Margaret Tynes by Carl Van Vechten
This photo was taken on September 14, 1959 by Carl Van Vechten and I pulled it from the Library of Congress website.
The beautiful lady in the photo is my aunt Margaret Tynes and I am writing a book about her called A Diva in the Family. She had a phenomenal international career as a singer in opera, jazz and theater for over fifty years. A graduate of North Carolina A&T State University (BA 1939) and Columbia University (MA 1944), she starred as Harry Belafonte’s leading lady off-Broadway in a show he produced called Sing Man, Sing! She also recorded a jazz suite called A Drum is a Woman with Duke Ellington and made several appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show. In 1961, she gained international acclaim as Salomé at the Spoleto Festival of the Two Worlds in Italy, where she lived for more than forty years.
