INSTRUMENTS OF IDENTITY: ALTON AUGUSTUS ADAMS SR., THE NAVY BAND OF THE VIRGIN ISLANDS, AND THE SOUNDS OF SOCIAL CHANGE.

There must have been a moment during the transfer ceremony when no flag waved over the Virgin Islands. A moment that captured, on one hand, the uncertainty, ambiguity, and fear created by the exchange and, on the other, the economic opportunity and social potential it presented. The colonial flag, Denmark's Dannebrog, was lowered slowly--reluctantly for some, who saw its departure as a signal of danger. Since July 3, 1848, when the islands' slaves were freed by gubernatorial decree, a precarious social truce had preserved the status quo. Denmark may not have had the financial resources to bring new industry or schools to the islands or even to offer relief after the hurricane of 1916, but they had demonstrated what one observer of the ceremony, Bandmaster Alton Augustus Adams (see Fig. 1), called "an atmosphere of racial tolerance" (Adams 1970-, preface). Tolerance in this case did not mean the absence of racism but a racism that was a known, stable quantity.

[Figure 1 ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Any moment of symbolic freedom from the banner of an external authority was short-lived, however. In practical terms, it was purely imaginary. It was now March 31, 1917--one week before the U.S. entrance into World War I. The United States had purchased the islands of St. John, St. Croix, and St. Thomas for $25 million in order to deny Germany a potential submarine base within easy striking distance of the American mainland and was now taking possession. According to Adams, who was twenty-seven years old at the time, immediately following the Dannebrog's descent, "The band of the U.S.S. Olympia struck up `The Star-Spangled Banner,' the guns again boomed out their salute of twenty-one guns and the Stars and Stripes mounted swiftly up the staff to remain there" (Adams 1917, 66).

The rules of the colonial game had changed. One set of foreign and exclusively white administrators had been exchanged for another. Law was in a state of flux, suspended between two systems. Local identity had been destabilized, creating a moment of powerful ambiguity. A fair question for the islands' inhabitants would have been, "Who are we now?" Many assumed that this question was unnecessary and that the terms of the sales treaty clarified the islanders' political status, but, in fact, the crux of an answer lay in yet another series of questions: who would respond to the question of local identity; who would gain the authority to speak; what situations might arise that would direct the interpretation of the sales treaty; what tactics could be employed to navigate through the perilous uncertainty of such a new social circumstance?

The United States government did not address the issue, possibly distracted by the country's entrance into World War I on April 6, 1917. Although the local inhabitants assumed differently, four years later it would be revealed that the articles of transfer did not include a provision making the islanders U.S. citizens--the United States Constitution did not follow the flag. Danish colonial law continued, now enforced by a United States naval governor rather than a representative of Denmark's king. Living under but not truly within the purview of the American flag, the islanders inhabited a social limbo created by a strategic real estate sale.

The United States government's relative silence on the issue of citizenship created the opportunity for local black leaders, such as Adams, Rothschild Francis, Caspar Holstein, D. Hamilton Jackson, and Lionel Roberts, to begin to answer the question of identity themselves. Francis, Holstein, Jackson, and Roberts took a stance of active resistance and demanded political change--a strategy that would prove increasingly successful as the islanders finally became U.S. citizens in 1927, as the naval administration was removed and a civilian governor appointed in 1931, and as most aspects of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were finally brought to the Virgin Islands by the Organic Act of 1936. Each of these four leaders used newspapers as a conduit for their arguments for change. Holstein and Roberts sent frequent letters to the editors of local and mainland papers, while Jackson and Francis started labor unions that operated independent newspapers. Jackson edited the St. Croix Herald, while Francis edited the Emancipator of St. Thomas. The four men argued vociferously for self-rule and better wages. Holstein was president of the Virgin Islands Congressional Council in New York. Roberts became chairman of the committee that shaped the Organic Act. Remarkably, Francis and Roberts had also started their own brass bands in the period before the transfer, each serving as conductor, organizer, and teacher. Francis's band was short-lived, but Roberts continued to conduct his ensemble into the 1920s (Lightbourn 1921, 156).

Adams took another approach, one seemingly very different but one on which, in some important ways, the later success of Francis, Holstein, Jackson, and Roberts would be built. Rather than being a social revolutionist, Adams was an evolutionist. While others worked to expel the navy, Adams cooperated with the new government, joining the navy along with the members of his band and thus gaining a voice in the local administration. Temporarily setting aside his concern for autonomous self-rule, he succeeded in inserting a group of islanders into the local government nonetheless. He then began to enlist the aid of the navy to provide for what he saw as the immediate social and economic needs of the islands. He also hoped to transform his personal vision of a racially tolerant community into reality.

Music was the rhetorical tool that Adams used to persuade the navy to enable his cultural work and to reinforce the identity of the local inhabitants as Virgin Islanders. Taking advantage of his position as bandmaster of the Adams Juvenile Band, he filled the void of local identity with music. For Adams, "music" embraced band music transcribed from the works of the canonized European masters, arranged from local dance musics, and newly composed by black musicians. Adams was a cultural interpreter, a mediator poised between the United States and the Virgin Islands. Analyzing Adams as an interpreter at the crossroads of race, class, and ethnicity helps to clarify not only his own activities, writings, and position within the islands' political situation, but also sheds light on the social tensions within the Virgin Islands specifically, and, more generally, the Harlem Renaissance.

Born in 1889 into a family of lower-middle-class urban artisans, Alton Augustus Adams grew up under the colonial government of Denmark in what was then known as the Danish West Indies. Although apprenticed to a shoemaker, Adams continued to pursue training in music, practicing the flute and piccolo diligently and taking correspondence courses in music theory and composition.(1) When the Virgin Islands were purchased by the United States, Adams had already developed an accomplished performing ensemble known as the Adams Juvenile Band (see Fig. 2). Within a month of the transfer, Adams and his band were inducted into the United States Navy to serve as "a bridge of communication" between the white naval administration and the predominantly black population and "a facilitator of cross-cultural dialogue and understanding" (Adams, 1970-, chap. 4). In a matter of months, Adams auditioned and recruited members from two other bands on the largest of the Virgin Islands, St. Croix: the Christiansted Industrial Brass Band, under the direction of Jacob Paulus, and the Fredericksted Band, under Eric Nielson. After a year of training with Adams on St. Thomas in 1918, these bandsmen were sent back to St. Croix and took up residence in their original towns. Adams continued as the bandmaster of the main navy ensemble in Charlotte Amalie, the port city of St. Thomas and seat of government for the islands. This network of three ensembles gave Adams a much broader geographic influence than any of the other black leaders on the islands.(2)

[Figure 2 ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Adams' three bands were the first black ensembles in the United States Navy and the only ones until World War II (see Floyd 1974). Adams was the first black to become a United States Navy bandmaster and, most likely, the first to be a chief petty officer in the navy. As the highest-ranking black Virgin Islander in the navy's territorial administration, Adams gained considerable prestige and social power within the Virgin Islands community. In a time of widespread unemployment, Adams and his bandsmen earned a dependable and relatively high salary, which transported the young men into the ranks of the local black community's elite (Lightbourn 1921, 65).(3) Adams' leadership role as the ensemble's bandmaster gave him a symbolic status as the emblem of naval race relations--a position that created opportunities for him to exercise remarkable authority within the new government.(4) That a bandleader would become a civic leader in the Virgin Islands is not surprising. The flexibility and portability of the band's instrumentation made for a variety of social uses. Because of their multifaceted role in island life, bandleaders attained leadership positions in the community very different from their counterparts on the United States mainland (see Francis 1956).(5)

On the United States mainland, despite the popularity of bands and band music at the turn of the twentieth century, orchestral music remained the art of the elite and carried the most prestige. On the Virgin Islands, band music was, more than any other cultural practice (except possibly journalism), at the center of governmental, religious, and social life. Woven tightly into the social fabric of the Virgin Islands, bands and band music provided much of the accompaniment for public life, especially concerts, dancing, and both sacred and secular ceremonies. While there were no full-time professional ensembles, members of the islands' artisan class were often instrumentalists who played in loosely organized ensembles based within hierarchical social networks. Performances in private homes created an atmosphere not unlike the European salon. In contrast, public performances accompanied public events. Regular public concerts in the Virgin Islands do not appear to have begun until the early twentieth century, but they quickly developed into civic institutions. Bands accompanied many government ceremonies. Contemporary photographs also reveal that small marching bands accompanied religious processions through the streets for such events as Carnival, funerals, confirmations, and first-communion parades (see Fig. 3).(6) The closest parallel on the mainland was certainly the funerary processions of New Orleans, a city that shared with the Virgin Islands a Caribbean heritage. Marcus Garvey also made extensive use of bands in New York City for parades popularizing his "back to Africa" movement. Not coincidentally, Garvey too was from the Caribbean.

[Figure 3 ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Competition among bands on the Virgin Islands was intense since the best bands received generous government subsidies in exchange for providing regular weekend performances. Rivalries between bandleaders were even more fierce, as players and instruments were in limited supply. Strong, charismatic players from one band frequently left to form smaller dance groups and sometimes even full bands that competed directly with their former ensembles. Adams, for example, was among the original members of a small social orchestra in St. Thomas (founded ca. 1903) that eventually became the Municipal Brass Band, officially organized in 1906-1907 and led by the islands' star cricket player, Lionel Roberts. When a leadership dispute between Roberts and the senior instrumentalists of the original ensemble caused many of the established musicians to resign, Adams stayed with Roberts in order to continue performing. Soon, however, Adams too came into conflict with Roberts and left in 1910 to form his Juvenile Band, winning the confidence and support of one of Roberts' most generous patrons, the pharmacist Elphege Sebastian (Adams 1970-, chap. 3). With Sebastian's backing and encouragement, the Adams Juvenile Band made rapid progress and seven years later was selected over Roberts' ensemble as the seed group of the navy band (Jarvis 1938, 132). In the 1930s, Adams would vehemently deny any artistic debt to Roberts in a bitter dispute over musical skill and influence that was carried on in the editorial pages of a local paper (see Roberts 1934; Vanterpool 1934; Adams 1934a, 1934b; Henry 1934).

Placing himself at the juncture between Danish colonial rule and the territorial administration of the United States Navy, Adams gained the power to mediate, to interpret, to define, to translate between past and present, and, he hoped, to guide the character of the future. Adams capitalized on his position at the cultural crossroads by creating multifaceted musical representations that supported complex, even contradictory readings, depending on the subject position of the listener. His music signified on the musical traditions of the United States to create a specifically local meaning. In the geometry of Signifyin(g),(7) the position of the audience is no less important than the position of the speaker/ performer. Differences in these subject positions help produce the ambiguity that makes meaning fluid and malleable.

