The invisibility and fame of Harry T. Burleigh: retrospect and prospect.

April 2, 2003, saw the opening of a three-day conference, The Heritage and Legacy of Harry T. Burleigh (1866-1949), designed to address and celebrate the contributions of this singer, composer, vocal coach, pianist, teacher, editor, and producer. (1) The presenters explored issues ranging from who influenced Burleigh's career to whom he influenced; from his musical prowess to his work as a composer; from his arranging to his singing; from his songs to his choral works; from his spirituals to his popular and concert music. This occasion was the first to address comprehensively so many aspects of this individual's career and to provide interpretations that reach beneath the surface of previous writings to support his status as a key figure in the history of American music; for over the decades, discussions of his contributions to American music have been virtually absent in the tomes that document and extol that history.

There are acceptable reasons for this silence, including the fact that until recently there have existed serious gaps in our knowledge about African-American music and musicians and a dearth of the kind of information that would reveal Burleigh as even semisignificant in the history of American music. In fact, in the large majority of cases, Burleigh's name does not appear unless Antonin Dvorak's does, not even in most black-oriented, black-authored, and black-produced publications. When his name is mentioned without Dvorak's, the context in which it appears carries the implication that Burleigh must have been a great singer since he was a featured soloist at a white church--St. George's Episcopal Church in New York--for fifty years, from 1894 to 1946. (2) Not even in my edited Black Music in the Harlem Renaissance (Floyd 1990) was Burleigh given more than a modicum of space, scattered throughout the volume. In order to place my observations in context, I will divert for a moment.

The late musicologist Eileen Southern has told of colleagues at NYU questioning her decision to write a book about black music, one asking, "What is there to learn about black music? There's nothing there--just jazz and spirituals. How could you possibly find enough material to make a course?" (Wright 1992, 6). Well, she certainly proved his assumption to be wrong, producing a massive musicological tome about black music and black music making that ranges chronologically from pre-nineteenth-century American slave music to contemporary European-derived and American-based concert music, The Music of Black Americans. Since that landmark work first appeared, in 1971, an abundance of information has been revealed in scholarly journals, including her own trailblazing journal The Black Perspective in Music, Jon Michael Spencer's Journal of Black Sacred Music, and my own Black Music Research Journal, and in research tools and monographs on black music. A second edition of Southern's book was published in 1983, and a third in 1997. Each new edition contained much more information than in its previous incarnation and reflected an enlarged perspective, advanced by Southern's observation and study of developments that had taken place in the intervening years. Nevertheless, in the subsequent editions Burleigh remained underexposed, receiving only seven passing mentions in 1983 and seven in 1997; nor is he given much space in the second edition of Southern's edited Readings in Black American Music (1983), in which the authors of the book's essays gave him but five passing mentions. In The Power of Black Music (Floyd 1995), my treatment of him was not much better, for while I identified him there as a "highly significant figure," my four passing mentions are now an embarrassment. A powerful exception to such omission is Reid Badger's biography of James Reese Europe, A Life in Ragtime (1995), which gives significant attention to Burleigh. All in all, however, while progress in the recognition of black music and musicians has been steadily consistent, Burleigh has been virtually disregarded.

In 2001, the long-awaited second edition of the august New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians resoundingly finished breaking one of the mainstream barriers to black music scholarship, as its numerous and wide-ranging black music entries far surpassed what could be found in the previous edition. It has become undeniably and powerfully clear that the rubric "black music" embraces much more than "just jazz and a few spirituals." In addition to an unprecedented increase in the number of journal articles and book-length studies on black music, significant reference works have been produced, including Southern's Biographical Dictionary of Afro-American and African Musicians (1982); Southern and Josephine Wright's African-American Traditions in Song, Sermon, Tale, and Dance (1990); Eddie Meadows's Jazz Research and Performance Materials, now in its second edition (1995); and the International Dictionary of Black Composers (1999, which does contain a lengthy entry on Burleigh). In addition, specialized scholarly editions of music continue to appear, for example, Paul Machlin's Thomas Wright "Fats" Waller: Performances in Transcription, 1927-1943 (2001), published as volume 10 in the Music of the United States of America series (which would do well to embrace a volume on Burleigh).

Nevertheless, the value of much of the black music oeuvre is still overlooked, ignored, and, in some quarters, questioned, although more quietly than before, and sometimes tacitly. In fact, Burleigh himself has remained virtually invisible to most students of American music, with the exception of those assembled at the 2003 conference and, now, a growing number of others. The Burleigh conference laid the groundwork for establishing Burleigh as a central figure in American music and, more broadly, making black musical achievement ever more "visible." The insights revealed at the conference shed light on Burleigh's legacy and showed promise for more work on his career and his importance as a genuinely significant historical figure. To date, four doctoral dissertations have been written about Burleigh, two books--Anne Simpson's biography (1990) and Jean Snyder's forthcoming biographical study. Also pertinent to Burleigh study are several recent CDs of his music. (3) All this work, together with a few smaller publications, contributes to a stream of information that will be used, inevitably, for the study of the work and works of Harry T. Burleigh, and which, I believe, will be worked into the mainstream of American musical scholarship.

