WBFO.org: Heritage Moments: America’s top black composer of the 19th century and his recollections of Buffalo

WBFO.org: The prominent African-American composer and bandleader Francis Johnson was hugely popular in Buffalo in the 1830s.

Portrait of Francis Johnson. Music Division, The New York Public Library.

Francis B. Johnson (1792-1844)

is featured at AfriClassical.com, 

which features a comprehensive
Works List and a Bibliography by 

Dr. Dominique-René de Lerma, 

www.CasaMusicaledeLerma.com.

WBFO 88.7

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.**