Portrait of Francis Johnson. Music Division, The New York Public Library.
is featured at AfriClassical.com,
which features a comprehensive
Works List and a Bibliography by
Works List and a Bibliography by
Dr. Dominique-René de Lerma,
By Jeff Z. Klein
Black history on the Niagara Frontier is long, rich and varied, a story that stretches from Joe Hodge,
the trapper and trader who lived on Cattaraugus Creek and Buffalo Creek
in the 1790s, to the Coloured Corps, the company of black soldiers who defended Upper Canada against the American invaders in the War of 1812, to William Wells Brown and the black Buffalonians who fought off Southern slavecatchers and the Erie County sheriff to keep a family of escaped slaves free. And that only takes us up to 1834.
But
there’s another, lesser known chapter of the region’s early black
history, a musical chapter that can still be heard today in the piano
figure that marks the end of every Niagara Frontier Heritage Moment on
WBFO.
Part of a 1839 composition titled “Buffalo City Guards Parade March,” it was written by Francis Johnson – the first African-American composer to have his works published as sheet music.
Johnson,
a Philadelphian born in Martinique, was a wildly popular composer,
musician and bandleader from 1818 until his death in 1844. He and his
band of black musicians performed across much of the United States and
were so admired that they were brought to London to play in celebrations
marking the coronation of Queen Victoria. Johnson played the violin and
the Kent bugle; composed more than 200 published works; and both
performed with, and taught, white musicians regularly.
It was
Johnson’s custom to write a special composition for many of the cities
he and his brass band visited on tour. “Buffalo City Guards Parade
March” was one such piece, written in 1839.* (It was named in honor of
the special militia brigade formed two years earlier to safeguard
Buffalo during the Upper Canada Rebellion.)
The piece was so
popular that the Buffalo City Guards accompanied Johnson and his band by
steamboat to the next stop, Detroit. There, according to one
contemporary account, a crowd gathered at the docks, where the City
Guards, dressed in full uniform, marched off the boat playing “Yankee
Doodle.” Then Johnson’s band played “General Scott’s Keyed Bugle Slow
March,” written in honor of Buffalo’s War of 1812 hero General Winfield
Scott, and themselves marched ashore “with thrilling and powerful
combinations blaring forth.” Johnson’s brass band and the City Guards
repeated the performance in Cleveland and Toronto.**
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