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Leontyne Price is inevitably compared to opera's other great divas. Renata Tebaldi, an indifferent actress, is perhaps the closest to pure voice; if she wanted to, she could produce ravishing sounds while reading a grocery list. Eileen Farrell wields her powerful voice with a fine sense of dramatic effect, but she is handicapped by a stage presence that sometimes destroys the illusion that her voice is creating. As for Maria Callas, she triumphs through sheer intelligence, acting ability and guts over her vocal limitations; she has undeniable fire without comparable warmth. Says a colleague who has worked with them both: "Callas expresses the torture of her life through her voice. Leontyne expresses her joy."
Whipped, with Love. Much of the joy, according to Leontyne's mother Kate, derives from the fact that Kate was singing hymns in the choir of St. Paul's Methodist Church in Laurel, back in 1927, when she felt the first pangs signaling the impending birth of Mary Leontyne Violet Price—a first child after 13 years of barrenness. Her father James, an erect, dignified, sparrow—thin man. now 79, worked in the local sawmills (Laurel used to call itself the Yellow Pine Capital of the World before the woods gave out). Kate Price, an iron-willed woman with some of Leontyne's own incendiary temper, took to midwifery to bolster the family income. Working at first for a fee of $10 per baby-or sometimes for a side of bacon or a barrel of peas-Kate delivered about 900 children over the years and never, she boasts proudly, lost a mother. But she created some problems for Leontyne : "The neighbor kids would say, 'You didn't come the right way; your mamma carries babies in her black bag.' " Although Leontyne has "retired her," Kate Price delivered a child shortly before traveling to New York for the Met debut, returned promptly to Laurel because another child was on the way.
As Leontyne recalls it, she and her brother George-two years younger and now an Army captain-had the kind of childhood any kid might expect from oldfashioned. God-fearing and strict parents. If you disobeyed, "you got yourself whipped-with love, but you were torn up just the same." The color bar was as strong in Laurel as anywhere in the South, but the children were not aware of it at the time: "We were taught to judge peo ple as individuals, not on the pigment of their skin," says George. Today some Southerners use the Price success story to bolster their arguments. Says Laurel's Leader-Call Editor J. W. West: "This gal is a good example to other nigras. She wasn't hurt by attending a nigra school."