Adams' "Virgin Islands March" served as one of these multivalent catalysts to local identity (see Fig. 4). For listeners on the United States mainland, however, it contained nothing in its musical argument to separate it from mainstream American band music. Only the title and the composer's biography distinguished this work from one by John Philip Sousa (1854-1932). Adams greatly admired Sousa and learned how to compose, in part, by transcribing music from the instrumental parts of Sousa's works into full score. Adams' analysis of Sousa's style and compositional strategies led to the creation of his own works and their capacity to adopt a seamless imitative disguise. Rather than diminish Adams' artistic accomplishment, this ability to compose in the style of another demonstrates the precision of his musical understanding.(8) By using a definitively American musical vocabulary in the "Virgin Islands March," Adams enabled the several social functions of this work and allowed for the alternative interpretations of his audiences. For mainlanders, the sounds of Sousa's marches, such as "The Stars and Stripes Forever," defined patriotic sentiment. Likewise, the "Virgin Islands March" would have reassured Adams' military superiors of his bandsmen's patriotism. It impressed potential tourists with the essential Americanness of the islands' population, establishing a sense of trust and comfort that might overcome the islands' foreign heritage and unfamiliarity. During the band's 1924 tour of the eastern seaboard of the U.S., the march would prove to be a powerful form of advertisement.

[Figure 4 ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Adams' accomplishment was to write a work that served as both advertisement and local manifesto. The work's local resonance was due not only to its title and role as an example of the islands' creativity, but it became part of the fabric of local life through the act of performance. For years prior to its becoming the official territorial anthem through legislative action in 1963, the "Virgin Islands March" was accepted as such through use and repetition--it was performed during civic ceremonies ranging from gubernatorial inaugurations to high school graduations. Adams' political intent was anything but incidental to his artistic motivation: "I was born at a time when the cultural identity of Virgin Islanders was on the wane," Adams would later say. "It was my hope that an awareness of distinctiveness could be revived through music" (quoted in Cuthbertson n.d., 44). The key to understanding the work's local potential is to allow for the possibility that the sounds of Sousa's music carried a less specific and therefore more malleable meaning on the islands than on the mainland. For Virgin Island residents who had heard "The Stars and Stripes" mixed with arrangements of European masters since at least the founding of Lionel Roberts's band in 1906-1907 (Vanterpool 1934), Sousa's music had as much Danish and local significance as American. For local auditors, the sounds of a Sousa march would have connected present to past in a way that it did not for members of the U.S. Navy or other listeners from the mainland. It was just such a historical connection that Adams hoped to create. Adams' patriotism was genuine, but he insisted that Virgin Islanders understand themselves as historically distinct and capable of making cultural and social choices that went against American ways.

A preliminary indication of the historical and artistic strategies that Adams would employ in guarding the cultural crossroads in the Virgin Islands appears in his first published representation of the islands to the people of the United States mainland. Beginning in April 1916, Adams wrote a column called "The Band" for Jacobs' Band Monthly, published in Boston by Walter Jacobs. In May 1917, just a month after the transfer, Adams offered a unique illustrated report to his musician readers entitled "The Virgin Islands: The Danish West Indies Now Included in the United States of America" (Adams 1917). Position again plays a Signifyin(g) role in the strategies of mediation employed here. For many of his readers, Adams was the sole conduit for information about the islands and their inhabitants. He therefore held the power to reveal or conceal, controlling his audience's perspective to further his own ends. In this article, Adams' goal seems to be to create awareness without fueling stereotypes. The primary difference between Adams' local audience and his readers on the mainland lay in their knowledge of race. Readers of Jacobs' Band Monthly likely would have been unaware that many on the islands, including Adams himself, were of African descent. While other columnists in the magazine had photographic portraits displayed prominently next to their bylines, Adams did not. At no point in this article, or in any other article published in Jacobs' magazine, does Adams reveal his racial identity.(9) The Virgin Islands photos in the article under discussion are either of landscapes or of white military personnel involved in the transfer ceremony. In effect, Adams passed for white, despite his rich brown skin color, by playing on the assumptions of his readers that an educated bandleader must certainly be white.(10) Rather than denying his race, this strategy can be seen as an attempt to be treated equally without regard for race, following the ideals of the Harlem Renaissance and of the "New Negro" as a full participant in cultural and social life.(11) Adams simply behaved as the person he was--an artist educated and trained in the European tradition. Another motivation was probably at work as well. While Adams did not fear revealing his racial identity to supporters and rivals on the islands, who already knew he was black, he almost certainly was concerned that racially motivated antagonism from the mainland could destroy the opportunities for publicity and employment he had so carefully nurtured during his career. Would Jacobs' have continued to publish his column if Adams was known to be black? Would his readers still accept his writings, no matter how erudite? By obscuring his racial identity, Adams minimized this danger.

In the conclusion of his May 1917 article, Adams portrays Virgin Islanders as having been loyal to their outgoing Danish colonial rulers but culturally distinct: "We are two different peoples that have never been in contact; two peoples whose customs, traditions, conditions, language and the like are foreign to each other" (67). Adams asserts the islanders' independence, while simultaneously claiming that their primary cultural influence had been their northern neighbor: "We have created for ourselves, totally unaided, our military bands and like institutions. Our customs, habits, thoughts, sentiments, aspirations and language are purely American, nothing in the main Danish" (69). Adams suggests that Virgin Islands culture is coherent and complete unto itself. It may fall under the umbrella of "American culture," but it is not controlled by the U.S. media. Local artists reinterpret and transform American culture for use in the islands' context.

Nevertheless, Virgin Islanders were to be loyal to the United States. Adams described the raising of the new American flag in triumphant, patriotic terms:

   The guards then reversed positions, and in the name of the United States of
   America, U.S. Commander Pollock acknowledged the transfer. The band of the
   U.S.S. Olympia struck up the Star-Spangled Banner, the guns again boomed
   out their salute of 21 guns and the Stars and Stripes mounted swiftly up
   the staff to remain there. An exclamation of greeting burst forth from the
   vast concourse of people--and why not? Isn't it under that flag that 40,000
   people expect intellectual freedom and moral uplift, equality and justice
   before the law? It was a warm Welcome! to OLD GLORY. (66, emphasis in
   original)

Adams embraces the ideals of the United States without ceding authority over local identity. This essay is at once the ingratiating overture of a colonial and a declaration of a strict boundary between self and other. The variable activating the alternative readings is the subject position of the reader, i.e., a reader from the United States mainland versus a reader from the Virgin Islands.

Adams uses the term "American" subtly and ambiguously. For readers in the United States, the term likely was read as synonymous with "United States citizen"; for Adams and other islanders, the term could refer to a broader community of nations ranging from north to south, Canada to Chile. "American" could also be used as a term of disdain to draw a distinction between the self and the imperial power. Adams does not refer to Virgin Islanders as Americans in this article. Adams refers to the islands as "American possessions" and as being under the "emblem," "flag," or "protection of the United States of America" (65-66). Yet the islands themselves never change. It is not until Adams invokes a ritual of colonialism by quoting the public recitation of a "proclamation issued by the President of the United States of America" that the islands are renamed the "Virgin Islands of the United States of America." Throughout the article, Adams deploys names and labels to subtle rhetorical effect. To name is to reconfigure tradition. To rename and revise is to signify. Adams implicitly credits the tradition of racial tolerance on the islands to the Danes. By undercutting the label "United States Virgin Islands," he begins a lifelong, and largely unsuccessful, effort to protect the islands from the pressures of mainland race relations.

In his conclusion, Adams takes the opportunity to plug the islands as a travel destination while incidentally drawing a boundary between the social and (especially) racial practices of the islands and those of their new administrators:

   Space does not allow me to dwell on the beauties of this West Indian
   Paradise with its excellent harbor; its intelligent and refined population,
   free from the ignorance of race prejudices; its beautiful blue skies, and
   equally blue and beautiful waters the year round; its beautiful trees, its
   hot but delightful tropical sun, its poetic moonshine and many other things
   which make one at times jump off the ground and exclaim with delight! (67)

Ambiguity remains, however, as Adams retains the label of "West Indian" despite the islands' new owners--a rhetorical strategy that both exoticizes the vacation paradise and reinscribes the boundary between the islands and the mainland as a marker of independence. That the "West Indian Paradise" could be a paradise, in Adams' view (see Adams 1970-), depended on his claims of historical independence and the relative absence of racial prejudice.

Adams was, to borrow Houston Baker's terminology, a master of social form--able to find opportunities for negotiation within the confines of an imbalanced political system (Baker 1987, 30-33). The elegance of Adams' mastery was that he did not have to fulfill nineteenth-century minstrel-character expectations of "colored" behavior; rather his success at representing the navy was proportional to his success at achieving his own goal of creating an educated, cosmopolitan, and racially tolerant band and, by extension, society. While historians of the U.S. Virgin Islands have almost unanimously condemned the naval administration as racist, Adams thrived in it, at least initially. Adams' success may be due to his ability to link his own agenda to that of the navy. Adams used his power of representation to open cracks of opportunity in naval policy. Adams became the measure of this policy and gained considerable power. While the games of representation that Adams played worked on several different levels and many different audiences at home and abroad, the discussion here will be limited to Adams' musical imagery intended primarily for observers on the United States mainland, especially his band's 1924 tour of the United States and its two parades through Harlem (see Fig. 5).

[Figure 5 ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

In his 1967 article "Orphan Islands: The Early American Years," Gordon K. Lewis dismisses the social importance of the Virgin Islands Navy Band as "a publicity gimmick in defense of the navy record in the islands." Lewis is probably right about the navy's reasons for inducting Adams' ensemble, but rather than grounds for dismissal, this role of mediator was the source of the band's influence. An example of this can be seen in the welcome given, on January 27, 1924, to an all-black, five-member federal commission(12) appointed by U.S. Secretary of Labor James Davis to "investigate industrial and economic conditions on the islands" (Jarvis 1938, 136-140). For the commission's arrival, the naval administration organized a Grand Promenade Concert by its unique ensemble in Emancipation Gardens, not coincidentally a symbolic public square in St. Thomas--the site where Governor Peter von Scholten's 1848 proclamation that freed the islands' slaves was read. This event lends credence to Lewis's interpretation of the band as a token of racial inclusiveness. Yet, even if the navy intended to use Adams and his band as a shield to ward off criticism of its racial policies, this event soon escaped the navy's control. Navy officials could not have imagined that Adams would co-opt the navy's own agenda and make the military into an unwitting collaborator in the Harlem Renaissance. Within six months, the navy's token "colored band" would be parading in triumph through the streets of Harlem, and Adams would pull off a publicity coup of his own by dedicating a new composition, "The Spirit of the U.S.N. [United States Navy]," to President Calvin Coolidge.