To understand Burleigh and his influence, the place to start is the National Conservatory of Music, where, during the period 1892-1895, Burleigh was a student of the composer Antonin Dvorak (1841-1904), who had been invited to the United States from his native Prague to direct the newly formed institution. In America, Dvorak learned more than he may already have known about American Indian and African-American music and challenged composers to use the characteristics of this music to discover a national style of music in the United States. His quest for a truly American music was controversial, and it was challenged by several prominent composers and critics whose perspectives were adamantly Eurocentric. One, Richard Wallaschek, said that the spirituals were "overrated" and that "Negroes have received a great deal of glory to which they are not entitled." But Natalie Curtis Burlin and many others, including Henry Krehbiel, countered resoundingly.

Dvorak's chief source of African-American music was Burleigh, who was his copyist and private singer of the spirituals. In this milieu, Burleigh functioned importantly, and Dvorak deserves gratitude for bringing Burleigh into collaboration with him and for making at least faint praise possible. Dvorak had other black pupils, too, among whom were Will Marion Cook (1869-1944) and Maurice Arnold (1865-1937). Others whom he influenced were William Grant Still (1895-1978) and the white aspirants Amy Beach (1867-1944), Natalie Curtis Burlin (1875-1921), and Aaron Copland (1900-1990). Burleigh's interaction with these and other individuals, at the conservatory and beyond, placed him within a supportive and stimulating environment.

It is time, however, to come to grips with the implications of statements to the effect that Burleigh merely taught Dvorak about the Negro spirituals. Such faint praise contributes nothing to the recognition of Burleigh's own considerable and estimable achievements and abilities, and distracts attention from the other important aspects of his legacy. These embrace his compositional oeuvre, which includes more than 140 solo songs, thirty choral works, and several collections of arranged African-American folksongs, as well as his preservation of the spirituals for their use as grist for the mill of recital and concert hall.

What else was Burleigh doing at this time? He arrived in New York in January of 1892 and remained there through the Harlem Renaissance and beyond. For nearly forty years, he was music editor of G. Ricordi Music Publishing in New York City. Jean Snyder recalls Jester Hairston's telling of the composers and arrangers of the day who took their manuscripts to Burleigh's office at Ricordi for him to examine, commenting that Burleigh always had time for them. (4) In his renown as a cultural leader and father figure, what other musicians did he influence? Did he influence or inspire Robert Nathaniel Dett, whose 1919 composition The Chariot Jubilee was the first of its kind to be published? Did he influence or help Scott Joplin, whose opera Treemonisha was completed and premiered in New York? Indeed, did Joplin move to New York City to get his opera published because Burleigh was there and had influence as an editor and producer? And to what extent, if any, was Burleigh's influence instrumental in the composition and performances of Harry Lawrence Freeman's fourteen operas and other dramatic works that were performed in New York and other cites after 1893, many of which continued to be performed into the 1940s? At the moment, we do not have answers to these questions, although we do know that both Joplin and Freeman knew Burleigh. (5)

But there is more to such matters than simply the facts, for they are imbued with intangibles that contribute to the depth and breadth of the man and his impact on American life and music. Natalie Curtis Burlin, who also studied at the National Conservatory and by 1919 had become a compiler and editor of published collections of Indian and American folksong, recognized his attributes early on. In that year, she wrote a touching tribute to Burleigh in which she cited his consistent association with "the best in art" and praised him for not allowing art music to lead him away from "the value and beauty" of "the music of his race." She continued:

   On his concert programs, along with the songs of great composers,
   he has always placed a group of the old Negro spirituals, thus
   telling the world that this racial music of his people is worthy to
   be heard beside the great songs of art.... For him, the spirituals
   were not to be looked down on and willfully ignored as reminders of
   a condition of servitude, but rather to be revered as living proof
   of a race's spiritual ascendancy over oppression and humiliation.

      ... Quietly, unassumingly ... he has fought for and won a
   foremost place among the great artists of America. As a singer, he
   is known on the concert platforms of our finest musical
   organizations, and as a composer of songs and choruses his name is
   found on programs throughout the country.

      The fact that better days are dawning for Negro artists in
   America is due in no small degree to the example of Burleigh, and to
   the perseverance and devotion of all these pioneers who through
   sacrifice and struggle are trying to lift the standard of the Negro
   musician and to help dissolve the "color line" through art.
   (Burlin 1919, 86-89)

In this statement, Burlin stresses three things about Burleigh: (1) his identification with "songs of great composers" through appearances on "the concert platforms of our finest musical organizations"; (2) African Americans' "spiritual ascendancy over oppression and humiliation"; and (3) his role in ensuring that "better days are dawning for Negro artists."

