Black Pearls Before Swine: Florence Foster Jenkins The Paris Review Daily The third piece for my column, “Songs to the Moon” Jenkins’s vocal inadequacies were so apparent, and audiences so clearly in on the joke, that criticizing her, then or now, reeks of aesthetic self-congratulation. What critical muscles do we flex, in dubbing her “the worst singer in the world”? How should serious music lovers respond, balancing artistic standards and mercy? Back to Essays & Stories