The idea for the tour first surfaced in a public letter of thanks to Bandmaster Adams from the federal investigative commission. Written by Charles E. Mitchell, the letter invited "the band to make a tour of the United States and thus enable thousands of music lovers ... and citizens ... to have visible and audible demonstration of what the Virgin Islands have produced" (Mitchell 1924). The idea might have faded soon afterward, if not for Adams' position at the crossroads of race. The commission's final report was highly critical of the naval administration's record of race relations, particularly citing discriminatory taxation, low wages, high unemployment, unjust competition with alien laborers, hunger, poor nutrition, and the withholding of full citizenship (Woodson et al. 1924). But the commission's black members praised the navy for at least one item--"its splendid policy of thus encouraging and employing musical talent among that group of patriotic Americans to which we proudly belong" (Mitchell 1924). Just over a month after the release of the commission's report, the islands' military governor sent Adams to navy headquarters in Washington, D.C., to finalize arrangements for a publicity tour The band's itinerary is shown in Appendix B.

The tour was billed not as an apologia for the navy's racial policies but as a stimulus to the islands' failing economy. Its shipping industry destroyed by World War I and its sugar and rum industries paralyzed by Prohibition, the Virgin Islands' economy could no longer depend on manufacturing or trade. Tourism appeared to be the islands' most viable industry but few mainland Americans outside of the navy even knew of their existence.(13) Published in a St. Thomas newspaper, The Bulletin, in a serial entitled "En Route with the Navy Band of the Virgin Islands," Adams' own account of the band's tour emphasizes its official mission to act as an advertisement for the islands: "Before starting our program[s], we usually tried our best in telling audiences the reason for our visit, giving as much information as possible about the islands, stressing particularly their adaptability as winter resorts. We also found it necessary ... to tell our audiences where and what are the Virgin Islands; their population, industries, economics, educational facilities and sanitation" (Adams 1924).

Music reinforced Adams' verbal description. Four of his own marches were featured on the tour: the "Virgin Islands March," "The Governor's Own," "Childhood Merriment," and "The Spirit of the U.S.N." All used the patriotic and reassuring Sousa-inspired musical vocabulary, while their rhythmic vitality and harmonic coloring provided a sound-portrait of the islands as a vacation wonderland. In Adams' music, the potential tourist heard a depiction of the Virgin Islands as fun and exotic, yet familiar and safe. A review of the tour in a nationally distributed music periodical published on the United States mainland, The Metronome, showed that this rhetorical strategy was successful. The magazine stated that "if these islands are nearly as good as the music their land discourses, they are indeed worth seeing and helping."(14)

On a purely musical level, the marches conceal the composer's racial identity, as no musical reference to race or African-based music is made.(15) Adams did, however, view the rhythmic vitality of Sousa's music as evidence of a shared black influence(16) While Adams was proud of his African heritage and motivated by the racial precedents he was setting, his social project, like that of the Harlem Renaissance, was invested in an idealistic and teleological conception of artistic growth and progress with European classical music at its pinnacle. His marches celebrate black achievement through mastery of an implicitly universalized European aesthetic. He defended black concert artists who performed both spirituals and European art songs, such as Marian Anderson, Harry Burleigh, Roland Hayes, and Paul Robeson. In an article for the Pittsburgh Courier, Adams wrote:

   I also feel no little amount of pride in being member of a race which
   possesses the emotional and intellectual capacity to formulate into art its
   joys and sorrows, labor and pain; its struggles, its strifes and its
   travails. But to contend that the musical appreciation of the race has not
   developed beyond that epoch which gave birth to these spirituals would be a
   travesty on truth.... And likewise, to proclaim ... that the Negro race is
   as yet unable to appreciate and enjoy the culture of the ages ... which
   represents things universal in the highest and truest form, would be a
   heavy and serious indictment against it.... Yes, we all enjoy programs of
   those beautiful spirituals as "Go Down Moses," "Nobody Knows de Trouble I
   See," and the matchless "Deep River," especially under the artistry of a
   Burleigh, Robeson, Hayes or a Marian Anderson. But would it really be a
   turbid tonal waste to us to include among them a bit of Grieg, Jessen,
   Beethoven or Wagner? I see no reason whatever for the Negro to restrict
   himself in his musical tastes and inclinations. I would advise him to look
   for his music everywhere; ahh to have the best, the highest, the richest in
   ideals for music is universal, a common possession. It has neither creed
   nor nationality.... Let the Negro not segregate himself musically but mix
   his menu with morsels from the rich heritage bequeathed to us all by the
   worlds' Tone Heroes. (Adams ca. 1936)

While criticizing blacks who might reject music because of its European roots, Adams deftly broadens the definition of "Tone Heroes" to reflect a global perspective that includes European masters along with the black communities that created the sprituals.

Race became a feature of Adams' music through performance rather than sound. In the minds of many listeners, the conceptual dissonance between the skin color of the players and the excellence of their music-making attacked the sterotyped understandings of the band's audiences. During the tour, the band's racial identity became well known and was emphasized in accounts by both the white and black press. Race became a source of black pride and white interest. The most popular pieces the band performed during the tour were not the Sousa-style marches but arrangements of Caribbean dance music, thus locating the band's racial identity within ethnicity.(17) Eliciting thunderous applause and frequent encore requests were Adams' own arrangements of bamboulas and danzas (see Fig. 6) and a set of "Porto Rican" dances by Luis R. Miranda.(18) According to a report from a reviewer in the Boston Chronicle, the band members even improvised one of these "native" dance tunes, removing all music from their stands with a theatrical flourish just prior to the performance.(19) It is difficult to trace the extent to which the band performed Caribbean musics because the titles of these works often are not listed or reported. In all but one instance, Adams reserved these "ethnic novelties" for the traditional period of encores following the formal program.(20)

[Figure 6 ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Published in newspapers and on souvenir programs, the formal program listings aspired to document an elite musical culture on the Virgin Islands (see Fig. 7). By featuring "the music of the masters," Adams presented the all-black band as a cultured and accomplished musical ensemble. While the band's open-air performances, often with free admission, appealed to the broadest possible audience, Adams subscribed to the ideals of cultural uplift and edification. His desire to "discourse in the language of Mozart and Beethoven [with] the ears of the American public" was essentially an attempt to negotiate class hierarchy through musical rhetoric. Writing early in the tour of a Washington, D.C., performance given in the "wealthiest and most aristocratic section of the city," Adams claimed, "we were told by many in the audience that several of our wealthy listeners were under the impression that we came to amuse them with the obnoxious jazz, but this impression, to their expressed joy, was soon dispelled" (Adams 1924). Like many in the black elite, Adams worried that jazz perpetuated a vernacular, rather than a cultivated, image of the "New Negro."

[Figure 7 ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

For Adams, excellence in music corresponded to the canon of masterpieces in the European concert tradition, especially opera, with its strong associations with the elite and edification. Table 1 presents the results of an analysis of the band's 1924 tour repertoire, showing the most frequently performed compositions. With the exception of "The StarSpangled Banner," "America," and Adams' own "The Spirit of the U.S.N.," all of which emphasized the patriotism of America's newest possession, the most frequently performed works in the band's formal programs were selections from the operas of Verdi. Adams also programmed arrangements of music by Beethoven, Bellini, Donizetti, Mozart, Rossini, and Wagner. The band performed an enormous, even virtuosic, amount of music during the month-long tour--a minimum of seventy-five different works by thirty-eight composers. They performed at a grueling pace, nearly every day and sometimes three to four times in a day at different locations. The prominence of Adams' own compositions emphasized his creative powers, while the solo concerti for clarinet, comet, and piccolo (the latter played by Adams himself) further underscored the skills of these talented "minority" musicians. With the exception of the danza "Chloe," the most frequently performed work by a Caribbean composer was that of Alfred Nemours, a Jewish Virgin Islander trained in Europe. The title of Nemours' work, "Soiree de Berlin," hints at the European-derived nature of the composition. The most frequently performed work by a black American, programmed in a gesture of solidarity, was "Call of the Woods" by William Tyers (b. 1876), a prominent New York musician who had passed away earlier in 1924. The New York Amsterdam News reported that Adams' "first announcement upon landing in New York was that a word of regret be carried from him to the people of color here anent [about] the death of William Tyers.... Bandmaster Adams held Tyers in highest esteem and placed many of the compositions of this past master on his programs for rendition before the leading officials of the navy and other Americans visiting the Virgin Islands" (quoted in Adams 1924).

Table 1. Most frequently performed works, 1924 tour, United States Navy Band of the Virgin Islands

No. of         Composer          Title
Performances

    14         Smith/Key         "The Star-Spangled Banner"
     9         Adams             "The Spirit of the U.S.N."
     8         S. F. Smith       "America"
     7         Verdi             Selections from Aida
     7         Verdi             Selections from La Traviata
     6         Adams             "Virgin Islands March"
     6         De Koven          Selections from Robin Hood
     6         Godard            Berceuse from Jocelyn
     6         Herold            Overture from Zampa
     6         Tyers             "Call of the Woods"
     6         arr. Adams?       Danza, "Chloe"
     5         Beethoven         Andante from "Moonlight Sonata"
     5         Chopin            "Polonaise Militaire"
     5         Lax, arr. Adams   Piccolo solo, "Mocking Bird"
     4         Adams             "The Governor's Own"
     4         Floton            Overture from StradeIla
     4         Grafulla          March, "Washington Grays"
     4         Lockhardt         Song, "The World Is Waiting
                                 for the Sunrise"
     4         Moszskowski       Spanish Dances nos. 1, 2, 3
     4         Mozart            Overture from The Magic Flute
     4         Nemours           Grand waltz, "Soiree de Berlin"
     4         Rossini           Overture from Semiramide
     4         Wagner            March from Tannhauser
     4         Weber             Overture from Oberon
     3         Adams             "Childhood Merriment"
     3         Bellini           Selections from Norma
     3         Filipovsky        Piccolo solo, "Chant du
                                 Rossignol"
     3         Rosas             "Impassioned Dream"
     3         Saint-Saens       "My Heart at Thy. Sweet Voice"
                                 from Samson and Dehlah
     3         Sousa             March, "The Fairest of the Fair"
     3         Suppe             Overture from Isabella

(Source: Sixteen surviving concert programs, held in the Alton Augustus Adams Collection, Center for Black Music Research; minimum of three confirmed performances.)

The need for such a gesture of solidarity in Adams' programming hints at the shadow of tension between foreign-born and native blacks in the United States--a tension that arose repeatedly during the tour. The band's first public concerts took place in Norfolk, Virginia, before whites-only audiences. Responding to petitions by local black organizations, the navy allowed the band to perform for a special black-sponsored lawn party. Adams' memoirs recount the impact of this event on the composer and his bandsmen:

   We were warmly received and lavishly entertained as champions of the race.
   That affair was a real eye-opener for me, since it provided me with my
   first experience with the professional caliber, the cultivation, the
   achievements and the dignified character of the colored middle class in the
   United States. Like many islanders, I had a highly stereotyped view of the
   American Negro, as a down-trodden, indolent menial, unable to rise above
   his former slave status. As we mingled and conversed with the urbane,
   intelligent attendees and learned of their appreciation of fine music, my
   men and I were compelled to revise our unwarranted feelings of
   superiority."(21) (Adams 1970-, chap. 5)

Black Americans likewise grew to appreciate these foreign bandsmen as face-to-face contact overcame stereotype. Accounts of the band's performances in the black American press early in the tour frequently misspell Adams' name, and misinformation about the thirty-eight performers in the band is typical. By the end of the tour, these errors have been all but eliminated, demonstrating a growing awareness of the band within the black community of the United States. In Philadelphia, Hampton (Virginia), New York, and Boston, special concerts were added to the band's original schedule to accommodate increasing interest by black audiences; an urgent, last-minute plea from Chicago could not be fulfilled (Adams 1924). Many of these extra concerts were benefit performances for local black hospitals, given to help repay black Americans for their support. Afterward, the band usually attended receptions sponsored by local black organizations. Adams reported, "as the band's reputation grew, black churches, universities, as well as social and political organizations vied for the honor of hosting receptions for these champions of the race" (Adams 1924).