Burlin was an ethnomusicologist with an interest in Native American, African-American, and African music. (6) Her best-known work appears to be The Indians' Book (1907) and the least known, Songs and Tales from the Dark Continent (1920). Of most value to American music studies are the four books in her collection Negro Folk Songs (1918-19) and an article in Musical Quarterly, "Negro Music at Birth" (1919). By 1910, she had begun to record and transcribe African and African-American music; in 1911, she helped organize the Music School Settlement for Colored People in New York City; and in 1912, she helped to organize a "Concert of Negro Music," the first such concert to take place in Carnegie Hall. Most of her research on African and African-American folk music was conducted at Hampton Institute, a black school in Hampton, Virginia. (7) Over the stretch of her career, she worked with some of the major African-American musicians of her time, including Burleigh and a host of others, among whom were R. Nathaniel Dett, John Rosamond Johnson, Will Marion Cook, James Reese Europe, Roland Hayes, Robert Russa Moton, and Charles Albert Tindley. (8) Her close association and interaction with these figures and their music, her academic preparation at Harvard University and the National Conservatory of Music, her study in Europe with the famous Berlin pianist Ferruccio Busoni and other prominent musicians and teachers all establish the authority of her knowledge, interpretations, and conclusions, and of her transcriptions of African and African-American music.

Burlin's comments about Burleigh, quoted above, point to three broad fields of inquiry that are well worth pursuing. The first is Burleigh as a performer of art songs, in which research would compare him more precisely than before, if possible, with other concert recitalists of his day, African-American and white and with those who were active immediately before and after his time. (9) In doing so, we might discover evidence of his influence on other performers, and theirs on him, and on the musical events of his day and after; about the reception of his performances; about his artistic competence in general; and about the effect of race on his status in the chronicles of African-American music and American music in general, as well outside these chronicles, then and now. To pursue this first field of inquiry would be very difficult, if not impossible, since there appears to be extant only one recording of his voice (Brooks 2004, 481). (10) This suggests the first step in that pursuit: to determine unequivocally whether or not any others exist.

On the second field of inquiry, Burleigh's role in the Negro's spiritual ascendancy over humiliation, we would want to know precisely how Burleigh played such a role; whose needs it served, and whose and what interests; how and to what extent he contributed to the cultural efflorescence that came to be known as the Negro Renaissance and to the broader movements of and after its heyday. Such an exercise might make Burleigh less local, less genre-subscribed, and less racially confined than he has been to date. Finally, in exploring the claim of Burleigh's trend-setting impact in the field of racial expression, we need to show how things would have been different had Harry Burleigh not done his work.

Such work alone, however, as important as it is, will not make Burleigh fully visible. The black music that was the foundation on which Burleigh thrived would need to be championed also, and the long-buried and suppressed values of African-Americans-singing-African-American-musicas-African-American music would need to be rediscovered and thoroughly studied. This is suggested by Burlin's telling in 1919 of a program at Hampton Institute at which, near its end,

   a deep silence which seems to hover like a benediction ... over ...
   hundreds of bowed heads, is broken by a soft-breathed note of
   music, almost inaudible at first, like hushed wings, like the
   descent of the Holy Spirit. And then, still breathed rather than
   sung, gathering in volume as group after group catches it up, from
   those bent black heads arises a chanted "Amen" of such penetrating
   sweetness, such prayerful intensity, that--well, every white person
   that I have ever seen visit Hampton for the first time leaves
   chapel wiping his eyes. (Burlin 2001, 86)

Burlin's opinion was that "the great folk choruses of America are to be found at Hampton and Tuskegee Institutes, Fisk, and other southern schools." One of her visiting informants remarked, concomitantly, "Only in Russia have I heard chorus singing comparable to this" (86). According to Burlin, popular song in America and in "the world at large" was dominated by "Negro Music," especially in the realm of ragtime:

   Nor may we foretell the impress[ion] that the voice of the slave
   will leave upon the Art of our country--a poetic justice, this! For
   the Negro, everywhere discriminated against, segregated and
   shunned, mobbed and murdered--he it is whose melodies are on all
   our lips, and whose rhythms impel our marching feet in a "war for
   democracy." The irresistible music that wells up from this sunny
   and unresentful people is hummed and whistled, danced to and
   marched to, laughed over and wept over, by high and low and rich
   and poor throughout the land. The downtrodden black man whose
   patient religious faith has kept his heart still unembittered, is
   fast becoming the singing voice of all America. And in his song we
   hear a prophecy of the dignity and worth of Negro genius. (86)

