Everett McCorvey is an American classical tenor, teacher, impresario, conductor and producer, living in Lexington, Kentucky, where he holds an Endowed Chair in Opera Studies at the University of Kentucky, is director of the University of Kentucky Opera Theatre and Professor of Voice. He is also the founder and conductor of the American Spiritual Ensemble, Artistic Director of the National Chorale and President of Global Creative Connections, a production company producing live public and private events. He has also been on faculty at the American Institute of Musical Studies in Graz, Austria, the Opera Theatre of St. Louis, and the Bay View Music Festival in Bay View, Michigan. His students have won numerous national and international singing competitions and regularly perform at leading houses throughout the world.
McCorvey, a native of Montgomery, Alabama, received his degrees from the University of Alabama, including a Doctorate of Musical Arts. He founded the American Spiritual Ensemble in 1995, a group of classically trained singers that tours nationally and internationally performing American spirituals.
Since 2014 McCorvey has been Artistic Director and Principal Conductor of the National Chorale of New York City, a symphonic choir which performs the great choral titans of the choral literature at Lincoln Center.
McCorvey has sung with the Metropolitan Opera in New York, at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., and at other houses in the United States and abroad. He performs regularly as a soloist and with his wife, soprano Alicia Helm, and has been a guest conductor for orchestras and vocal groups throughout the United States and in other countries.
Early life and education
Everett David McCorvey was born in Montgomery, Alabama on December 3, 1957, to David and Olga McCorvey, a postal worker and librarian. He grew up during the Civil Rights Movement. His father was a deacon at First Baptist Church where Ralph Abernathy was the minister. Martin Luther King Jr. lived in the same neighborhood. “The whole Civil Rights movement of the ‘60s was part of my life,” he said in a 2015 profile by Creative Lexington. McCorvey recalled some of his childhood experiences of racism in an interview in 2020 that was broadcast on WUKY. The grade school he attended was across the street from a church where Civil Rights leaders were meeting, he said, and as a second grader he saw troopers “go up into the church on horseback and beat everybody out of the church.”
Neither parent was involved in the arts but McCorvey explained in a 2011 National Endowment for the Arts Art Works interview that his family housed students who attended the local historically black college, Alabama State Teacher's College, and that his love of music began at age eight when he heard one of them practice the trumpet. McCorvey graduated from Jefferson Davis High School in Montgomery in 1975 then attended the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, receiving a Bachelor of Music in Vocal Performance in 1979, a Master of Music, with an emphasis on vocal performance and choral conducting, in 1981, and Doctor of Musical Arts in Vocal Performance in 1989, with a dissertation on The Art Songs of Black American Composers. In 2015 he was recognized with the Alabama Distinguished Artist Award, which honors a professional artist who “has earned significant national acclaim for their art over an extended period.”
Teaching
McCorvey joined the faculty of the University of Kentucky in 1991 as an assistant professor of voice. He was named a full professor of voice in 1997 and became the director and executive producer of the University of Kentucky Opera Theatre that year. Since 2006 he has held the Lexington Opera Society Endowed Chair in Opera Studies. Prior to U.K., he taught at Knoxville College (1989–1991), at Newtown High School in Queens, New York (1985–1986) and at Shelton State Community College in Tuscaloosa (1980–1983.)
Two of McCorvey's students have won the National Metropolitan Opera Auditions (Gregory Turay, 1995 and Reginald Smith, Jr., 2015) and several have performed at the Met as well as other leading opera houses in the United States and Europe. Former students also include Broadway performers, movie and television actors: Reshma Shetty, Phumzile Sojola, Andrea Jones Sojola and Jennifer Fair.
Performance
McCorvey lived and worked in New York where he was cast in the 1983 revival of Porgy and Bess at Radio City Music Hall.
He has performed in many venues in the United States, Mexico, China and Europe, including the Metropolitan Opera, the Kennedy Center, Teatro Comunale in Florence, Italy, and Queen Elizabeth Hall in London, England.