In his memoirs, Adams calls the 1924 tour "the apogee of the Navy Band's success," in part because it was a "minor, albeit significant event in the history of American race relations." Adams was aware of the historical precedent his band had set and was continuing to forge. He carefully edited official accounts of the tour to remove examples of racism and create the illusion of a unanimously favorable reception from all people of any race with whom the band came into contact.(22) For many; Adams and his bandsmen appeared to exemplify the ideals of Harlem's Renaissance in actual practice--that social equality would follow from cultural excellence.

The band elicited widespread praise in the black press and quickly became a source of pride for many black Americans (see Fig. 8). In Harlem, the band marched in the only parades of its tour. According to press accounts of the first parade, a massive audience lined the sidewalks. Adams notes, "We were cheered and applauded wildly as we marched proudly by, and the crowd joined the happy procession to the bandstand." Adams concluded that "the concert ... meant much to the people of Harlem.... They realized that what we were doing was just vindication of their true status in the cultured part of the human family. I'll always remember one man screaming during the explosion of joy that erupted after the concert: `Yes, Yes. Let them find out from this that we are not monkey chasers'" (Adams 1970-, chap. 5).

[Figure 8 ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

One of the effects of making the Virgin Islands part of the United States was that travel between the islands and the mainland became easier. Many islanders came to the mainland, especially to New York, in search of improved economic circumstance.(23) The band's two performances in Harlem also served to unite the thousands of Virgin Islanders living in New York, helping to explain the crowd's enthusiasm. According to Adams (1970-, chap. 5), "The Virgin Islanders who did not attend were very few. The aged, the decrepit, the invalid were there, cheering along with everyone else every number on the program." Neither foreigners nor yet citizens, Virgin Islanders inhabited a political limbo on the United States mainland, and the band's visit encouraged both visibility and group identity.

The triumphant success of Adams' ensemble in the black American community belies the ethnic tension within this community and its impact on the tour. This tension can be best characterized from the perspective of planning and publicity. Adams spent three months in the United States making arrangements for the tour, working in part through a tight social network of Virgin Islanders living on the mainland.(24) This mutual support network, which included benevolent societies and political organizations, was one response of foreign-born blacks to ethnic tension. In each of the principal cities slated for inclusion on the tour, Adams had a group of Virgin Islanders working to make his visit a success.(25) The Philadelphia stop on the tour was not as successful, suggesting that the Virgin Island community there was less organized and influential than those of Washington and New York.

Romeo Dougherty, a Virgin Islander who worked as the Sporting and Dramatic Editor of the New York Amsterdam News, spearheaded the tour's publicity effort. It appears that for several months the Amsterdam News was one of only two black papers to acknowledge the band's impending tour.(26) Newspapers and radio stations run by prominent U.S.-born blacks barely seem to have recognized the existence of Adams or the band. An anonymous editorial in the Amsterdam News, likely penned by Dougherty himself, castigated these publications and grouped them with white periodicals as agents of discrimination against foreign-born blacks:

   When Bandmaster Adams made his first trip to this country [in 1922] we
   suspected the Crisis of withholding some praise from the brilliant young
   man who has been accepted by leading musicians of Europe and America. When
   the band arrived WE KNEW that station WEB will continue to fight for Santo
   Domingo and Haiti and other places in the West Indies, but with nothing
   praiseworthy to say of the real men and women of these places." (Anonymous
   1924; emphasis in the original)(27)

All but accusing W.E.B. Du Bois, editor of the NAACP's The Crisis, of ignoring the real people of the West Indies while championing them in the abstract, the editorial identifies the tension between American- and foreign-born blacks. Adams may not have been well-enough known to Du Bois to merit inclusion. Another reason for the neglect might have been that any emphasis on ethnic diversity within the black community in the United States might have been counter to the construction of an undifferentiated, unified, and therefore powerful, black identity.

Adams' difficulties might have been exacerbated by a continuing rift in Harlem Renaissance political philosophy--a tactical split between an assimilationist strategy and one of active resistance. For assimilationists, the band's induction into the U.S. Navy was a victory for the race as a whole--a victory of ability and perseverance over prejudice. For others, Adams' cooperation with the military was a step in the wrong direction, yet another example of "Uncle Tomming," or in this case, "Uncle Samming." By dedicating his newest march to the president as "expressive of the loyalty and patriotism of people of the Virgin Islands to the United States," Adams falsely ventriloquized for many islanders who saw the United States as yet another unwarranted colonial ruler. Adams' support of the naval administration made him a controversial figure on the islands, creating animosity that did not diminish after the navy left the islands in 1931 and that continues to a lesser degree even ten years after his death.

Yet to call Adams' project assimilationist is to oversimplify not only his thought but also the entire Harlem Renaissance project. Adams' goals and those of other black leaders, especially those from the Virgin Islands, such as Caspar Holstein, D. Hamilton Jackson, Rothschild Francis, and Lionel Roberts, were largely the same: full access to the rights and privileges of all Americans as guaranteed under the United States Constitution. They differed over the means. Holstein, for instance, chose political processes,(28) while Adams used culture to serve the same ends. When placed in historical perspective, what is remarkable is how well these strategies worked together.

Adams' music was a powerful form of publicity. Reaching listeners through the press, concerts, and the new technology of the radio, Adams and his band forged a positive image of Virgin Islanders. Response cards received from listeners across the East Coast confirmed the enthusiastic response of the public to the band. One radio listener in Maryland wrote Adams to say:

   Your program, given through station WCAP last night, did more to put the
   Virgin Islands on the map than anything since they passed under the
   government of the United States.... There were not many, I dare say, who
   knew the islands could appreciate an organization as good as the band has
   developed into under your leadership, much less furnish the material from
   which to make it. You have therefore raised our estimate of the people
   there, by showing us their taste in music. (Larcombe 1924)

High-profile concert performance of Adams' marches by professional bandsmen such as John Philip Sousa, Edwin Franko Goldman, Patrick Conway, and C. Herbert Clarke created not only awareness of the islands but constituted an endorsement by the mainland's leading conductors and ensembles. Probably the most enthusiastic endorsement was given by Edwin Franko Goldman, conductor of the Goldman Concerts in the Mall of New York's Central Park. Prior to the tour, Adams was in New York making preparations and writing "The Spirit of the U.S.N." while staying with Dougherty. Goldman, who knew of Adams through his articles in the Jacobs' Band Monthly, invited the Virgin Islander to conduct his "Virgin Islands March" in the Central Park series. On a Wednesday in June, Adams conducted the work and was brought back to the stage for several curtain calls. He responded by saluting the audience and thus endeared himself further to the crowd. Quoting an unnamed New York newspaper (probably the sympathetic voice of the Amsterdam News), Adams reports Goldman's flattering introduction:

   We are always glad to have among us distinguished musicians, especially as
   guest conductors. This evening I am presenting to you a distinguished
   musician in the person of Mr. Alton Adams, Bandmaster, United States Navy,
   born, educated and trained in the Virgin Islands of the United States, our
   possession. Mr. Adams and myself have been in correspondence for several
   years, and this is the first time I have had the privilege of meeting him
   personally, as it is his first visit here. His work among bands in the
   islands has won for him the highest praise of all the Governor Generals
   there. He is indeed a wonderful musician, and I am asking him to conduct
   one of his own compositions entitled the "Virgin Islands March." I take
   pleasure in presenting to you Bandmaster Alton Adams of the Virgin
   Islands." (Adams 1970-, chap. 5)

Adams and Goldman continued their correspondence until the latter's death in 1956, and Adams would again conduct the Goldman Band--in 1957 at a fiftieth-anniversary celebration of the purchase of the islands.

Even before the Goldman concert, the "Virgin Islands March" had been active as a musical agent of publicity. Adams was also a great believer in education and the power of youth to transform a community. In 1919, he had the score and parts to his "Virgin Islands March" published in Jacobs' Band Monthly, which was distributed to band directors and music educators throughout the United States. Adams' music thus strove for broad public awareness not only when performed by his own band but in performances by school and community bands.

Adams' melodic gifts and his skill at emulating Sousa made these publicity efforts surprisingly successful. Although his music is not well known on the mainland today, it enjoyed some popularity in the mid-1920s. His march "The Governor's Own," dedicated to navy Governor Oman of the Virgin Islands, was declared one of 1924's top four marches by its publisher, Carl Fischer (Advertisement n.d.). While Holstein fought for structural changes in the legal status of the islands and their people in the U.S. Congress, Adams fought the battle of public opinion and awareness among the lawmakers' constituents. Adams' use of publicity and mass media may seem innocuous, but his tactics were overtly political, although the extent of their effect is difficult to assess. While not a music of protest, his marches implicitly argued for the acceptance and increased social status of Virgin Islanders and other black Americans. Adams' music proclaimed the islanders' heritage as distinctive, but their abilities as equal. In his memoirs, Adams wrote that though he and Caspar Holstein "may dream of the same good things for the Virgin Islands, our methods of dealing with local problems are ... diametrically opposed" (Adams 1970-, chap. 5). Yet Holstein personally sponsored and organized the band's farewell concert in New York, using the band as a focal point to help solidify and galvanize the nascent political organizations of Virgin Islanders living in New York. Adams praised Holstein for the success of the event and called it "more of a far-from-home big family gathering than anything else" (Adams 1924).

Another common thread connecting the approaches of Adams and Holstein was their emphasis on providing social services. Holstein spent lavishly on the people of his homeland, sending annual gifts of food as well as building materials and carpenters after the 1928 hurricane. Although lacking Holstein's personal fortune, Adams took advantage of his position within the naval administration to engineer a series of social projects. He became the secretary of the Virgin Islands office of the Red Cross, which likewise sent food and building supplies in relief of the hurricane. (Not coincidentally, the Red Cross materials were transported free on navy vessels.) In 1920, Adams helped convince the Red Cross and the American Library Association to donate books and to provide funding for the first public library on the islands (Adams, n.d.b).(29) Adams also courted the largesse of wealthy white islanders. He convinced one such patron, a Mrs. White,(30) to purchase instruments, music, and other teaching materials in order to create a comprehensive public music education program in the islands. He then used his position in the navy to secure an appointment as Supervisor of Music for the public schools (beginning about 1920) and to travel to the United States mainland in 1922 to research music education programs. Rather than involving himself with citizenship issues, Adams focused his social project on services and economic infrastructure. (His resistance to a minimum wage increase, for example, was an effort to protect what he saw as a precarious tourist industry still in the early stages of development.) The navy brought money to the islands to provide for education and to build the foundation for a modern economy: roads, power plants, and sewer systems. Adams remained, therefore, a supporter of and apologist for the navy's efforts well after the military administration had left the islands. Adams appears to have been something of an economic determinist. In his view, the economy provided opportunities for social good, and culture steered people toward the fulfillment of these opportunities. Yet creating the opportunity was the necessary first step; the social upheavals that followed the navy's arrival were simply part of the price of economic development.

