Women’s History Feature: The late, Margaret Tynes, an International Star of Aggie Pride Passes on March 7, 2024
For generations of Aggies, there is one name that fully embodied the right combination of music, stage, glamour, theater, and worldwide fame. That Aggie alumna was international opera star, Margaret Tynes ‘41, who passed on March 7, 2024, at the age of 104.
As far as it is known to the university archives, she was not only the eldest living alumna and the eldest Miss A&T, but possibly the last living Aggie to have attended the university before 1940. She was an international star with an incredible voice, living in Italy, and with beginnings as a little girl in America’s segregated south, her life was compared to a fairy tale more than once. North Carolina A&T State University was a significant part of her amazing journey.
Margaret Elinor Tynes was born September 11, 1919, as one of the 10 children of the Rev. J. W. Tynes and Lucy Jane Rich Tynes. The Tynes’ children grew up in Lynchburg, Virginia, and in Greensboro, North Carolina.
Rev. Tynes was the longtime pastor of the historic, Providence Baptist Church. While attending James B. Dudley High School, Margaret sang in the school chorus under the training and guidance of the great, Eloise Logan Penn.
All three of the Tynes sisters enrolled at N.C. A&T beginning with Katherine in 1935, Margaret in 1937, and Angeline in around 1940. All three sisters were also Miss A&Ts.
Angeline Tynes Roberts was also a teacher and a singer and their brothers, Morris and Victor Tynes, were also Aggies, becoming respectively a civil rights activist and pastor in Chicago, and a dentist with the Guilford County Public Health Department.
During her freshman year, Margaret auditioned for the famous “A&T Little Theater” under the direction of J. Percy Bond. She and the cast of “Sun Up” a mountain rural drama went on tour for over a year to great reviews. A press photo of her and actor, George Miller, in a scene was her first national exposure as an actress.
Margaret was also an honor roll student placing in the top 12 of her freshman class, a member of the Girls Quartet, and a lead soloist of the A Capella Choir director by the great Warner Lawson Sr.
As a sophomore, Margaret was the campaign manager for Estelle Smith a candidate for Miss A&T of the Summer School 1938, and an attendant of Pearl Garrett (Bradley) Miss A&T 1938-39. During the commencement week ceremonies of May 1939, Garrett passed the crown on to Margaret. She was a popular Aggie Queen and much of the press about the 1939 Homecoming highlighted her and her attendants. She was also considered a strong candidate for the 1941 May Queen but placed 3rd in the final vote.
Margaret was one of the 76 undergraduate students, plus our very first master’s degree graduate, to walk on May 30, 1941. With a bachelor’s degree in music, her listed ambition beyond graduation was to be a “concert soloist.”
After graduating from A&T College, Margaret taught music classes for about two years at a high school in Scotland Neck, North Carolina, and at E. E. Smith High School in Fayetteville, North Carolina.
Tynes earned her master’s in music education from Columbia University in 1945 and graduated from the Julliard School of Music. According to an interview, she interviewed for the A&T Register in 1960 and said that her singing career began the day she graduated from Columbia when she signed a contract to perform in three Broadway shows. On Broadway, she starred in over 200 performances of “Finian’s Rainbow.” She also began singing with the New York City Opera. Duke Ellington heard her voice and he was so impressed he called her in the middle of the night to ask her to record his song, “A Drum Is A Woman.” After three phone hang-ups, he finally convinced her that he was really Duke Ellington. She also sang in the 1952-54 Broadway revival of “Porgy and Bess” as Bess, and as Harry Belafonte’s leading lady in “Sing, Man, Sing.”
If Tynes was not the first Aggie to appear on television, she was certainly A&T’s first TV star. In the Golden Age of Television, she performed in several broadcasts of the “NBC Opera Television Theatre” from 1953-1954, a production of “A Drum Is a Woman” with Duke Ellington for the “United States Steel Hour” in 1957, and on the “Tonight Show” with Jack Paar in 1959. Following a performance at the funeral of “Father of the Blues” W. C. Handy in 1958, television host Ed Sullivan asked Margaret to perform on his series “Toast of the Town.” She was a part of Sullivan’s state-sponsored touring group to sing in Russia in 1959, and the first American to sing behind the “Iron Curtain”. She would later appear in several TV broadcasts in England, Spain, and Sweden.
Throughout the 1950s, many African Americans in opera began leaving for Europe for more opportunities to perform. Along with the Sullivan tour, Tynes appeared in Verdi’s Macbeth in Canada, Italy, and Switzerland, as “Salome” in the “Spoleto Festival of Two Worlds,” as “Carmen” and as “Aida.” In 1974, she made her debut at the Metropolitan Opera in Janacek’s “Jenufa.” She also performed in the Prague Opera, Vienna Staatsoper, the Budapest Opera, and several other internationally renowned centers of opera.
In 1961, she married Hans Von Klier a Czech architect and industrial designer. The couple were married and lived in Milan, Italy for 39 years until his death in 2000.
North Carolina A&T was always dear to Tynes, and she returned to Aggieland for decades. She opened the college’s lyceum series in 1960 at Harrison Auditorium. A performance for the 1975-76 series included the works of Schubert and Mozart, folk songs, and spirituals. Her most famous performance at A&T may have been her concert on Sunday, April 18, 1982, which was part of the inaugural ceremonies for Chancellor Edward. B. Fort.
A champion in A&T’s music and theater history, Tynes performed for A&T’s centennial celebrations in April 1991. She also sang a recital for A&T’s 75th Anniversary in 1967. Astonishingly, she also performed in A&T’s 50th anniversary pageant on March 6, 1941, in her senior year. Margaret portrayed the university’s first great musical “Margaret,” the Margaret Falkener who founded the music department in 1894.
Tynes was awarded an honorary doctorate of the humanities by A&T. In the 1970s there was a “Margaret Tynes Award” for Vocal Excellence awarded at commencement.
In August 2001 Margaret Tynes moved back to the United States and gifted her memorabilia collection to the F. D. Bluford Library Archives and Special Collections. Still studied by scholars from around the world in recent years, it includes personal and professional photographs and bulletins from her performances, along with her bachelor’s and an honorary doctorate from North Carolina A&T. Items from the collection were displayed at the third Annual Homecoming “A&Tiques Roadshow” in 2021. The Margaret Tynes display case was so popular with library patrons that it did not come down until just this past January.
During her 2001 visit, Tynes was quoted as saying “I have never tried to impress but to express.” It is anticipated that the life and legacy of Margaret Tynes will always “impress,” all while inspiring Aggies to “express” themselves with all our given creativity.
A special thanks goes to the New Journal and Guide newspaper for permission to use the oldest known images of Margaret Tynes as a student. Also, to Lee Love, Leslie G. Buschmann, and Monica Morgan of the F. D. Bluford Library for preservation, digitization, and research work in recent years on the Tynes collection.
For more information about Margaret Tynes, the Tynes family, former Miss A&Ts, and the history of the Humanities in Aggieland please contact the archives at libraryarchives@ncat.edu.
By James R. Stewart Jr. ‘08
