Rachael Baptist, also known as Baptiste, was a celebrated black singer in Dublin’s pleasure gardens in the 1750s.
Baptist’s early life is as much a mystery as her later years but what is known is that she enjoyed a musical career as a soloist and entertainer that spanned almost a quarter of a century.
Her first recorded appearance on a Dublin stage was in February 1750 when she performed at a benefit concert for her singing teacher Bernardo Palma and was described as ‘native of this country’. Palma, an Italian musician, had been resident in Dublin since the 1730s.
Between 1750 and 1753 Baptist sang regularly throughout the Dublin summer season in the Marlborough Green Gardens, one of the pleasure gardens frequented by the gentry and middle classes. According to the actor and playwright John O’Keefe, who saw her there when he was a boy, she always appeared on the stage in a yellow silk gown and was applauded with great delight by her audience. No one objected to her colour.
She made no public appearance in 1754 and sang only three times in the gardens in 1755. Her last Dublin performance was in July 1756.
Baptist married a man known only as Mr Crow between the summer of 1758 and the spring of 1767, though a precise where and when is unknown.
Mrs Crow, as she was now called, returned to Ireland with her husband later in 1767. She advertised a concert followed by a ball at the Tholsel Assembly Room in Kilkenny at the beginning of December. Further concerts and balls followed – later in December in Kilkenny and in the new year in Clonmel and Durrow. The success of the first Kilkenny concert inspired a gentleman of the town to publish a poem in her honour in Finn’s Leinster Journal which referred explicitly to her colour and to the prejudice which this aroused – prejudice that was disarmed, according to the writer, as soon as she began to sing.
The pattern of the months in Kilkenny was replicated in the years that followed. Each winter the couple settled in a different Irish provincial town, advertising concerts and balls by Mrs Crow and instrumental tuition by her husband. In 1768–9 they were in Limerick. In the summer of 1770 they gave a concert followed by a ball in Bandon and another in Cork.
It is not known where the Crows spent the winter of 1771–2. In October 1772 they were in Belfast and began their most extensive series of entertainments yet, putting on concerts and balls once a month throughout the winter at the Assembly Room. Additional concerts were held in Lisburn, Downpatrick and Carrickfergus. Their final concert and ball was held in Belfast on April 30 1773.
Rachael Baptist’s repertoire as a singer was typical of the period, consisting largely of contemporary arrangements of popular Irish and Scottish airs.
Nothing is known of Rachael Baptist’s life after 1773, including the date of her death or any children she may have had.
But her career shows how a black woman enjoyed celebrity as a singer in Ireland at a time when the transatlantic slave trade was at its peak with some 78,000 enslaved people being brought each year to the Americas.
The information contained in this article was collated from various sources, most notably www.dib.ie. The main photo is by Matt Botsford/Unsplash