What made the Black Renaissance project so complex, whether in New York or Charlotte Amalie, was the relationship between race and social class. Ethnic variations within the "black" population further complicated social stratification, sometimes as another determinant of class or as yet another mask for class problems. Ernest Schulterbrandt, a resident of St. Thomas born in Danish times, who played trombone in Lionel Roberts' Municipal Band, claimed that before the United States purchase, Virgin Islanders "had class prejudice, not race prejudice" (Schulterbrandt 1998). With roots in Danish colonial strategies for controlling slaves by encouraging internal divisions within the black population (Campbell 1943), the class system on the Virgin Islands was tied to levels of education, economic status, and variations in skin color, with dark at the bottom of the social chain and light at the top.

According to Schulterbrandt, the economic and educational components of an individual's professional status, more than skin tone, determined his or her location within the local class system: upper-class blacks were store owners, the middle class was made up of craftsmen, and manual laborers occupied the lowest stratum. Black islanders of all classes resisted associations with slave life, especially work in agricultural plantations and sharecropping. Whites were at the top of the class system by default, but it was not unheard-of for upper-class blacks to enjoy some aspects of white privilege (see Campbell 1943; Willocks 1995, 162-163). The arrival of the navy in 1917, however, effectively dismantled the local class system. The navy was largely blind to the internal distinctions within the native population; from the perspective of most members of the navy, islanders of African heritage--whether black, brown, or beige, educated or uneducated, owners or laborers--were still black. The navy replaced the previous stratified system with a simple equation: white equalled administrators, black equalled administrated (Krigger 1998).(31)

During the Danish period, education had been an important tool for negotiating class hierarchy. Until the opening of the College of the Virgin Islands (now University) in 1963 (Willocks 1995, 8-9), no secondary education was available on the islands. While some traveled to the States for study, others, like Adams, did not, fearing to encounter a more virulent, even violent, strain of racism. Correspondence training was a popular alternative. Yet correspondence training did not confer the same stamp of social status as a degree from a mainland institution, especially in the eyes of mainlanders who had access to these universities.(32) To mark social class and prestige, some islanders borrowed status symbols from a familiar European colonial vocabulary; Old World markers of class distinction became emblems of Virgin Islands society. Classical music, for example, including European waltzes and quadrilles, operatic excerpts, and overtures, formed the musical education of islanders attending the open-air band concerts in Emancipation Gardens on St. Thomas. The Harlem Renaissance, with its use of cultural hierarchy as a social ladder, resonated in the Virgin Islands, where such a system was already in place.

"To Alton A. Adams Bandmaster, U.S.N." (see Fig. 9), a poem by Romeo L. Dougherty inspired by Adams' first visit to New York in 1922, articulates the bandmaster's position in relation to the Harlem Renaissance project and the interaction of race and social class. Here Dougherty adopts the yardstick of Western European aesthetics to measure Adams' accomplishments: Adams' art should be measured not against an African primitivist ideal ("Without the beating of the tom tom," line 12), but against the canon of European masterworks. The reference in line 26 to Adams' "magic flute," for example, invokes not only the bandmaster's solo instrument but also Mozart's opera Die Zauberflote [The Magic Flute], implicitly associating Adams with an explicitly European concept of musical genius. Another example is the repeated use of a faux-Elizabethan poetic vocabulary: words such as "oft" (line 19), "doth" (line 23), "did'st thou" (lines 25, 29), and "'tis" (line 36) invoke a distant and honored European past. Cultural hierarchy can be seen in the poet's use of vertical spatial metaphors (lines 10, 11, 43). The poet elevates Adams--and, by extension, black culture--to the "imperial heights" (line 11) of "true art" (lines 20, 46). Further, the poet's gendered rhetorical gestures play on the social conventions of the period, especially the male dominance that permeated military-style bands, to affirm Adams' role as master and creator through the repetition of masculine signifiers: "son" (lines 2, 21, 35, 38), "men" (line 10), "masters" (line 15), as well as the recurring "he" (lines 5, 6, 7, 16, 17) and "his" (lines 14, 26, 42). The poet portrays Adams, and blacks by extension, not as the passive victim(s) of society but its master(s).

Figure 9. "To Alton A. Adams, Bandmaster, U.S.N.," by Romeo L. Dougherty (1922b, emphasis in original)

1  From far-off Carib shore there came
   A son of moral worth and standing;
   Bronzed by the rays of tropic sun
   And sea where beauteous moons
     are shining.

5  He sought no plaudits at our hands,
   No added fame he came to seek:
   He boasted not of foreign sands,
   But acted humbly, and so meek.

   But here where worth is recognized

10 Where only MEN ascend the rostrum
   To ART'S imperial heights and find a
     place
   Without the beating of the tom tom,
   True worth of learning well displayed
   His hearers by his gifts dismayed:

15 The MASTERS here did find response
   In the entrancing tunes he played.

   The poet's soul he did inspire
   In speech, manner and attire,
   Where oft before we say the knave

20 To claim TRUE ART would conspire.
   Ah, noble son of tropic seas
   Where sweet perfume of zephric breeze
   Doth inspiration ever give
   Thou strengthen our soul to LIVE.

25 Did'st thou hear the moaning of the
     wind
   As from his magic flute we heard
   The sighing of the tropic trees
   Undulating in the breeze?
   Did'st thou hear the singing of the birds

30 As from piccolo came those sounds
   Of forest, glade and dell?
   Ah, let me oft the story tell
   Of Alton's visit to this land
   Where FRIENDSHIP did extend the
     hand

35 Of welcome to accomplished son
   Of whose work 'tis said: Well done!

   In well-trained ever-lucid style
   This son of far-off tropic isle
   Brought to our land of brave and free

40 Close bond of FRIENDSHIP, sympathy;
   And joyously we oft proclaim
   A hallelujah to his name.
   May others too, such heights attain
   So that the poet's true refrain

45 A welcome warm in verse will sing
   When such to us TRUE ART will bring.

Throughout the poem, Dougherty collapses categories of artistic value with those of social value. Black Renaissance art aspires not only to cultural excellence but to "moral worth and standing" (line 2). Classical virtues are invoked: humility (line 8), nobility (line 21), friendship and sympathy (lines 34, 40), and spirituality (lines 24, 42). The poem offers an idealized view of the United States that lives up to its image as the "land of brave and free" (line 39), where worth, not race, is recognized. The poet's only reference to skin color occurs obliquely, in line 3, when he describes Adams as "bronzed by the rays of tropic sun." Thus, blackness is an evolutionary result of proximity to the equator, not a measure of ability. Yet even as the poet attempts to escape racial stratification, he reinforces a class hierarchy. If culture is a social ladder, it must enforce a hierarchy of social class.

After leaving the navy, Adams ceased to compose and conduct. His most successful work in terms of continued performance, the "Virgin Islands March," is one that melts social division on some levels by appealing to a broad geographic community.

On several levels, Adams' mediating tactics produced lasting results that continue to influence the character and culture of the Virgin Islands. In 1963, his "Virgin Islands March" was officially adopted as the territorial anthem by the Fifth Legislature of the Virgin Islands (Bill no. 1890). "The Governor's Own" likewise became the official theme of the islands' governor. This status was affirmed by the Sixteenth Legislature of the Virgin Islands in 1982 (Bill no. 14-0662). The "Virgin Islands March" is played each day on Virgin Islands public television and at all official governmental and educational ceremonies. On their 1997 tour of the United States, the Rising Stars Youth Steel Orchestra from St. Thomas performed Adams' anthem. Adams' control of the cultural crossroads also provided for a remarkable array of social opportunity and influence, which continued throughout the composer's lifetime. In later years, he served as a journalist, radio host, historian, and president of both the Virgin Islands Power Authority and the Virgin Islands Hotel Association. His historical legacy remains somewhat controversial for many residents of the islands, but his influence is still felt, especially on an institutional level.

The story of Alton Augustus Adams and the United States Navy Band of the Virgin Islands is still largely absent from histories of the Harlem Renaissance. The 1924 tour does not receive so much as a footnote. In one way, this conspicuous absence is hardly surprising. Before being brought back to the attention of historians in the United States by Samuel Floyd (1977), Adams was almost unknown to scholars of African-American history. Adams' participation in the Harlem Renaissance may have been dramatic for those who heard his band's concerts, but his influence was severely limited in scope. Although Adams lived in the United States for nearly six months during 1924, he was never a resident of Harlem. Furthermore, band music was in decline in the United States during the 1920s; its awkward combination of highbrow and mass culture fell into disfavor. Most important, Adams' version of black identity, which cultivated pride in ethnic origins and diversity within the black community, did not fit the notion of Harlem as a pan-African answer to the diaspora. The category of blackness in the United States may have been most powerful if it erased any differentiation between the historical legacies that connected Afro-Caribbeans and African Americans to a monolithic and unified "Africa."

Adams' story continues to hold interpretive potential. If we include Adams in the pantheon of Renaissance figures, the word "Harlem" itself begins to become more of an event than a geographical location, more of a cultural crossroads than a place: "Harlem" becomes a term of mediation and Signifyin(g) in and of itself. Here, the Harlem Renaissance is revealed not as a rebirth but as a cultural exchange of ideas, attitudes, and aspirations among a wide range of peoples throughout the African diaspora. Adams' story is not simply a tale of white versus black but one of class and ethnic diversity within society as a whole. While cultural historians may look at the music, poetry, and literature of the Renaissance as the core of its legacy; its most powerful creation may well be the notion of "Harlem" itself--the creation of a unified yet vibrant black identity out of a diverse and often conflicting experience. Today, the Stars and Stripes continues to fly over the islands of St. Thomas, St. Croix, and St. John just as it flies over Harlem. The central question remains: to what extent does the United States Constitution protect and serve all of the many peoples over whom the flag flies? Asked countless times a day in the practice of everyday life, this question remains as pertinent today as it was in 1924, when Adams and his band marched through the streets of Harlem, or in 1917, when he gave the downbeat at the premiere of his own answer to the question of rights and identity, the "Virgin Islands March."

