Welcome to British Isles Friday! British Isles Friday is a weekly event for sharing all things British and Irish — reviews, photos, opinions, trip reports, guides, links, resources, personal stories, interviews, and research posts. Join us each Friday to link your British and Irish themed content and to see what others have to share. The link list is at the bottom of this post. Pour a cup of tea or lift a pint and join our link party!

Last week, I reviewed the J. Draper YouTube channel that covers London history. Tina shared British police dramas that she’s been enjoying recently.

The A to Z Challenge begins tomorrow. Here’s a sneak preview — my post for A is about Marian Anderson when she finally did get to sing in Constitution Hall. This was after the famous incident in 1939 when Eleanor Roosevelt helped facilitate Anderson’s performance at the Lincoln Memorial because she’d been denied Constitution Hall as a venue due to the color of her skin.

As I learned about the life of Marian Anderson, I became fascinated with her 1927-1928 visit to England.

Anderson traveled to London in October 1927. She went there to study with Raimund von zur-Mühlen, who was born in the Baltic region but spent much of his life in London. He was well-known as a teacher and singer of lieder, songs formed by setting poetry to music. While in London, according to this timeline of her life at American Masters, Anderson met other black American performers like Paul Robeson and Josephine Baker.

According to this article at the Wigmore Hall website, Marian Anderson appeared there in 1928 to sing lieder, art songs, and spirituals.

Anderson stayed in London for nearly a year, traveling back to the United States in September 1928. According to the biography associated with her collection papers at the University of Pennsylvania, she was “eager to return to London.”

This was all new information to me. Did you know that Marian Anderson had such a strong connection to London?