Editor's introduction.

The articles on the life and work of African-American composer-singer-arranger Harry T. Burleigh featured in this issue of Black Music Research Journal originated in presentations at the 2003 national conference "The Heritage and Legacy of Harry T. Burleigh," sponsored by Edinboro University of Pennsylvania. This first national conference on Burleigh's life and work was designed to focus on the heritage of African-American culture that shaped Burleigh and on his multifaceted legacy: the broad scope of his work as a singer, a composer of art songs, a pioneer arranger of spirituals and music editor, and a role model and mentor for singers, composers, and arrangers who have followed him.

At the conference, Horace C. Boyer presented a demonstration-lecture on Burleigh's compositional style and a lecture-recital tracing the lineage from spirituals to gospel songs. Ann Sears discussed the pianism and vocalism in Burleigh's songs and with tenor William A. Brown gave a lecture-recital of songs by Burleigh's friend Will Marion Cook. The Rev. Charles Kennedy Jr. presented his one-man show Deep River, in which he brings Burleigh to life as an elderly man reflecting on his long career. A teacher's workshop led by Odell Hobbs and a choral workshop led by Roland Carter offered practical instruction on African-American music to the broader community. And two documentary films relevant to Burleigh's life and career were screened by their producers.

Several additional sessions were planned, but for various reasons the speakers were unable to attend: Karen James was to describe the nineteenth-century Erie that shaped Burleigh in his first twenty-five years; the late Josphine Harreld Love was to discuss influences on Burleigh and Burleigh's influence on younger singers and composers; the late Doris Evans McGinty was to examine Burleigh's role in the development of African-American concert music; and Rae Linda Brown was to speak to Burleigh's influence on Florence Price.

The conference also provided numerous opportunities to hear and sing the music being discussed. Each day at noon, conference participants sang through a variety of Burleigh's sacred and secular choral arrangements. A choir directed by Rebecca Ryan from Mercyhurst College in Erie presented Burleigh choral pieces and art songs. The McIntosh County Singers demonstrated the ring shout, a representation of the oral heritage from which Burleigh drew for his concert arrangements of spirituals. A shared recital by tenor William A. Brown and soprano Louise A. Toppin brought art songs and spiritual arrangements by Burleigh and other African-American composers vibrantly to life. Pianist Kristine Denton played several of Burleigh's piano sketches and George Walker's Sonata no. 2. Erie artist Mary Alice Brown played her distinctive jazz renditions of spirituals. And the culminating concert by the Morehouse Glee Club displayed the remarkable choral tradition of the historically black colleges at its finest.

Although these articles represent only a small portion of the topics covered in the conference sessions, they extend the scope of research on Burleigh's seminal influence on the development of African-American concert music. This is an issue not of conference proceedings but of articles that have grown out of the discussions and interactions generated by the conference.

Samuel A. Floyd Jr.'s conference keynote address examined Burleigh's role in the musical culture of African Americans before the Harlem Renaissance and raised the question of why Burleigh's influence and reputation seem to have been submerged by the forces of modernism and the rise of popular black music styles. His provocative suggestions about Burleigh's probable influence on other black performers and composers invite increased scholarly attention.

My recent research on Burleigh's singing career in Erie, Pennsylvania, before he began his studies at the National Conservatory of Music in New York City documents his significant formal music training and his substantial public reputation among Erie's finest classical and church musicians. His success as a student at the conservatory and his immediate acceptance into the highest ranks of black concert singers in New York were assured by his previous accomplishments in Erie.

Burleigh's thorough knowledge of recital repertoire as a singer informed his own compositions, and Ann Sears brings the perspective of a musicologist and accompanist to her detailed examination of the careful craftsmanship and sensitive interpretation of song texts in Burleigh's art songs and spiritual arrangements. An experienced accompanist and solo recitalist, Sears grounds her analysis in her performance with singers Oral Moses and William A. Brown of songs by nineteenth- and twentieth-century African-American composers.

Although Burleigh performed spirituals in his own recitals as early as 1906, his first published choral arrangements did not appear until 1913, when his works "Deep River" and "Dig My Grave," written for Kurt Schindler's Schola Cantorum, were issued by G. Schirmer. His first solo arrangements appeared in the 1916-1917 concert season, introduced by tenor Oscar Seagle, who was familiar with the oral tradition from camp meetings in his native Tennessee. By this time, Burleigh's secular art songs had earned him a place among the most-renowned American art song composers. His spiritual arrangements, although substantially different in style from his art songs of the same period, were the product of his maturity as a composer. While Arthur Jones does not speak to the specifics of Burleigh's arrangements, he addresses the deep and fundamental significance of the spirituals in African-American culture from his personal and professional experience as a psychologist and as a singer. This article draws on insights developed more fully in Jones's earlier publications, Wade in the Water: The Wisdom of the Spirituals and The Triumph of the Soul (with Ferdinand Jones).

John Graziano's comprehensive study of turn-of-the-twentieth-century African-American popular song provides the context for his examination of the use of dialect in African-American spirituals, folk songs, and popular songs, as demonstrated in Burleigh's songs and those of his contemporaries James Weldon and J. Rosamond Johnson and Will Marion Cook. He also analyzes and compares their harmonizations in light of the continuing controversy regarding the appropriateness of neoromantic compositional style for reinterpreting and transforming African-American oral music traditions.

Perhaps the most intriguing new research presented at the Burleigh conference was Brian Moon's revelation of Burleigh's relationship with white southerner Dorothy Bolton and his fieldwork among the tenant farmers (former slaves) on the Burge Plantation in Mansfield, Georgia, in the early 1920s. The Old Songs Hymnal, which contained some of the songs Bolton and Burleigh collected and which was published in 1929, has received little attention. It was previously assumed that Burleigh's direct knowledge of oral plantation traditions came primarily from his grandfather--who had been a slave--and through the transcriptions of other collectors, black and white. Moon's research documents a significant new chapter in the Burleigh story. Although many of Burleigh's spiritual arrangements were published several years before his Georgia sojourn, we must reexamine the later arrangements and Burleigh's role in bringing spirituals into "vogue" (in James Weldon Johnson's term) in the light of this new information. Burleigh's relationship with Bolton also begs further study of his earlier collaboration with chanteuse Kitty Cheatham.

The Burleigh conference brought together scholars, singers, students, other music lovers, and members of the Burleigh family, who listened, shared, sang together, and learned from the music and from one another. In this issue of the BMRJ, we extend the circle of sharing in the hope that others will be challenged to help us recover more of the story of this neglected but foundational period in American music history.

JEAN E. SNYDER teaches in the Music Department at Edinboro University, Pennsylvania, and is working on a book on Burleigh's life and music. She contributed a chapter on Burleigh's relationship to Antonin Dvorak in John A. Tibbett's Dvorak in America, 1892-1895 (Portland, Ore.: Amadeus Press, 1993) and wrote composer and works essays on Burleigh for the International Dictionary of Black Composers, edited by Samuel A. Floyd Jr. (Chicago: Fitzroy-Dearborn, 1999). She served as consultant and presenter for the PBS documentary Dvorak and America (2000) and appears on Safe Harbor, a PBS documentary on the Underground Railroad in Northwestern Pennsylvania. She has co-produced two CD recordings of music by African-American composers, including Burleigh, and wrote the liner notes for a third.