Background
Mitchell was the daughter of an African-American mother and a Jewish-German father from New York City"s Lower East Side.
Mitchell was the daughter of an African-American mother and a Jewish-German father from New York City"s Lower East Side.
She was reared by a maternal aunt, Alice Payne, in Baltimore, Maryland, where she attended a convent school.
After finishing her school education in Baltimore, she started studying voice in New York in 1897. The next year composer Will Marion Cook and lyricist Paul L. Dunbar cast her in their musical comedy Clorindy. Or, the Origin of the Cakewalk.
lieutenant was so successful that it ran for the whole season at the Casino Roof Garden.
She also appeared in his production The Southerners (1904). Their son became a professor at Howard University and United States Ambassador to Niger and Senegal.
The cakewalk, considered old fashioned by the cast, was almost cut from the show, but proved popular with audiences and became a fad in the United Kingdom. Mitchell received international acclaim for her performance, and was invited to appear at a command performance for King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra at Buckingham Palace.
Mitchell later performed with the Black Patti"s Troubadours, and in the operetta The Red Moon (1908) by Bob Cole and J. Rosamond Johnson.
In 1913, she appeared in the unfinished film Lime Kiln Field Day with Bert Williams, and produced by Klaw and Erlanger. In 1919, Mitchell went to Europe with Cook"s Southern Syncopated Orchestra. In New York, she appeared on the concert stage and in opera.
Mitchell"s 1935 appearance in Porgy and Bess was her last musical role on the stage, after which "she taught and coached many singers in New York and appeared in many "spoken" dramatic roles on the stage." She performed in New York and taught at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama.
Lee De Forest made a short film Songs of Yesteryear (1922) of Mitchell singing, using his DeForest Phonofilm sound-on-film process. This film is preserved in the Maurice Zouary film collection at the Library of Congress.
Mitchell died in New York on 16 March 1960.