Putting the spirituals aside for the moment, this question arises: What were the other kinds of music that were being "hummed and whistled," danced to, and laughed and wept over by the millions of Americans, and in which Burlin had so much faith? Some of it was the music of Scott Joplin--"Maple Leaf Rag, "Chrysanthemum," his self-described "ballet" entitled "The Ragtime Dance," and other works--and his St. Louis colleagues who composed in the ragtime vein, including James Scott ("Frog Legs Rag," 1906), Tom Turpin ("Harlem Rag," 1897), Louis Chauvin ("Heliotrope Bouquet," 1906). Some of it was the music of composers in New Orleans and Chicago, for example, Jelly Roll Morton ("King Porter Stomp," 1906, "The Pearls," 1919, and other substantial gems). There were the cakewalks, rags, and other songs that were written by songwriters like Will Marion Cook ("Lovie Joe," 1910, which made the white singer Fanny Brice famous), Eubie Blake ("Charleston Rag," 1899, and "Tricky Fingers," 1904), Luckey Roberts ("Nothin," a cutting contest piece from ca. 1908), and other St. Louis, New York, and New Orleans composers, as well as myriad others from all across our nation. There were songwriters like Shelton Brooks of "Darktown Strutters Ball" fame (1917); the beginnings of stride piano, featuring piano pieces by Roberts and James P. Johnson; and the early pre-jazz recordings and performances of James Reese Europe, including the pieces he wrote for the dance team of Vernon and Irene Castle, whose music director he was from 1913 to 1917. (11) There was the show music of Cook, Johnson, Robert Cole and the Johnson brothers James and Rosamond, Joe Jordan ("That Teasin' Rag," 1909), Chris Smith ("Ballin' the Jack," 1914), the songwriting team of Henry Creamer and Turner Layton ("After You've Gone," 1918), and other now-forgotten composers of the popular and show music of the time.

And what a time it was? Black shows were rampant on Broadway, including In Bandana Land, In Dahomey, The Oyster Man, The Policy Players, and dozens of other less successful stage works. White musicians were just as involved as black, with Irving Berlin ("Alexander's Ragtime Band"), Albert Von Tilzer ("Take Me out to the Ball Game"), George Gershwin ("Swannee"), Nora Bayes ("Shine on, Harvest Moon"), Harry Von Tilzer ("Only a Bird in a Gilded Cage"), and others composing hits for singers of the day like George M. Cohan and Al Jolson. There was also the emergence on the East Coast of Paul Whiteman (1890-1967), the self-styled (and critic-denigrated) "King of Jazz," who developed an association with George Gershwin. The Whiteman Orchestra played the first performance of Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, which became Whiteman's theme. He and Gershwin were part of the general modernist movement that was to bring to a close the era during which, as we shall see, Harry T. Burleigh flourished.

The songs of many of the composers of the day were published by G. Ricordi, where Burleigh edited the works of, for example, J. Rosamond Johnson, James Reese Europe, Will Tyers (1876-1924), and Amanda Ira Aldridge (1866-1956), who composed under the name Montague Ring. (12)

And we will not forget the music of the well-known blues singers "Ma" Rainey (1886-1939), Bessie Smith (1894-1937), and the other blues men and women of the time; (13) gospel singer Arizona Dranes (ca. 1905-1960); (14) nor the college-based and professional Jubilee quartets that crisscrossed the country and beyond. (15) There were also the settings of the poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar by Will Marion Cook and by the Afro-British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. (16) Burleigh was in the middle of it all, more or less. A mere sampling of his body of work will reveal not only the nature and extent of that presence but also the power of his contributions, as the participants in that 2003 Burleigh conference, who heard much of Burleigh's music, can attest.

Most African Americans living today are unaware of all but a few of the musicians mentioned above, who contributed to this period of stunning musical activity. Thus, certain questions arise: What happened to change the music and move it away from the kind of activity that flourished from 1895 to 1920, to activity governed by ideals associated with a more Eurocentric aesthetic? Was Burleigh overshadowed and cheated of a broader and more visible legacy by the ascendance of a modernism that, for African Americans, took form as a Negro Renaissance driven in large part by James Weldon Johnson, W.E.B. Du Bois, (17) and, by 1925, Alain Locke, and exampled in the extended works of R. Nathaniel Dett and William Grant Still? (18) In 1919, Dett wrote the first extended work for chorus and orchestra by an African American, The Chariot Jubilee, which premiered in 1920; Still would later write the first successful symphonic work by an African American, Afro-American Symphony, which was premiered in 1931; and Johnson, with his brother Rosamond, collected and edited two books of American Negro spirituals (1925 and 1926), which to some degree superseded Burleigh's arrangements and may have become the primary source for spirituals in the Harlem Renaissance period. The arrangements of Hall Johnson, who arranged more than twenty spirituals for his choruses to sing, would bring both a more modern interpretation and an approach to performance that was grounded more precisely in the vernacular than was the case with Burleigh's work. In an interview given in 2001 by the singer William Warfield and the pianist-accompanist Sylvia Lee, the latter remarked, "Mr. Burleigh didn't know much about Spirituals, he just loved them, and wrote them, because so many of his don't have the Spiritual color" (Schiller Institute 2001). (19) Compared to the Johnsons, who were southern bred and had sung the spirituals from childhood, Lee is correct; but it was more than Burleigh's background, in my view, that caused him to be left behind. Taste had changed, and modernism, clearly, was in vogue.

