Savage performed as a concert soprano. In 1927, she won awards for singing at the Los Angeles District Eisteddfod, and the California Grand Finals Eisteddfod.[8][10] In Missouri, she was a soloist with the People's Symphony Orchestra in St. Louis, and she was director of music at Lincoln University,[11] where her husband was a professor of history.[6][12]
In 1939, she directed a "Yuletide pageant" of forty performers in San Bernardino, using traditional black spirituals.[13] She wrote and directed a musical play based on Spanish and Mexican folksongs in 1940.[14] In California during World War II, she organized and led a choir of war workers near San Bernardino, performing as the Legend A Cappella choir.[15] She toured the American South giving concerts in 1949.[16] In 1962, she joined the summer opera chorus of the Redlands Bowl.[17] Later in life, she was associate professor of voice and chair of the humanities department at Jarvis Christian College in Texas,[18] and wrote a musical pageant, Hearthstones.[9]
She was active in the Missouri State and Jefferson City branches of the NAACP,[19] and a charter member the Los Angeles alumnae chapter of Delta Sigma Theta.[20][21]
Personal life
Roena Muckelroy married history professor W. Sherman Savage in 1927. They had two daughters, Eloise (born 1936) and Inez (born 1939).[22][23] She was widowed in 1981, and she died in 1991, the day before her 87th birthday, in Los Angeles.
^"Negroes to Give Yuletide Pageant". San Bernardino Sun. December 9, 1939. p. 7. Retrieved April 27, 2020 – via California Digital Newspaper Collection.
