"De Organizer Restored" By Dr. James Dapogny (With contributions from Jeremy Murphy)

World premiere performances of the restored one-act opera "De Organizer" by James P. Johnson and Langston Hughes, in Ann Arbor, Michigan:

                                                               An opera lost --- and found!

The story of this restoration and performance has been followed and covered across the country and around the globe. Please see these articles in the: The New York Times; Detroit Free Press; San Francisco Chronicle; Voice of America (Stories were also featured in the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune.). Or these sound clips from Celeste Headlee which ran on Morning Edition on December 3 and Michigan Radio's The Todd Mundt Show. (Stories were also featured in the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune)

During an epoch of fervent labor organizing in the late 1930s, two giants of the Harlem Renaissance, jazz pianist and composer James P. Johnson and poet/novelist Langston Hughes, collaborated on the creation of a one-act opera, "De Organizer."

A blues opera about organizing sharecroppers, "De Organizer" was performed once at Carnegie Hall in New York City in 1940 during a convention of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. And then it disappeared. Now, working from a rediscovered partial score, University of Michigan Music Professor James Dapogny has restored the one-act opera, and it will be performed twice next month, Dec. 3 at Detroit's Orchestra Hall and Dec. 11 in Ann Arbor at the Power Center of the University of Michigan.

Professor Dapogny, a composer, jazz pianist, scholar and leader of his own Chicago Jazz Band, was long familiar with Johnson, the "father of the stride piano," and with the existence of his missing opera. (The libretto had survived in Hughes's papers). Dapogny began searching for...

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