An earlier version of this paper, titled "Culture at the Crossroads: Alton Adams and the Construction of Black Identity during the Harlem Renaissance," was presented at the InterAmerican Conference on Black Music Research (July 1997). Many individuals provided helpful comments as this project developed, especially Philip Bohlman, Johann Buis, Judah Cohen, John Cowley, Richard Crawford, Suzanne Flandreau, Samuel Floyd, Myron Jackson, Travis Jackson, Marilyn Krigger, Ernest Schulterbrandt, Gilbert Sprauve, and Leroy Trotman. The staffs of the Enid M. Baa Library (St. Thomas), the University of the Virgin Islands (St. Thomas), and the Whim Museum (St. Croix) provided invaluable assistance. Finally, I owe a great debt to the family of Alton Adams--particularly Alton A. Adams Jr. and Gwendolyn Adams--for their encouragement, comments, and assistance.

(1.) For a more detailed discussion of Adams' biography and compositions, see Floyd (1977) or Clague (1999).

(2.) Adams was a tough disciplinarian and demanding conductor. He earned the respect of his superiors as well as his bandsmen by requiring dedication and hard work of himself and his charges. For some brief accounts of Adams by his bandsmen, see McKay (1991) and Thurland (1994).

(3.) Salaries were proportional to rank. The majority of the bandsmen were ranked as Musician Second Class or Second Class Petty Officer and initially earned $50 per month. The assistant conductors on St. Croix, such as Jacob Paulus and Eric Nielsen, held the rank of Musician First Class and received $56 per month (Thurland 1994, 11). These salaries were supposed to be equivalent to other bandsmen in the navy at the time and increased gradually, reaching an average of $72 per month by 1921 (Lightbourne 1921, 65). Because the bandsmen were not stationed on board ship and did not receive military rations, they received an additional living and food stipend of $9 per month, later raised to $13 (McKay 1991, 11). Although I have not yet located precise income figures for Adams, as Bandmaster and Chief Petty Officer, he should have received a higher salary than other Virgin Islands bandsmen.

4. Adams was not the only bandsman from the U.S. Navy Band of the Virgin Islands to become active in local leadership. Cyril Michael (1898-1978), for example, became an attorney after leaving the navy and was appointed to the Municipal Court as a judge in 1957, later becoming presiding judge, a position he held until his retirement in 1976 (Moolenaar 1992, 157-158).

(5.) For a thorough investigation of band music in life on the United States mainland, see Kreitner (1990).

(6.) The Whim Museum Library on St. Croix has an exceptionally fine photograph collection that contains a series of such images depicting the role of bands in public life.

(7.) As used here, the term Signifyin(g) invokes the rhetorical strategy outlined by Gates (1988). While Gates treats Signifyin(g) as an interpretive strategy used to tease out meaning from works of literature, it is used here as a creative tactic of black artists of the diaspora as a means of inserting meaning into works of art. While not as simple as the idea that the key used to decipher a cultural code must of necessity be the same as the one used to create the cipher, as used here, Signifyin(g) does imply the intentional placement of meaning by artists for later interpretation by listeners, readers, or viewers. A "geometry" of Signifyin(g) is an attempt to place both the creator and auditor(s) of a musical work into a contextual and historical relationship that articulates not only the stakes of the negotiation of meaning but also the vectors of social power and the varying perspectives of each group of actors.

(8.) One could argue for distinguishing artistic characteristics in rhythmic, contrapuntal, and ornamentive treatment between the compositions of Adams and Sousa. These differences could connect Adams' music to a Caribbean heritage. But such distinctions are subtle and do not undercut the sense of aural similarity for the casual concert listener. Adams' distinct musical heritage is better heard in his treatments of Caribbean dance music for band.

(9.) In the early 1920s, after Adams had ceased writing his regular column for the magazine, a biographical sketch in Jacobs' Band Monthly by Frank Seltzer identified Adams as black (Seltzer ca. 1920). A similar article by Arturo Giglioli, published in the magazine in June 1916 (when Adams was contributing one or two essays per month), made no mention of Adams' race. This does not necessarily imply that Adams withheld his racial identity; indeed, he was intent on setting precedents. His photo or other racial identifiers could well have been removed by the editors of the publication.

(10.) Adams' daughter, Gwendolyn Adams (1998), related an interesting story that illustrates this type of racial assumption. When identification cards were first made for the members of the newly inducted Navy Band in 1917, the photographs were sent away (off island) for processing. While the instrumentalists' photos were processed correctly, Adams' own photo was underexposed so severely that he appeared white.

(11.) While the Harlem Renaissance as a literary movement is often limited to the 1920s and early 1930s, Floyd (1990) and others have argued that including music among the Harlem Renaissance arts calls for a broadening of its chronology. The term "New Negro" has a long and complex history. For a discussion of the term in the sense I use it here--as a full participant in U.S. cultural and political life--see Locke (1925). The earliest use of the term I have encountered is by Booker T. Washington (1900), but the concept's roots might well go back even further (see also Levine 1993).

(12.) The commission's members were George H. Woodson (Iowa), Cornelius R. Richardson (Indiana), Charles E. Mitchell (West Virginia), Jefferson S. Coage (Delaware), and W.H.C. Brown (Virginia).

(13.) Jarvis (1938,136) tells of an incident in 1922 when the Colonial Council for St. Thomas sent a trio of ambassadors to Washington "for the purpose of laying the grievous conditions of the island personally before the officials of the Federal Government." Dubbed the "Orphan Islanders" by the Washington press, the representatives found few to listen to their complaints but did manage to correct the U.S. State Department, which had classified the Virgin Islands as part of the Philippines.

(14.) This and other press articles are preserved in Adams' scrapbook of the 1924 tour, held in the Alton Augustus Adams Collection, Center for Black Music Research, Columbia College Chicago. A list of the articles is included in Appendix A.

(15.) Despite Dvorak's call for basing an explicitly "American" musical tradition upon "Negro music" (see n. 33), few black composers working outside the commercial sphere of cakewalks and rags made musical reference to black musics, preferring that their music be judged against their canonical models in the Western European tradition. There are exceptions, such as the art-song spirituals of Harry Thacker Burleigh and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor's "Symphonic Variations on an African Air." These exceptions became the rule in the 1930s, with Clarence Cameron White's opera Ouanga (1931), the Afro-American Symphony of William Grant Still (1931), and William Dawson's Negro Folk Symphony (1934), but in the two preceding decades in the United States, Adams' musical strategy, although conservative, was in no way unique. In fact, Adams' approach was similar to that of the earlier Philadelphia-based black bandmaster and composer, Francis "Frank" Johnson (1792-1844) (see The Music of Francis Johnson 1990).

(16.) Adams bases this conclusion on an interview of Sousa by Marie Devenport-Euberg in the Bellingham Register in which Sousa tells of experiences as a youth seeing "Negro boys and girls" as well as adults dancing alongside regimental bands in Washington "with that abandon which characterized the Negro and his sense of rhythm." Sousa concludes, "When I came to write my marches these things were in my subconscious mind" (quoted in Adams n.d.a).

(17.) This conclusion is supported by listener response cards contained in the Alton Augustus Adams Collection, Center for Black Music Research, and in Adams' own account of the tour.

(18.) Miranda was the bandleader of the Fifteenth Infantry Regiment of Puerto Rico. Adams also included Miranda's "Ugolina" on a program for an all-black charity concert at Walter Reed Hospital in Philadelphia.

(19.) Lacking any evidence from Adams' own writings or any other mention of this work in journalistic accounts, it is impossible to decide if this piece was improvised or simply memorized. The theatrical removal of music from the music stands serves to emphasize the oral/aural rather than literate tradition of this performance. This move may have been an attempt to graft Caribbean music onto the growing enthusiasm of American audiences for jazz. The Boston concert was one of the band's final tour performances. They had had time to get to know mainland blacks and mainland music. Early in the tour, Adams disavowed jazz and would continue to do so to some extent later in his career, but by the time of the Boston concert, he seemed to embrace, even imitate, a similar aesthetic. The possibility that this performance represented a temporary shift in Adams' perspective, or that he tailored this performance specifically for the black-Americans in this audience, is supported by the presence of Maud Cuney-Hare at the Boston concert. After this performance, Adams gave Cuney-Hare a set of dance transcriptions and other writings, possibly from his own study of Virgin Islands folk music, which she would use in her book Negro Musicians and Their Music (1936); see especially chapter 5, "Folk Song in the Provinces" (95-112), which begins with a discussion of the Virgin Islands and contains a musical example credited to Adams (103).

(20.) The practice of listing mainly highbrow compositions in the official program and performing much of the most popular, audience-pleasing music in the encore set might well have been borrowed from the programming tactics of such influential conductors as John Philip Sousa.

(21.) Adams is probably referring more to his bandsmen's experience than his own, as he had already undergone a similar realization during his trip to the United States mainland in July of 1922. Writing of this earlier visit to Washington and New York in his memoirs, Adams stated, "I, however, gained considerably from meeting and talking to men and women of my race, many of whom I had only read and heard about and from conversations with others. I was mystified and extremely delighted with the high degree of cultivation and education I found among them" (Adams 1970, chap. 5). The black musicians, ministers, educators, and other leaders he met on this earlier visit included the violinist Joseph Douglass; Henry L. Grant (president of the National Association of Negro Musicians); the Reverend Francis Grimke (Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church); the Virgin Islander Reverend Daniel E. Wiseman, Dr. Keller Miller, and J. Emmet Scott of Howard University; Dr. Garnet Wilkerson (head of Washington's black public schools); and James Weldon Johnson. Such narrative license in Adams' tour account is typical of the adjustments made to his narrative for rhetorical and social effect.

(22.) When his military authority failed to overcome racial prejudice, Adams stood behind democratic principle. According to his memoirs (1970-, chap. 5), at one concert in Philadelphia, when the white park superintendent offered only a scattered pile of wooden boxes on which the musicians could sit while playing, Adams delivered an ultimatum. He refused to allow the band to perform until the superintendent had provided "the same seating arrangements that you would give to John Philip Sousa." After a forty-minute delay, Morris chairs were provided. The band played for twenty minutes to finish out its scheduled hour and departed.

(23.) For more information about Caribbean immigrants in New York, see Watkins-Owens (1996) and Guirty (1989).

(24.) Two other parties were involved with the organization of the tour: the U.S. Navy and Captain William Russell White, the original sponsor of the band. White was instrumental in making arrangements to include the band on the Keith's circuit, with all proceeds from the tour to be donated to hospitals on the Virgin Islands. This arrangement was necessary to meet the conditions of a Congressional law forbidding competition between service bands and like civilian organizations.

(25.) Adams had laid the groundwork for this publicity and support network of Virgin Islanders in 1922 during his first visit to the United States. This visit involved solo flute recitals along with research in music education programs for the benefit of his position as Supervisor of Music of the Virgin Islands' public schools.

(26.) A partial exception to this rule was the New York Age, which employed two friends of Dougherty as editors, Lucien II. White and Fred R. Moore. The Age reprinted information originally published in Amsterdam News accounts. Eventually, another pro-Caribbean publication, The World, trumpeted Adams' success.

