the maids or mammies that black actresses had been allowed to play up to that time.

"Here was a black woman who wasn't playing a servant, who wasn't fat, middle-aged or maternal in appearance, who was, indeed, sexy and glamorous and who sang a torch song rather than a Negro spiritual," the Chicago Tribune noted in a 1989 story about Barnett.

Barnett caught the attention of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who asked her to sing "Forgotten Man" for President Franklin D. Roosevelt's birthday party in 1934. Barnett was the first black woman to sing in the White House.

Barnett returned to New York to star in the 1942 revival of "Porgy and Bess."

George Gershwin had wanted Barnett for the original production of "Porgy and Bess" in 1935.

"He told me I wasBess, that I had the verve and the looks he wanted," she once said of Gershwin. But the composer also wanted Bess to be a soprano.

"I asked him to transpose it to my range, but he refused," Barnett recalled years later. "He said Bess was 'a good bad girl,' which meant she had to be a soprano. I told him a contralto can be good and bad, too." But Gershwin hired soprano Ann Brown as Bess.

After Gershwin died, "Porgy and Bess" was shortened for the return to Broadway production and Barnett finally got the role. She played for six months on Broadway before taking it on the road for two years.

But the strain of singing as a soprano damaged her voice. "I sang it too long," she told