Elizabeth Cowan is a professional opera singer and a vocal teacher, and an adjunct professor at Western Michigan University’s Lee Honors College. Her courses incorporate the birth of the blues and jazz and how those genres work hand in hand with the restoration of America and the Civil Rights Movement.
“I’ve been at WMU for 20 years,” Cowan says. “And my personal background—I’ve three degrees in vocal performance … as a musician, even before I got formally educated, I took the obligatory piano lessons, and I also fell in love somewhere along the line in middle school, with jazz. I really fell in love with Miles Davis, and that started me down this rabbit hole of really being obsessed with jazz … even though vocally my voice runs toward opera.”
Cowan’s interest in American history developed side-by-side with her interest in music, as he father was an expert on the Civil War. That, she says, led to many discussions over family dinners about the War, about the enslavement of African-Americans, and the development of jazz.
“In order to really understand the origins of jazz, you have to go back to the enslaved Africans and how they were brought across the ocean,” Cowan says. “One of the slides I show in my class that almost always brings about some type of reaction because people are surprised is how the enslaved Africans were brought around the world—40 percent were taken to the Caribbean Islands, 38 percent were taken to Brazil, 17 percent were taken to Spanish America, and only 6 percent were taken to the United States … but what we did with the enslaved Africans was different from every other country they were brought to. We put them into slavery. Other countries did not. They were laborers.” (Note: Historians agree that Africans were also enslaved, rather than being considered "laborers," in countries other than United States.)
Cowan explains that New Orleans was the birthplace of the blues and jazz. In the late 1800s, a section of New Orleans’ was known as Storyville.
“It was totally seedy, but it was the birthplace of jazz,” Cowan says. “Storyville was a legally sanctioned prostitution district, located just north of the French Quarter. The attractions of Storyville were sex, music, and dance … it made it a very important tourist attraction. The jazz musicians played in the brothels.”
The jazz musicians were employed to keep the men in the brothels entertained while waiting their turn, Cowan says. It was one of the few means of paying employment for Black Americans. Louis Armstrong began his musical career in just such a manner—and with him, jazz was born.
Elizabeth Cowan has studied at Westminster Choir College and the Chautauqua Institute and has taught at Florida International University and the New World School of the Arts in Miami. She has sung with opera companies across the United States, most notably Santa Fe Opera and Dallas Opera, and has been the featured singer in masterclasses. She was the 1994 Metropolitan District winner in Dallas, named the North Texas Singer of the Year, and was the featured recitalist for the National Association of Teachers of Singing convention at North Texas State University. A winner of the Wagner Society solo competition in Dallas, a Dallas Opera Guild career grant winner, and a concerto competition winner at SMU, she was also a finalist in the San Antonio Vocal competition and the D'Angelo vocal competition.
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