(27.) A similar editorial by Dougherty (1922a) criticizing Du Bois appeared in the New York Amsterdam News after Adams' first visit to the U.S. Du Bois may have ignored the 1924 visit because of the involvement of Caspar Holstein, who sponsored the band's final tour performance held in Harlem's Renaissance Casino. According to Axel C. Hansen (1996, 141), Du Bois "never recognized any of the worthy activities of the numbers banker" who earned his fortune in the gaming industry and spent lavishly on philanthropy and activism in theattempt to buy a position of respect in Harlem Renaissance society. Du Bois and Adams later became personal friends--a development that is not surprising considering that both believed in the elite arts and looked toward classical concert music to elevate the community.

(28.) Holstein engaged in direct political activism and congressional lobbying. At the time of the Navy Band's tour, he was president of the Virgin Islands Congressional Council, one of the two most influential Virgin Islands political organizations in New York (the other being the American Virgin Islands Civic and Industrial Association organized by Ashley L. Totten). Pressure from Holstein's organization may have prompted the formation of the Department of Labor's 1924 investigative commission. The commission's first stop was not in the islands but in Harlem to interview members of Holstein's council (Hansen 1996, 140). Holstein kept the issue of the status of Virgin Islanders in front of federal leaders. He made substantial financial contributions to candidates of the Democratic Party, paid the expenses of Virgin Islands representatives traveling to Washington, and hired a professional lobbyist to work full-time on his dreams of self-government.

(29.) Renamed after educator Enid M. Baa, this library continues to serve the islands.

(30.) The Mrs. White mentioned here may well be the wife of the Navy Chief of Staff, Captain William Russell White. According to Adams, she recommended to her husband that the Adams band be inducted into the U.S. Navy (see Floyd 1977, 175).

(31.) Many lower class blacks approved of the destruction of the black elite.

(32.) Adams' anxiety about his own self-education is evident in a series of short stories he wrote during a GI Bill-sponsored correspondence course from the Palmer Institute of Authorship of Hollywood California. In one story, John Paige, a musician trained by correspondence courses, triumphs over John Wiseman, a conservatory graduate (Adams ca. 1953).

REFERENCES

Adams, Alton Augustus. 1917. The Virgin Islands: The Danish West Indies now included in the United States of America. Jacobs' Band Monthly 2 no. 5 (May):65-69.

--. 1924. En route with the Navy Band of the Virgin Islands. [St. Thomas] Bulletin. Held in the 1924 tour scrapbook, Alton Augustus Adams Collection, Center for Black Music Research, Columbia College Chicago.

--. 1929. Music appreciation: An appeal for its study. Music Bulletin (October):8-15, 17.

--. 1934a. Corrections and omission in Mr. Roberts [sic] "Unwritten music history." [St. Thomas] Daily News October 9:3; October 10:3.

--. 1934b. Letter to the editor. [St. Thomas] Daily News October 12:5.

--. ca. 1936. We segregate ourselves. Pittsburgh Courier. Held in Adams' career scrapbooks, Alton Augustus Adams Collection, Center for Black Music Research.

--. ca. 1953. Lesson 14: Assignments 22, 23, 24. Untitled, unpublished correspondence-course assignments completed for the Palmer Institute of Authorship of Hollywood, California. Held in the Alton Augustus Adams Collection, Center for Black Music Research.

--. 1970-. Memoirs. Unpublished manuscript, begun 1970 and unfinished. Held in the Alton Augustus Adams Collection, Center for Black Music Research.

--. n.d.a. John Philip Sousa: As man and musician. Unpublished manuscript, written sometime after 1945. Held in the Alton Augustus Adams Collection, Center for Black Music Research.

--. n.d.b. Public library. Unpublished manuscript. Held in the Alton Augustus Adams Collection, Center for Black Music Research.

--. n.d.c. The power of music. Unpublished manuscript. Held in the Alton Augustus Adams Collection, Center for Black Music Research.

Adams, Gwendoyn. 1998. Interview with the author, June 23.

Advertisement. n.d. Held in career scrapbooks, Alton Augustus Adams Collection, Center for Black Music Research.

Anonymous [possibly Romeo Dougherty]. 1924. Untitled clipping. Held in 1924 tour scrapbook, Alton Augustus Adams Collection, Center for Black Music Research.

Baker, Houston A., Jr. 1987. Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Campbell, Albert A. 1943. St. Thomas Negroes: A study of personality and culture. Psychological Monographs 55 no. 5:1-90.

Clague, Mark. 1999. Alton Augustus Adams. In International Dictionary of Black Composers, 9-16. Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn.

Cuney-Hare, Maud. 1936. Negro Musicians and their Music. Washington, D.C.: Associated Publishers.

Cuthbertson, Clarence R. n.d. The first black U.S. bandmaster. Clipping, probably from Pride Magazine [St. Thomas], 43-45. Held in Adams family photo album, Alton Augustus Adams Collection, Center for Black Music Research.

Dougherty, Romeo L. 1922a. About things theatrical. New York Amsterdam News. November 29.

--. 1922b. To Alton A. Adams, Bandmaster, U.S.N. St. Croix Herald August 9.

Dvorak, Antonin. 1894. Music in America. Harper's New Monthly Magazine 40 (February):432-433.

Floyd, Samuel A., Jr. 1974. The Great Lakes experience, 1942-1945. Black Perspective in Music 3 no. 2:17-24.

--. 1977. Alton Augustus Adams. Black Perspective in Music 5 no. 2:173-187.

--. 1990. Music in the Harlem Renaissance: An overview. In Black Music in the Harlem Renaissance: A collection of essays, edited by Samuel A. Floyd Jr., 1-27. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press.

Francis, Hepburn E. 1956. Native bands in the Virgin Islands. In Silver Anniversary Booklet, 60-61. [St. Thomas] V.I.: Virgin Islands Civic Association.

Gates, Henry Louis. 1988. The signifying monkey: A theory of African-American literary criticism. New York: Oxford University Press.

Giglioli, Arturo. 1916. Alton A. Adams. Jacobs' Band Monthly 1 no. 6 (June):29-30.

Guirty, Geraldo. 1989. Harlem's Danish-American West Indians, 1899-1964. New York: Vantage Press.

Hansen, Axel C. 1996. Casper A. Holstein, 1876-1944. In From these shores, 130-149. Nashville, Tenn.: Hansen and Francois.

Henry, Cecil. 1934. An open letter: To ex-bandmaster, Alton Adams. [St. Thomas] Daily News October 12:5.

Jarvis, Jose Antonio. 1938. Brief history of the Virgin Islands. Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas, V.I.: The Art Shop.

Kreitner, Kenneth. 1990. Discoursing sweet music: Town bands and community life in turn-of-the-century Pennsylvania. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Krigger, Marilyn. 1998. Interview with the author, June 19.

Larcombe, Henry C. 1924. Letter to Alton Adams, July 19. Held in the Alton Augustus Adams Collection, Center for Black Music Research.

Levine, Lawrence W. 1933. The concept of the New Negro and the realities of black culture. In The unpredictable past: Explorations in American cultural history, 86-106. New York: Oxford University Press.

Lewis, Gordon K. 1967. Orphan islands: The early American years. Virgin Islands View (September):21.

Lightbourn, Alberic G. 1921. Lightbourn's annual and commercial directory of the Virgin Islands of the United States. Charlotte Amalia, V.I.: Alberic G. Lightbourn.

Locke, Alain. 1925. The new Negro. New York: A. and C. Boni.

McKay, Ogese T. 1991. Now it can be told: An autobiography. St. Croix, V.I.: Ogese T. McKay and the Virgin Islands Council on the Arts.

Mitchell, Charles E. 1924. Letter to Mr. Alton A. Adams, Bandmaster, U.S.N. [St. Thomas] Bulletin January 29:1.

Moolenaar, Ruth. 1992. Profiles of outstanding Virgin Islanders. Rev. ed. Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas, V.I.: Government of the United States Virgin Islands.

The Music of Francis Johnson and his contemporaries. 1990. Chestnut Brass, with Tamara Brooks, conductor. MusicMasters 7029-2-C.

Radio programs scheduled for the coming week. 1924. New York Times July 27: sect. 20, 14.

Roberts, Lionel. 1934. Letter to the editor. [St. Thomas] Daily News October 2:3.

Schulterbrandt, Ernest. 1998. Interview with the author, June 18.

Seltzer, Frank R. ca. 1920. Famous bandmasters in brief. Jacobs' Band Monthly. Held in the Alton Augustus Adams Collection, Center for Black Music Research.

Thurland, Karen C. 1994. Peter G. Thurland, Sr.: Master cabinetmaker and bandleader. St. Croix, V.I.: Karen C. Thurland.

Vanterpool, Ernesto. 1934. Unwritten music history: As told to Ernesto Vanterpool. [St. Thomas] Daily News October 5:3; October 6:3.

Washington, Booker T. 1900. A new Negro for a new century. Chicago: American Publishing House.

Watkins-Owens, Irma. 1996. Blood relations: Caribbean immigrants and the Harlem community, 1900-1930. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Willocks, Harold W. L. 1995. The umbilical cord: The history of the United States Virgin Islands from pre-columbia era to the present. Christiansted, V.I.: Harold Willocks.

Woodson, George H., Cornelius R. Richardson, Charles E. Mitchell, Jefferson S. Coage, and W.H.C. Brown. 1924. Report of the federal commission appointed by the Secretary of Labor to investigate industrial and economic conditions in the Virgin Islands, U.S.A. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office.

APPENDIX A

Newspaper articles from 1924 Tour Scrapbook Alton Augustus Adams Collection, Center for Black Music Research

Band concert. [Washington, D.C.] Sunday Star July 29, [1924].

Bandmaster Adams had world famous musicians under his baton. Unidentified St. Croix newspaper.

Benevolent society entertains V.I. band. New York Amsterdam News [undated].

Carlton Ave. Y.M.C.A. entertains navy band. New York Amsterdam News [undated].

Concerts. Washington Evening Star July 22, [1924].

Dougherty, Romeo L. The Virgin Island band to appear at Dunbar on 18th, Philadelphia Tribune [undated].

Douglas hospital benefit a success. [Philadelphia] Tattler [undated].

Famous Negro band of navy at the Dunbar. The Public Journal [undated].

Famous Virgin Island band in farewell Sunday concert charm many at Renaissance. New York News [undated].

Famous Virgin Isles band starts concert tonight. Washington Daily American July 18, [1924].

Famous Virgin Island band to appear in concert at Renaissance Casino soon. New York Amsterdam News [undated].

Famous Virgin Island band to give concert for Quaker city hospital. Pittsburgh Courier August 16, [1924]:11.

Five bands will give seven open air concerts. Washington Post July 21, [1924].

The Goldman Band. New York Times August 31 [1924]:sect. 7, 7.

Grudgingly the Billboard announced that the United States Naval Band had been making a hit. New York Amsterdam News [undated].

