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Ruby couldn’t stay far from Serena. In October 1941, she returned to the role in Cheryl Crawford’s acclaimed revival of Porgy and Bess. Following a sell-out run in Boston, Crawford’s shortened Porgy and Bess with Todd Duncan, Anne Brown, and Ruby Elzy opened at New York’s Shubert Theatre. The show was the biggest hit of the 1942 Broadway season, playing for 286 performances. Virgil Thomson, as critic for the New York Herald-Tribune, wrote “Miss Ruby Elzy, as Serena, gives the single loveliest performance in the cast.”

In May 1942, Ruby gave her final radio appearance, in a special one-hour adaptation of Porgy and Bess to inaugurate the Mutual Broadcasting network’s American Opera Festival.

In June, Ruby sang her Boston recital debut at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum to glowing reviews. That summer she had a photo shoot for a promotional brochure, wearing an Aida costume for one of the shots. The brochure states “The grand opera debut of Miss Elzy will be in the title role of Verdi’s Aida.” But no one knows in which production this would have been, or how beautifully Ruby would have sung the role.

In December, a profile on Ruby Elzy appeared in the The Christian Advocate, in which she spoke out publicly for the first time on behalf of her race:

“I believe prejudice is based altogether on misunderstanding and fear, and I pray that the day will come when my race will find the way to let it be known that what they want is not the sort of thing the white people fear. In the new world for which we are fighting, Negroes ask only to be considered as men and women with the right to work out their own salvation with, as Mr. Lincoln put, ‘malice toward none,’ with liberty and justice for all” (p. 175).

On February 27, 1943, Ruby Elzy gave her 700th performance as Serena, and June 19th was her final performance altogether. She planned to leave Porgy and Bess when the show completed its run, to begin a solo tour that would likely have included Aida. But first, Ruby returned to Detroit for a “routine” surgery on a benign tumor that had been diagnosed the previous February. Her mother recalled that she seemed happy on the morning of her surgery, June 26, 1943. When Jack and Emma arrived at the hospital afterwards, however, Ruby Pearl Elzy Carr had been pronounced dead. Something had gone terribly wrong during surgery, but her precise cause of death may never be known.

Ruby’s mother took her back to Mississippi for burial, and The Pontotoc Progress ran the headline: “Ruby Elzy Has Come Home Again.” Whites and blacks at once packed the McDonald Methodist Church, where Ruby had begun her singing performances 31 years back. She would have been glad to see the races coming together in her honor.

In August, The Etude magazine published an article Elzy wrote prior to her death, “The Spirit of the Spirituals.” An editorial at the end of the article paid a special tribute to Ruby:

“The passing of Ruby Elzy…removes a very unusual figure of great potential value to her race and to her country. She was just starting upon a concert tour under the direction of Mark Byron, Jr., and had a list of important appearances scheduled. Her aspect of the race question was one of the sanest and most sincere we have ever known” (p. 186).

In 1998, Elzy’s broadcast recording of “My Man’s Gone Now” from the Gershwin Memorial Concert at the Hollywood Bowl was released on CD for the first time. In 2000, the Mississippi Musicians Hall of Fame honored Ruby Elzy as one of its first 25 inductees, along with Leontyne Price, William Grant Still, Elvis Presley, B.B. King, and Tammy Wynette.

Although Ruby Elzy left this world too soon and has largely gone unrecognized until now, the work she did not only enriched the lives of those who heard her sing or had the pleasure of knowing her, but it paved the way for the success of many other black opera singers to come. Thanks to the dedication and research of David Weaver, we now have an excellent account of her life based on conversations with those who knew her, letters, articles, and artifacts left behind. Black Diva of the Thirties: The Life of Ruby Elzy presents a definitive look at Ruby Elzy, written with devotion to one of America’s truly great artists.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to University Press of Mississippi for their permission to excerpt quotes from Black Diva of the Thirties: The Life of Ruby Elzy by David E. Weaver.