However, Burleigh was an exemplary writer of art songs. Snyder has written of his work in that arena, with the composer's Saracen Songs as an example:

   The dramatic character of the Saracen Songs reflects Burleigh's
   fascination with opera and his familiarity with the works of
   Puccini, Wagner, and Verdi, which were being performed at the
   Metropolitan Opera house. Several well-known singers performed the
   cycle in 1915, including European baritone Christian Frederick
   Martens, Marie Steinway, and Marian Veryle. Kramer's observation
   that each of the songs in the cycle is "a real song" and could stand
   alone is borne out by the use of individual songs in recitals.
   Though the tessitura of the songs is best suited to mezzo-soprano
   and baritone voices, Boston tenor George Rasely named "Ahmed's Song
   of Farewell" among his "Ten Favorite American Songs," and this song
   was also a favorite of tenor Roland Hayes. The 1995 recording of the
   cycle by Hilda Harris and Arthur Woodley now makes all of the songs
   accessible to listeners. (20) (Snyder 1992, 189)

Writing of his vernacular music, however, a recent observer intimately familiar with Burleigh's work has written:

   Purists have criticised Burleigh's arrangements as inappropriate for
   folk music. This misinterprets his intention. Indeed, in his time
   the folklorists had barely begun their work. Burleigh gave us a kind
   of idealized spiritual, a transformation of the melodies into art
   songs very much in the manner of the Brahms Deutsche Volkslieder.
   Considered this way they are beautiful examples of the songs of
   their time. They quickly became a part of the concert repertory and
   were sung by many leading artists. (When I Have Sung 1976)

By 1925, it appears, Burleigh had become a "father figure," although he remained active well into the twenties and continued to be, although increasingly less so, until 1941, when he was seventy-four years of age. I believe that the historians and other commentators of the Harlem Renaissance and pre-Renaissance era must bear the brunt of the blame for Burleigh's later disregard, for in their rush toward modernity they failed to make connections, substantially and appropriately, between the music of the pre-World War I era, during which Burleigh was at his peak, and the postwar period, when Harlem was in vogue. Nevertheless, James Weldon Johnson clearly saw and acknowledged these connections and gave Burleigh his due as a primary source of the movement. In the preface to his and his brother's first collection of spirituals, Johnson wrote that "Mr. Burleigh was the pioneer in making arrangements for the spirituals that widened their appeal and extended their use to singers and the general musical public," and acknowledged a line of influential successors to that movement, pointing out that Burleigh was followed in the march toward modernity by "Nathaniel Deft, Carl Diton, J. Rosamond Johnson, N. Clark Smith," and others such as Clarence Cameron White and Azalia Hackney, with "Roland Hayes, Paul Robeson, Miss Marian Anderson, and Julius Bledsoe [having] brought [the spirituals] to their highest point of celebrity." He maintained that, with African-American singers then performing with the major symphony orchestras in America, drawing "concert goers of the highest class," it was evident that there had been "a change of attitude to the Negro," not only by whites but "with regard to himself. It is new, and it is tremendously significant" (Johnson 1925-26, 48, 50).

So, if Burleigh started it all, making it possible for all this significant activity and changes of attitude and acceptance to have happened at all, what does that, then, make Burleigh? Whether Burleigh was or was not cheated by fate or by a "progress" fueled by the modernist philosophy of which Alain Locke was the primary cultural guru, and by the cultural activity of the Harlem Renaissance and the broader New Music movement of the time, (21) may not be important in the present context. More to the point are the powerful implications of the comments contained in Burlin's recollection of the Hampton Institute performance quoted above. Her reference to the "poetic justice" in the growing popularity of African-American music in the United States, and its part in a "war for democracy," both reflected the historic present and portended the content and legacy of the civil rights marches of the 1950s and 1960s, where the spirituals supported the grit, fervor, intensity, and fears of that historic moment. With her comments, which were written in 1919, Burlin was clearly addressing primarily the singers, teachers, and scholars who were, and would be, the users of books 3 and 4 of her Hampton series of Negro Folk Songs.

Again, what a time that must have been! One would not know it, however, from the state of our current knowledge. Musically, the period 1895 to 1920 appears to have been richer than that of the Harlem Renaissance, that more famous event it helped to create and which, ironically, would eventually destroy it. In other words, the music and social mentality of the earlier period gave birth to the Harlem Renaissance and died in the delivery. And through it all, there was Harry T. Burleigh, whose hands metaphorically touched it all, in ways both large and small.