Monster crowd greets famous Virgin Island band at Renaissance Casino. New York Amsterdam News [undated].

Music notes. New York Age [undated].

Navy band to give concert to-night. New York Evening Journal July 30, [1924].

Negro navy band entertains here. Norfolk Journal and Guide July 12 [1924]:1.

Radio's best offerings. Washington Star July 18, [1924].

2,500 attend first Highland Park concert. Brooklyn Daily Eagle August 9, [1924].

U.S. Navy Band of Virgin Islands features WCAP bill tonight: Visitors will play one hour. Washington Times July 18, [1924].

U.S. naval band concerts. New York Times August 4, [1924]:16.

U.S. naval band from Virgin Islands gives pleasure to music lovers in Jamaica. Long Island Daily Press and Daily Long Island Farmer [Jamaica, N.Y.] August 11, [1924].

U.S. Navy Band of Virgin Islands is on tour here. Metronome July [1924].

The Virgin Islands band. Hampton Student [undated].

Virgin Island band charms city. Boston Chronicle [undated].

Virgin Islands band conquers Washington. Unidentified Washington, D.C., newspaper [undated].

Virgin Islands band gives concerts. Musical America [undated].

Virgin Island band makes hit in park concert. New York News [undated].

Virgin Island band share honors and Honolulans in ether: Two talks on night bill. Washington Times July 19, [1924].

Virgin Islands band to be heard tonight. [Washington, D.C.] Evening Star July 18, [1924].

Virgin Island band to give a concert. Unidentified New York paper, August 8, [1924].

Virgin Island band to tour United States. The [Indianapolis, Ind.] Freeman [undated].

Virgin Island navy band to play here. Washington Daily July 15, [1924].

Virgin Islands navy band visits United States and has successful tour. Metronome [undated].

Virgin Island U.S. band concerts. New York Times July 31, [1924]:13.

A West Indian musical genius. [Granada, B.W.I.] West Indian [undated].

Walton, Lester A. U.S. Navy Band of Virgin Islands is on tour here. World August 3, [1924].

White, Lucien H. Alton A. Adams, only Negro bandmaster in U.S. is here. New York Age [undated].

--. Virgin Islands naval band now being heard in New York. New York Age [undated].

APPENDIX B

Itinerary, 1924, United States Navy Band of the Virgin Islands

Date/Time         City             Event

Jan. 28           St. Thomas       Idea for a tour proposed
                                   by the Federal Commission
                                   to investigate industrial
                                   and economic conditions
                                   in the US. Virgin
                                   Islands.

Feb. 28           Washington       Federal Commission's
                                   report submitted to the
                                   U.S. Secretary of Labor

April             Washington       Adams on the mainland to
                  and New York     make preparations for the
                                   tour; will compose a new
                                   march, "The Spirit of the
                                   U.S.N.," for the tour
                                   while in New York.

May 9             St. Thomas       Official approval by the
                                   navy for the tour arrives
                                   in Virgin Islands.

June              St. Thomas       Seventh-anniversary
                                   celebration of the band

June 4, 11,       New York         Adams conducts the
18, or 25,                         Goldman Band in the Mall
Evening                            of Central Park by
                                   invitation of Edwin
                                   Franko Goldman. An
                                   audience estimated at
                                   20,000 hears the "Virgin
                                   Islands March."

June 27           St. Thomas       Navy bands depart from
                                   Virgin Islands and
                                   Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

July 1            Hampton          Bands arrive on the
                  Roads, V.A.      mainland and rehearse as
                                   a single unit for fifteen
                                   days.

July 4            New York         Adams departs for Hampton
                                   Roads.

July 6            Norfolk          First public performance,
                                   for an all-white audience
                                   in the city park; other
                                   concerts follow, but
                                   dates and number are
                                   unknown.

July              Norfolk          Performance for a black
                                   audience of 500 at a
                                   private lawn party

July 15           Washington       Adams visits Navy
                                   Department to set up more
                                   concerts.

July              Washington       Band arrives in
                                   Washington, D.C. and
                                   visits local sites.

July 17           Washington       First Washington
                                   performance, Washington
                                   Navy Yard

July 18,          Washington       Performance for the
9:30 A.M.                          Department of Labor,
                                   including Secretary of
                                   Labor Davis

July 18, Noon     Washington       Concert for District
                                   Commissioners; band
                                   welcomed

July 18,          Washington       Concert, Meridian Hill
7:30-9 P.M.                        Park; mixed-race audience
                                   of 9,000

July 18,          Washington       Radio broadcast on WCAP
10 P.M.

July 19, 7:30     Washington       WRC radio broadcast with
or 8 P.M.                          tenor Philip Gomez

July 20,          Washington       Concert, Walter Reed
6:30 P.M.                          Hospital, for patients
                                   (Note: In this hospital,
                                   President Coolidge's son
                                   had died shortly before
                                   the tour, preventing
                                   Coolidge from accepting
                                   the dedication of "The
                                   Spirit of the U.S.N."
                                   march in person.)

July 21, 4 P.M.   Washington       Concert, Howard
                                   University

July 21,          Washington       Concert with Philip Gomez
8 P.M.                             at Lincoln Colonnade
                                   Hall, followed by a
                                   reception organized by
                                   Rev. Daniel E. Wiseman
                                   (from the V.I.) and a
                                   reception committee
                                   including Joseph
                                   Douglass, violin virtuoso
                                   and grandson of Frederick
                                   Douglass

July 22, Noon     Washington       Band serenades Mr.
                                   Wilbur, Secretary of the
                                   Navy at the Navy
                                   Department.

July 22,          Washington       Concert, 10th, U, and
7:30-9 P.M.                        Vermont Avenue; Adams
                                   claims an outdoor
                                   audience of more
                                   than 15,000.

July              Philadelphia     Arrival for concerts
                                   postponed because of the
                                   extra days spent in
                                   Washington; Philadelphia
                                   concerts organized with
                                   the help of Rev. Richard
                                   Bright of St. Thomas.

July 23           Chicago          Telegram from Chicago
                                   sent to New York City
                                   requesting a visit by the
                                   band.

July              Philadelphia     Concert, Wanamaker's
4:30 P.M.                          department store;
                                   broadcast on store
                                   station WOO; preceded by
                                   a talk on V.I. by
                                   Jefferson F. Coage of
                                   the federal
                                   investigative
                                   commission

July              Philadelphia     Performed several city
                                   park concerts for white
                                   audiences

July 27, 4 P.M.   New York         WJZ radio broadcast

July 29,          New York         WJZ radio broadcast
4:30 P.M.

July 29           Brooklyn         Adams reports the band's
                                   arrival in New York City;
                                   the band was housed
                                   at Brooklyn Naval Yard.

July 30,          Brooklyn         Concert, City Park
7:30-9:30 P.M.                     (opposite navy yard)

July 31,          New York         WJZ radio broadcast
9:45 P.M.

Aug. 1,           New York         Concert, Battery Park
Noon-1 P.M.

Aug. 1            Harlem           Band is entertained at
                                   Imperial Lodge of Elks,
                                   no. 129.

Aug. 1,           Harlem           Parade and concert,
8-10 P.M.                          St. Nicholas Park

Aug. 2,           Bronx            Concert, Poe Park
2-4 P.M.

Aug. 2,           Manhattan        Concert, Washington
8-10 P.M.                          Square Park

Aug. 3,           New York         Concert, Battery Park
2-4 P.M.

Aug. 3,           Manhattan        Concert, Mt. Morris Park
8-10 P.M.

Aug. 4,           Brooklyn         Concert, Prospect Park
8-10 P.M.

Aug. 5,           Harlem           Parade and concert,
8-10 P.M.                          St. Nicholas Park;
                                   reception following

Aug. 6,           Queens           Concert, Highland Park
8-10 P.M.

Aug. 7,           Brooklyn         Concert, Tompkins Park
8-10 P.M.

Aug. 8,           Brooklyn         Concert, Highland Park
8-10 P.M.

Aug. 9,           Coney Island     Concert, Dreamland Park
2-4 P.M.

Aug. 9,           Brooklyn         Concert, Fort Greene Park
8-10 P.M.

Aug. 10,          Jamaica,         Concert, Kings Park
2-4 P.M.          Long Island

Aug. 10,          Staten Island    Concert, Curtis Field;
8-10 P.M.                          post-concert reception by
                                   the American West Indian
                                   Benevolent Society, a
                                   women's organization made
                                   up of Virgin Islanders

Aug. 12           New York         Departure for Boston

Aug. 13,          Boston           Arrival in Boston
9:15 A.M.

Aug. 13, Noon     Boston           Concert, Navy Yard

Aug. 13,          Boston           Concert aboard the
2-4 P.M.                           battleship Constitution,
                                   alternating with an
                                   ensemble of Civil War
                                   veterans in the city for
                                   a GAR (Grand Army of the
                                   Republic) convention

Aug. 14, Noon     Boston           Concert, Boston Commons;
                                   congratulated by William
                                   Monroe Trotter and Maud
                                   Cuney-Hare (best
                                   performance of the tour,
                                   according to Adams)

Aug. 15,          East Weymouth,   Concert
Evening           Mass.

Aug. 15           Boston           Departure for New York;
                                   the band was presented
                                   with two American flags
                                   in dock ceremony by
                                   ladies of the GAR.

August            Brooklyn         Concert, City Park

Aug. 17           Harlem           Concert, Renaissance
9 p.M.-Midnight                    Casino; organized by
                                   Romeo Dougherty and
                                   sponsored by Caspar
                                   Holstein and the
                                   Congressional Council of
                                   the Virgin Islands as a
                                   political rally

Aug. 18,          New York         Departure for
Morning                            Philadelphia; drummer
                                   Ronald Hennessy remains
                                   behind.

Aug. 18,          Philadelphia     Benefit concert for
Evening                            Frederick Douglass
                                   Hospital, Dunbar Theater

Aug. 19           Hampton          Concert, Hampton
Morning           Roads, Va.       Institute (where six
                                   students from the Virgin
                                   Islands are enrolled)

Aug. 19           Hampton          Concert, Hampton
4:15 P.M.         Roads, Va.       Institute, Holly Tree Inn
                                   lawn

Aug. 20,          Hampton          Embarkation for home
Morning           Roads, Va.       aboard the USS Kittery;
                                   the deaths of the wife of
                                   First Musician P.O.
                                   Nicholsen and the father
                                   of George Sealey
                                   announced; Adams remains
                                   for a vacation. (Tour
                                   stops in Cuba, Haiti,
                                   Santo Domingo, and Puerto
                                   Rico were canceled
                                   because of the extension
                                   of time in the U.S.)

by Sept. 18       St. Thomas       Adams returns with his
                                   family to St. Thomas.

MARK CLAGUE is executive editor of Music of the United States of America (MUSA) and adjunct assistant professor at the University of Michigan. He is completing his Ph.D. in musicology at the University of Chicago and worked as an editorial assistant on the International Dictionary of Black Composers.3