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[Charles Kaufmann: Frances Walker, as she appears in my new short film, Frances Walker: A Miraculous Journey - Coleridge-Taylor's 24 Negro Melodies.]
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The Longfellow Chorus Portland, Maine
May 9, 2014
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"I had a problem years ago with communication. . . and
I thought, 'How do you get people. . . involved?' And I
found, you have to be involved. The performer has to be
involved. It's like the pot is up here, and when the pot is
ready to boil over, that's when the audience feels
something -- when it's your emotions up to the top and
boiling over. When I play, I have to put a tight rein on
myself because I get emotional. . . ."
—Frances Walker, from my new short documentary,
Frances Walker Shares Her Story on Film:
Recording Samuel Coleridge-Taylor's 24 Negro
Melodies in 1979
Charles Kaufmann:
I have just completed a new 15-minute
documentary compiled from my interview last week
with pianist Frances Walker in her Oberlin, Ohio,
home. You can view the complete 15-minute film
Coleridge-Taylor's 24 Negro Melodies. The film
contains a number of excerpts from Walker's
groundbreaking 1979 recording of Coleridge-
Taylor's 24 piano miniatures, a collection itself
groundbreaking when it was first published in
Boston in 1905.
Candid, humorous, moving, and ultimately
inspiring, Frances Walker, in her gentle,
years of personal history, expanding upon the
narrative in her autobiography, A Miraculous
Journey (2006).
Shortly after I met Frances Walker-Slocum at
Oberlin College last February during the
screening my film, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor
occurred to me that her voice was missing from
the film. Having been born and raised in
Washington, DC, in the 1920s, having begun
classical piano at a very young age in the same
tight-knit Washington community that welcomed
SC-T twenty years before, having made the first-
ever recording of Coleridge-Taylor's 24 Negro
Melodies -- setting the standard for the next 35
years -- and having nurtured numerous
performers and composers and advocated for
African-American fine arts, Frances Walker owns
a remarkable part of the Coleridge-Taylor in
America story.
Frances Walker's narrative now joins the narrative
of the other experts in my Coleridge-Taylor
documentary and spins off into a new
documentary of its own, (to be expanded upon at
a later date from material now on film). Thanks in
no small part to cameraman John Cummings, of
Cleveland, Ohio, who worked with me on the
project.
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