Yet, the "poetic justice" to which Burlin refers is still to come for Burleigh. His legacy must be a part of any vindication that such justice would represent. This means, of course, that vindication for Burleigh must be sought within the larger effort to seek justice for black musical achievement as a whole, and within the general histories of American music and American cultural and social history. He fares well in some of these arenas and not so well in others, as would be the case with almost anyone, and all of this awaits further research.

Some of the work toward these ends has already been done, providing us with a baseline from which scholars and musicians could work. Thomas Riis's book Just before Jazz (1989) is one such study, and Reid Badger's A Life in Ragtime (1995) is another. The main questions for the future, however, are (1) whether Burleigh's African-American output--his arrangement of spirituals, primarily--will be respected by Americanists to the extent that it and he will be viewed unequivocally as important in the larger scheme of things; (2) whether his art songs will be respected as important contributions to that genre's American repertoire; and (3) whether a significant case can be made for the vindication of pre-Harlem Renaissance black music and culture within the context of the broad perspective of the annals of American musical and social history. Perhaps Burleigh's most important work was his preservation of the spirituals and their presentation to a wider audience, laying the foundation for singers like Marian Anderson and Paul Robeson and for scholars such as Maude Cuney Hare and Eileen Southern.

Returning to Eileen Southern's colleague's dismissive comment about black music: "Just jazz and a few spirituals." Could that "just" be construed both as a slight on a genre that most musicologists of the time felt did not deserve serious consideration and as an indication of the speaker's lack of knowledge about the large body of music that was performed and composed by black musicians during the period 1895-1920? Could the "few" in his comment refer to the small number of spirituals that most musicologists in the sixties had heard, paid attention to, or were acquainted with? I think the answer, in both cases, is yes. Southern has trumped that commentator with The Music of Black Americans. However, many Americanist music scholars already were aware of this body of work, and Riis inadvertently trumped Southern's colleague's "just," and musicologist Richard Crawford furthered that trumping with a comment he wrote to me in 2002 about the spirituals: "There are few repertories with anything like the aesthetic power of this music."

There we are! Richard Crawford in the year 2002 and Natalie Curtis Burlin in the year 1919 came to the same conclusion. As Crawford can be seen, in one sense, as standing on the shoulders of Burlin, Burleigh must be seen as standing on the shoulders of the great black spirituals and singers of spirituals of the Reconstruction-era American South, just as did the singers at Hampton who so mightily moved Burlin's visiting observers. As Burlin then extolled the spirituals and Crawford now extols them, and as Burlin extolled Burleigh the man and musician, we should now and in the future extol both Burleigh and the entire repertory of the music of his time, embracing the spiritual in its many forms, including its treatment in the hands of musicians of the present day, for example, Olly Wilson in his "Sometimes" for voice and electronic tape, and his "Of Visions of Truth"; David Baker in his "Through This Vale of Tears"; Fred Tillis in his "Spiritual Fantasy no. 12: Suite for String Quartet" and numerous other works; John Coltrane in his album Spirituals; and many other composers and performers, following the lead of Harry T. Burleigh in showing admiration and respect for a strong and lasting body of black music.

I am grateful to Jean E. Snyder for reviewing this article and providing me with some important facts and figures, and to Richard Crawford for suggesting the expansion of the speech from which this article developed and raising provocative questions that led to its improvement.

DISCOGRAPHY 

Burleigh, Harry T. Art songs of Harry T. Burleigh. Regina McConnell, soprano, Michael Cordovana, piano. Centaur CRC 2252 (1996). Compact disc.

--. Deep river: Songs and spirituals of Harry T. Burleigh. Oral Moses, baritone, Ann Sears, piano. Northeastern NR 252-CD (1995). Compact disc.

--. From the southland: Songs, piano sketches and spirituals of Harry T. Burleigh. Hilda Harris, Philip Creech, Steven Cole, Arthur Woodley; Joseph Smith, pianist. Premier PRCD-1041 (1995). Compact disc.

REFERENCES

Abbott, Lynn, and Doug Seroff. 2002. Out of sight: The rise of American popular music, 1889-1895. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.

Badger, Reid. 1995. A life in ragtime: A biography of James Reese Europe. New York: Oxford University Press.

Baker, Thomas, arr. 1861. The song of the contrabands (O let my people go). New York: Horace Waters.

Banfield, Stephen, and Jeremy Dibble. 2006. Coleridge-Taylor, Samuel. Grove Music Online. http://www.grovemusic.com (accessed July 20, 2006).

Beckerman, Michael. 2003. New worlds of Dvorak. New York: W. W. Norton.

Brooks, Tim. 2004. Lost sounds: Blacks and the birth of the recording industry, 1890-1919. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Burleigh, Harry T., comp., arr. 1901. Plantation melodies old and new. New York: Schirmer.

--, arr. 1917. Go down Moses. London: G. Ricordi.

