Ruby Greene

Ruby Mae Greene (July 28, 1909 – January 1, 2002) was an American contralto and Broadway performer whose stage career spanned from 1942 to 1973. She is also widely recognized as the subject of a 1928 painting by James Ormsbee Chapin titled "Ruby Green Singing," which became one of the more frequently reproduced portrait images of the twentieth century.

Born in Savannah, Georgia, to Edward and Amanda Greene, she relocated to New York City in 1916 when her mother moved the family north as part of the Great Migration. Because her mother was unable to provide for the children, Greene and her younger sisters spent approximately five years at the Good Samaritan Orphan Home in Newark, New Jersey, where she began singing and learned to play piano. After accumulating professional experience as a singer, she enrolled at the Institute of Musical Art in 1930 and earned a diploma there in 1933.

Greene's musical career took shape in Harlem, where she became contralto soloist in the Saint Mark's Methodist Episcopal Choir in 1924. At Carnegie Hall in 1926, she received three medals at a competition organized by the New York Music Week Association, and that same year she sang at the annual meeting of the National Association of Negro Musicians. In 1928 she sang with the Hall Johnson Choir, and Frankye A. Dixon, a Harlem concert artist and classical pianist, frequently served as her accompanist. Through her work with the Eva Jessye Choir in the 1930s, Greene became acquainted with Ira Gershwin and his wife. She also sang with the Fisk Jubilee Singers during the 1940s.

Her stage work began with a small part in Set to Music in 1939, a revue by Noël Coward, and she appeared in Four Saints in Three Acts in 1934, an opera composed by Virgil Thomson to a libretto by Gertrude Stein; she returned to that work to sing on its 1947 cast recording. Greene made her Broadway debut in The Pirate in 1942, and went on to appear in six Broadway productions over three decades, including Lost in the Stars, The Desert Song, and The Great White Hope. Her most sustained Broadway association was with Porgy and Bess, in which she appeared in both the 1953 and 1961 productions in an ensemble role, again collaborating with Eva Jessye and working alongside a young Maya Angelou. The production toured Africa, Europe, and South America during that period. From 1968 to 1970, she was on Broadway in The Great White Hope, playing James Earl Jones's mother. She also appeared in touring productions of Kiss Me, Kate and Show Boat, and had several small television roles in the 1970s.

Chapin's 1928 portrait of Greene gained broad public visibility after Harper's Magazine published it in 1929, and the image continued to circulate widely in subsequent decades. In March 2001, it appeared on the cover of the Journal of the American Medical Association. The original painting is held at the Norton Museum of Art in Palm Beach, Florida. In 1942, Greene married Stephen R. "Dutch" Aspinall, who died in 1973; her later years were spent with her companion Mary J. Johnson. She died of cancer in Philadelphia on January 1, 2002, at the age of 96, and is buried alongside her husband at Long Island National Cemetery in Farmingdale, New York.