Singers Diary
Singer's Diary: Keith Jameson
.jpg "Singer's Diary HDL")
© Dario Acosta 2010
A Baptist childhood might conjure up operatic images of fire and brimstone for some, but for Keith Jameson it was all song and dance and the church youth choir.
Jameson has taken his childhood love of music — coupled with a meteoric rise in the opera world — and returned to his hometown of Greenwood, South Carolina, to start a music festival that just celebrated its fourth season. Not bad for a kid who thought he had hit the big time singing the role of some guy named Joseph who had a coat of many colors.
Jameson's Southern roots, in fact, are the very foundation of his music. Although he lives in New York and has played dozens of opera houses — and recently branched out into cabaret music — Jameson feels most at home in the lush landscape of northwestern South Carolina. He sees this area as the perfect place to nurture music — and to do something for the community that nurtured him. In 2007, he began the Greenwood Music Festival, a one-weekend celebration of the music that honors his small-town roots and big-city successes.
In this small town, Jameson learned to love music. And, he said, music is music, whether it's rarely performed Baroque opera or obscure hymns from the backs of splintered pews. For him it's been about spiritual music more than the popular music of the South.
"I never went the route of country music, partly because the part of the South where I grew up is more focused on sacred music," he said. "It's very common to grow up in church choirs, and Christian music had a huge explosion in the mid to late '80s."
That music laid the foundation for his transition into classical and opera music. After a church choir director encouraged him to take voice lessons — cue his title role at age seventeen in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat — he did just that, every other Saturday, during his last two years of high school and throughout four years of college. He was involved in high-school musicals and madrigal dinners at church while continuing in youth choir.
His first taste of opera came when he attended a performance of Aida in Greenville, SC, at Bob Jones University. In 1987, while attending Furman University, also in Greenville, he watched the Metropolitan Opera television broadcast of Dialogues of the Carmelites. He developed a love for opera right away and considered a career in conducting but realized he preferred being onstage. He received his bachelor's degree from Furman and subsequently earned a master's degree in conducting and a doctoral degree in voice from the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York.
After leaving Eastman, Jameson worked at Indianapolis Opera and toured the state in children's operas. He moved briefly to Washington, D.C., to be a choral conductor at a church, then to New York, where he worked in temporary office jobs while pursuing his singing career. He sang as a baritone until he was selected for the finals of the Center for American Artists program at Lyric Opera of Chicago. "They made me vocalize onstage and told me that I was a tenor," he said. "So I went back to New York and started the process of becoming a tenor."
That process changed the course of his career. Jameson auditioned for about a dozen opera companies and was chosen as an apprentice for Santa Fe Opera in 1998. He will return there this summer — his eighth season with the company — in Life Is a Dream, Madama Butterfly and as a cover in Albert Herring.
His career has taken him far from the rural South. He's sung with many of the major U.S. regional companies, and he made his Metropolitan Opera debut in 2007 in War and Peace. (He has returned to the Met in Gianni Schicchi and Carmen.)He performed a cabaret act in Greenwood in 2008 and 2009 as fundraisers for the festival, and he opened his first New York cabaret act in January, singing songs by Kander and Ebb, Sondheim and Irving Berlin, among others, at the historic Gershwin Hotel. He's planning to work closely with a director to hone his cabaret skills for future shows in New York and elsewhere.
Despite his success, Jameson felt a need to return to his Southern roots. The Greenwood Music Festival is a way to celebrate the music — and the community — to which he is connected. His parents are still very much involved in his childhood church, the First Baptist Church of Greenwood, which he describes as much more musically formal — more classical music and choral anthems — than some other Baptist churches in the South. That music nurtured him, and he feels the need to bring opera, chamber and cabaret music to his roots. "You want to bring people to something that you love," he says. "There was always this desire to give back to the community that supported me for all these years," Jameson said. "This is a way to bring it to them — a great way to expose them to music they otherwise would not hear."
The festival's programming focuses on unusual works. The 2010 festival, which ran from May 20 to 24, was a celebration of France and included a screening of the 1938 film Marie Antoinette, a recital by soprano Susanna Phillips, French chamber music, and Grétry's eighteenth-century opera Zémire et Azor, billed as Beauty and the Beast, in which Jameson played the Beast. It was not exactly typical small-town entertainment for the rural South, Jameson admits, but that is the point. Many people in that area — including his friends and family members — traveled earlier this year to Greenville to see the Metropolitan Opera simulcast of Carmen (in which Jameson played Remendado), but those same people may not be exposed to more obscure operas. "I want to show people that this was the popular entertainment of the time," he says, referring to rarely performed operas and chamber music. "This is what people went to for centuries. I think people just need to give it a chance."
Greenwood's location is somewhat remote, but it's well suited for those traveling to the Spoleto Festival in Charleston, SC, or even for weekend tourists from such cities as Atlanta, Greenville, Columbia and Asheville, or the Raleigh-Durham area. Jameson feels that many in rural America are hungry for weekends away that are artistically stimulating.
"I have this dream of running an opera company some day," Jameson says. "But I thought a small festival would be manageable, combining musicals, sacred music and chamber music." (Next year's cabaret will feature Nat Chandler, a Broadway singer who starred in The Scarlet Pimpernel and grew up on the same street in Greenwood as Jameson.) Jameson describes Greenwood as a small town of 22,000 residents with an exploding arts scene. Museums and antique shops dot the town, which, like many other rural communities, experiences high unemployment but has a growing retirement community.
"The biggest problem is fundraising, which every arts organization is facing. And it's hard to do when I'm on the road," Jameson says. He tries to stimulate interest by tying opera and music to specific community events. This September, outside of its usual five-day event in May, the festival will give the premiere of composer Marcus DeLoach's thirty-minute children's opera Mooch the Messy, based on a 1970s children's book by Marjorie Weinman Sharmat about an untidy rat who learns about neatness and organization. This will coincide with the opening of a new Greenwood County Library.
"It's refreshing when I talk to people down there and they don't know much about opera," he says. "To get them interested in coming to something they don't even know is such a thrill."
Yet the idea of a music festival in the rural South — especially in a town that doesn't straddle an interstate — undoubtedly has raised a few eyebrows. "A lot of my colleagues have said, 'That's brave. Are you crazy?' or ask, 'Where do you find time?' or 'Why in South Carolina?'" he says. "I'm thankful that I'm at a point in my career that I can do this, and that I can bring those colleagues to Greenwood and give them work."
And whether it's rural Southerners or international opera stars coming together in a leafy town in South Carolina, it's all about stimulation, economic or artistic — or both, for that matter. "What better time to do this than in this economic climate?" Jameson asks. "There's a survival element when people are unemployed. This is the time when creativity is sparked." 
DAVID BELCHER, a New York-based culture writer, profiled artist William Kentridge and The Nose for the March issue of OPERA NEWS.
