Mabel Ridley

Mabel Ridley (January 1894 – April 18, 1938) was an American mezzo-soprano and Broadway performer born in Augusta, Georgia, to Charles and Katherine Ridley. Her family were African-American Catholics with deep roots in the Augusta area; her grandparents, Ulysses Ridley and Antoinette (Dugas) Ridley, were documented as free people of color at the time of their 1843 marriage. Ridley grew up alongside two sisters, Julia and Antoinette, and later noted that Gullah was her first language and English her second. She may also have been married at some point to a man surnamed Edwards.

Ridley received her education at Augusta's Haines Institute, a school founded by African-American educator Lucy Craft Laney, where her musical abilities developed. She subsequently relocated to New York, where she began building a performance career. In 1925, she appeared in three productions associated with the Tutt Brothers: the touring musical Non-Sense and two touring revues, Rainbow Chasers and Everybody's Talking. The following year she performed in Desires of 1927, a musical revue cowritten by Andy Razaf, and in 1927 she appeared in Miss Bandanna, a touring vaudeville revue written by Clarence Muse and starring Moms Mabley.

Ridley's Broadway career spanned 1929 to 1935. Her first Broadway credit came in 1929 with Deep Harlem, a Tutt Brothers musical comedy featuring music by Joe Jordan that traced Black American history from slavery through the 1920s. Ridley played multiple roles in the production, among them Princess Ola. The show closed quickly due to insufficient funding, after which Ridley joined Ebony Show Boat, a revue that opened in Harlem, traveled to Philadelphia, and returned to New York.

Her subsequent Broadway credits included two productions connected to Pulitzer Prize–winning source material. She performed in the original run of Marc Connelly's drama The Green Pastures, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. That same year she appeared in Scarlet Sister Mary, performing with the Heaven Gate Singers in a stage adaptation of Julia Peterkin's Pulitzer Prize–winning novel of the same name; the production starred Ethel Barrymore in blackface.

The final documented performance of Ridley's career was the role of Clara in a Charleston, South Carolina, production of George Gershwin's opera Porgy and Bess. Ridley died in New York on April 18, 1938. Her funeral drew an estimated 3,000 attendees; students from the Peter Pan Dancing School, where she had taught, performed a song, and members of the newly formed Negro Actors Guild also participated. A second funeral service was held on April 24 at the Immaculate Conception church in Augusta, and she was buried at Cedar Grove Cemetery in that city.