Burlin, Natalie Curtis, comp. 1907. The Indians' book: An offering by the American Indians of Indian lore, musical and narrative. New York: Harper and Brothers.

--. 1919. Negro music at birth. Musical Quarterly 5:86-89.

--, comp. 1920. Songs and tales from the dark continent. New York: Dover.

--, comp. 200l. Negro folk songs: The Hampton series, books I-IV, complete. Mineola, New York: Dover.

de Lerma, Dominique-Rene. 1990. A musical and sociological review of Scott Joplin's Treemonisha. Black Music Research Journal 10, no. 1: 153-159.

Europe, James Reese. [1914] 1973. Negro's place in music. New York Evening Post, March 13. Negro Composer on Race's Music. New York Tribune, November 22. Reprinted in Reminiscing with Sissle and Blake, edited by Robert Kimball and William Bolcom, 60-61, 64. New York: Viking Press.

--. [1919] 1983. A Negro explains jazz. Literary Digest, April 26, 28-29. Reprinted in Readings in black American music, edited by Eileen Southern, 240. New York: W. W. Norton.

Evans, Mark. 1976. Scott Joplin and the ragtime years. New York: Dodd, Mead.

Floyd, Samuel A., Jr., ed. 1990. Black music in the Harlem Renaissance: A collection of essays. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.

--. 1995. The power of black music: Interpreting its history from Africa to the United States. New York: Oxford University Press.

Fuld, James G. 2000. The book of world-famous music: Popular, classical and folk. 5th ed. New York: Dover.

Gammond, Peter. 1975. Scott Joplin and the ragtime era. New York: St. Martin's Press.

Horowitz, Joseph. 2005. Classical music in America: A history of its rise and fall. New York: W. W. Norton.

Johnson, James Weldon. 1917. "Fifty Years" and other poems. Boston: Cornhill.

Johnson, James Weldon, and J. Rosamond Johnson. [1925-26] 1940. The books of American Negro spirituals, including The book of American Negro spirituals and The second book of Negro spirituals. Two volumes in one. New York: Viking Press.

Locke, Alain, editor. [1925] 1970. The new Negro. New York: Atheneum.

Marsh, J.B.T. 1875. The story of the Jubilee Singers, with their songs. 2nd ed. London: Hodder and Stoughton.

Meadows, Eddie. 1995. Jazz research and performance materials: A select annotated bibliography. 2nd ed. New York: Garland.

Oja, Carol. 2000. Making music modern: New York in the 1920s. New York: Oxford University Press.

Pike, Gustavus D. 1873. The Jubilee Singers, and their campaign for twenty thousand dollars. Boston: Lee and Shepard.

Riis, Thomas. 1989. Just before jazz: Black musical theater in New York, 1890-1915. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press.

--. 2006. Cook, Will Marion. Grove Music Online. http://www.grovemusic.com (accessed July 20, 2006).

Schiller Institute. 2001. Save the African-American spiritual: A dialogue with William Warfield and Sylvia Olden Lee (January 19-21). http://www.schillerinstitute.org/ fid_97-01/fid_011_spirituals.html.

Simpson, Anne K. 1990. Hard trials: The life and times of Harry T. Burleigh. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press.

Snyder, Jean E. 1992. Harry T. Burleigh and the creative expression of bi-musicality: A study of an African-American composer and the American art song. Ph.D. diss., University of Pittsburgh.

--. 1999. Burleigh, Harry [Henry] T(hacker). In International dictionary of black composers, edited by Samuel A. Floyd Jr., 182-193. Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn.

Southern, Eileen. 1982. Biographical dictionary of Afro-American and African musicians. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press.

--. 1983. Readings in black American music. 2nd edition. New York: W. W. Norton.

--. 1997. The music of black Americans: A history. 3rd edition. New York: W. W. Norton.

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(1.) Henry Thacker Burleigh was born on December 2, 1866, in Erie, Pennsylvania. He died on September 12,1949, in Stamford, Connecticut, at the age of eighty-two. The Burleigh conference took place at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania, April 2-5, 2003, and was planned and executed by Jean E. Snyder.

(2.) The best and most-recent exceptions to this rule are Beckerman 2003 and Horowitz 2005.

(3.) See the Discography for examples.

(4.) Personal conversation, January 1, 1987.

(5.) See Evans (1976, 70); Gammond (1975, 78); de Lerma (1990, 155).

(6.) Born Natalie Curtis, she worked and wrote under her maiden name until 1917, when she married the painter Paul Burlin.

(7.) Known since 1984 as Hampton University.

(8.) During Burlin's tenure at Hampton Institute, Dett was head of the music department, where he served from 1913 to 1932. Johnson was the director of New York's Music Settlement School for Colored People, which Burlin had helped to found.

