As told to Lynnda Greene
Photograph by Ken Howard
In 1991, Jermaine Smith had never heard an opera. A teacher conned the Roosevelt High School senior into joining the Opera Theatre of St. Louis’ newly launched Artists-in-Training program ... and Smith became its first scholarship winner. Fifteen years later, Smith is an acclaimed tenor, completing his master’s degree at the New England Conservatory, serving on the voice faculty of the University of Missouri–St. Louis and singing around the country. What he loves best of all is singing opera in jeans and dreadlocks to a bunch of inner-city kids and telling them his own North Side story: how he and his brother did their homework in the halls of the community college while their single working mom took night classes; how he sang in the school choir but nearly quit when classmates laughed at his first solo performance; how he learned to play drums on a pad because he couldn’t afford a real drum kit and how that didn’t stop him from starting an eighth-grade R&B band that became a neighborhood sensation. Here’s how it happened:
Everything changed on a bus ride home from a football game. I was just clowning around with the band, spoofing an opera singer to get a laugh. I didn’t know any Italian words, so I just bellowed, “I want some piiiizaaaa! With mozzaarellllaaaa!” And our teacher, Mr. [Dello] Thedford, whipped around and said, “You have the potential to become an opera singer, and when I find a program, I’m putting you in it.” I laughed: a black opera singer—ha!
Well, the very next year Opera Theatre of St. Louis started its Artists-in-Training program, and he got me in it. I didn’t want to do it at all, until the day Denyce Graves came and sang an aria from Carmen. It was unbelievable. I knew nothing about opera except that I wanted to make that kind of sound. So I asked her if I had any talent, and she said, “Listen, your voice has great potential. It will take hard work—you’ve got to get it out of your throat and forward—but you can do it.”
So I worked after school with the Opera Theatre of St. Louis coaches, who taught me how to use my voice. Practicing was tough. I’d walk around the house vocalizing as I was taught, and my mother would say, “That’s enough, please.” I’d move out on the back porch, and she’d say, “Jermaine, give it a rest.” So I’d move out to the alley, and the neighbors would go to my mother and say, “Is Jermaine OK? He’s singing in the alley.”
I was astounded when I won AIT’s first competition that spring, but the prize, a music scholarship, upset everything because I was already set to study computer engineering at Rolla School of Mines, which had no music program at all. Dr. Mark Madsen [coordinator of vocal studies at the University of Missouri–St. Louis] helped me switch to UM-St. Louis, where I could study both computers and music. But I felt out of my depth—especially when the Opera Theatre asked me to sing in the chorus of Billy Budd the next summer. Here I was, an 18-year-old computer-science major trying to sing pages of music with Juilliard graduates! I got so lost in rehearsals, I’d just mouth the words. I taped rehearsals on a boom box because I didn’t have a tape recorder. But I loved everything about it—the music, the staging, the people. Opera, I decided, was going to be it. So I switched to a triple major—computers, math and music—but the music was a struggle. I had this big voice, but my foundation wasn’t strong; I was always trying to catch up, and yet things kept happening, especially after I got hired to sing in the Houston Grand Opera’s Paris production of Porgy and Bess. I’d never been out of the North Side, and here I was singing great music with great people—in Paris—and getting paid so well, I could make a down payment on a house for my mother when I got back.
My talent has always surpassed my knowledge. But opportunities kept showing up, and, ready or not, I had to make it happen. That I have is due to a whole lot of people who saw something in me I couldn’t understand and helped me every step of the way when I didn’t know where I could go.