(9.) Singers to whom Burleigh might be compared, provided that recordings of their voices are extant, are the black singers Roland Hayes (1887-1976), Jules Bledsoe (1898-1943), and Edward Boatner (1898-1981), and the white singers Herbert Witherspoon (1873-1935), Giuseppe de Luca (1876-1950), Oscar Seagle (1877-1945), Lawrence Tibbett (1896 1960), and David Bispham (1857-1921). In a comparison with Hayes, Burleigh would not fare well, but how many singers of any stripe could? The public regard for Hayes, as compared to other black singers, at least, was unparalleled and unchallenged.

(10.) This was a recording of "Go Down Moses," which was made and released in 1919 by Broome Special Phonography, Medford, Massachusetts, according to the record's label. A digital preservation copy of the performance is held in the Library and Archives of the Center for Black Music Research. The song first appeared in print in 1861 (Fuld 2000) as "The Song of the Contrabands" (Baker 1861, with music different from that of later versions). It was issued in G. D. Pike's The Jublilee Singers and Their Campaign for Twenty Thousand Dollars (1873) and again in The Story of the Jublilee Singers, with Their Songs (Marsh 1875). There followed appearances in Thomas Fenner's Religious Folk Songs of the Negro (1909) and in two collections by Burleigh (1901, 1917).

Burleigh was fifty-two years of age when the 1919 recording was made, so it cannot be a reliable gauge of the singer's sound and execution when he was at his peak. A modest indication of Burleigh's performance in his prime might be made by comparison with two other performers on the recording, Edward Boatner and Florence Cole-Talbert, singing two songs each; when the recording was made, Boatner was twenty-three and Talbert was thirty-one.

(11.) By 1919, jazz had become so important that Europe was asked to explain what it was; the result was an article called "A Negro Explains Jazz," which was published in Literary Digest (Europe 1919). In 1914, he had published at least two newspaper articles on black music, "Negro's Place in Music" and "Negro Composer on Race's Music" (Europe [1914] 1973).

(12.) Aldridge was the London-born daughter of the famous Afro-British thespian Ira Aldridge (1807-1867), who was among the first black actors to grace British and European stages.

(13.) Although W. C. Handy first popularized the blues in 1912 with "Memphis Blues," the idiom had been around for more than a decade. The first published example can be seen not in Handy's work but embedded, in the form of a twelve-bar blues, within a 1904 James Chapman and Leroy Smith ragtime piece called "One O' Them Things." See the published sheet music in Jasen and Tichenor (1978, 70-71).

(14.) Dranes was a blind singer, pianist, and guitarist who sang and played primarily the music of her sanctified church and the gospel tradition, but she also played barrelhouse. See Southern (1982, 115).

(15.) In addition to black college groups such as those at Fisk, Hampton, and Wilberforce, there were professional groups such as Orpheus McAdoo's Virginia Jubilee Singers and Frederick Loudin's Jubilee Singers, both of which flourished abroad, especially in Australia in the 1880s and 1890s; the Tennessee Jubilee Singers, which toured the West Indies and Central America in 1889-1891; the Maryland Jubilee Singers; and Mumford's Jubilee Singers (Abbott and Seroff 2002, 3-27, 4045).

(16.) Dunbar collaborated with Coleridge-Taylor around 1897 on the operetta Dream Lovers (Banfield and Dibble 2006), and with Cook in 1898 on the operetta Clorindy, or The Origin of the Cakewalk (Riis 2006).

(17.) Apparently, Burleigh was closer to Booker T. Washington than to Du Bois, having helped the former to raise funds for Tuskegee Institute. See Snyder (1999, 183).

(18.) Johnson has been credited as having launched the movement in 1917 with the publication of his Fifty Years and Other Poems; others place its beginning in 1921, when Sissle and Blake's musical Shuffle Along opened on Broadway. Still others date it from 1925, when Locke's The New Negro appeared in print and he became the movement's unofficial aesthetician (see Southern 1983, 396; Lewis 1981, 117).

(19.) Not only did Burleigh not "know" the spirituals, he once proposed a Hebrew origin for them (Snyder 1992, 228).

(20.) The recording of the Saracen Songs is on the CD Songs from the Southland; see Discography.

(21.) For the character and activities of the New Music movement, particularly with regard to William Grant Still and other composers, see Oja (2000), in the index under "African Americans" and, particularly, "Still, William Grant."

SAMUEL A. FLOYD JR. is Founder and Director Emeritus of the Center for Black Music Research at Columbia College Chicago, where he is also served as Interim Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost for the 1999-2001 academic years. He has published in several professional journals, including American Music, Music Journal, and The Black Perspective in Music. Among his published works are The Power of Black Music (Oxford University Press, 1995) and the International Dictionary of Black Composers (Fitzroy Dearborn, 1999), for which he was editor-in-chief. Floyd is writing a new manuscript on the subject of Music in the Black Diaspora: A World History of Black Music, which will be published by Oxford University Press. He has taught at Florida A&M University, Southern Illinois University, Fisk University, and Columbia College Chicago.