William Grant Still in a pensive pose from 1949
(Courtesy of Judith Anne Still)
The Bach Festival Choir and Orchestra
(DOUGLAS W. JACKSON)
The City's Magazine
April 2018
By Michael McLeod
Now and then, some well-meaning person will try to give
Celeste Headlee a compliment about her grandfather. It does not go well.
They’ll say: “His music sounds just like George Gershwin to me.” And
she’ll say: “Are you kidding me? It’s more like the other way around.”
Headlee is a writer, NPR commentator, and
opera singer living near Washington, D.C. Her grandfather, William
Grant Still, was one of the first African American composers to create
classical music in the first half of the 20th century. Born in 1895 in
Little Rock, Arkansas, to two first-generation, free black
schoolteachers, he began by crafting his own violins from scrap wood as a
boy and would go on, in a career that took him to New York City and
Hollywood, to become known as “the dean of African American composers.”
He was the first black musician to have
his own opera performed by the New York City Opera Company; the first to
conduct major symphony orchestras and see his own symphony performed by
them; the first to have one of his classical works broadcast on
television; the first to conduct a radio orchestra—at the insistence of
its musicians, all of whom were white.
He was also party to another, more dubious first. That’s where Gershwin comes in.
Still belonged to the first—and certainly
not the last—generation of African American musicians to routinely see
their music appropriated, whole or in part, by white performers who
turned it into mainstream success. A notorious example involves the
opening chorus of a Gershwin song, “I Got Rhythm,” a vintage jazz
standard first sung by a brassy young star by the name of Ethel Merman
in Gershwin’s 1930 Broadway hit, Girl Crazy.
The belief among some classical music
historians, and all of Still’s colleagues and family members, is that
Gershwin “borrowed” that catchy, four-note theme after hearing its
inventor, one William Grant Still, play it, as he often did, while
warming up with his oboe as a pit musician for an earlier, long-running
Broadway smash of that era, Shuffle Along, a Eubie Blake revue which was re-envisioned and revived on Broadway two years ago.
The soft-spoken Still never complained about the supposed theft. But in Afro-American Symphony, his
groundbreaking fusion of blues motifs incorporated into complex
symphonic conventions, he inserted the same theme at the beginning of
the third movement, as if to wordlessly reclaim it as his own.
Headlee draws a measure of amusement and
satisfaction from an old joke – if indeed it is a joke: “They used to
say that Gershwin would go down to Harlem with a stack of dollar bills
and walk around asking people: ‘Hey. Could you hum that tune for me
again?’ ”
Still is one of three pioneering and
oft-overlooked African American classical composers whose works will be
performed April 21 and 22 in a concert at Rollins College combining the
Bach Festival and Bethune-Cookman University choirs. The concert, African-American Masterpieces: Symphonic Spirituals, is in observance of the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
Like Still, both of the other composers,
Nathaniel Dett and William Dawson, lived in a looking-glass world,
honored for creating music in its loftiest forms while being treated as
second-class citizens. They were keenly aware of a responsibility to
challenge the patronizing racial stereotyping of the day by
incorporating motifs from the blues and jazz—which were still dismissed
by many as lowly, rough-hewn genres—into lofty classical compositions.
Dawson, best known as a composer for
choral arrangements of African American spirituals, sold his bike for $6
when he was 13 years old and set off from his home in Anniston,
Alabama, to the Tuskegee Institute, where he was eventually befriended
and mentored by its founder, Booker T. Washington.
He also secretly earned a degree from the
then-segregated Horner Institute in Kansas City, but was not allowed to
take the stage at graduation for fear of upsetting the crowd. His Negro Folk Symphony, which debuted in 1934 with the Philadelphia Orchestra under the baton of Leopold Stokowski, will be performed during the Bach-Bethune-Cookman event.
Dett, born in Canada in a town founded by
fugitive slaves, grew up to spend most of his musical career in the
United States. He was dedicated to incorporating black spirituals into
the classical concert tradition. His work will be represented in the
concert by The Ordering of Moses, an ambitious oratorio fusing European romanticism with African American spiritual themes.
The oratorio was first performed in 1937
in Cincinnati, which had been a key way station in the Underground
Railroad, one that Dett’s grandparents may have passed through on the
way to Canada. The concert was a success, but, in an era in which white
spirituals were accepted as part of the mainstream but black spirituals
were not, a live radio broadcast was cut off because of listener
complaints.
Of the three composers, Still was the most versatile, well-traveled and influential.
He taught himself to play the clarinet,
saxophone, oboe, double bass, cello, viola and violin, which he used to
serenade officers at mealtime after enlisting in the Navy during World
War I.
He had a lifelong working friendship with
W.C. Handy, an Alabama log cabin-born African American musician and
composer who earned a title of his own, “Father of the Blues,” for
helping to transform a regional genre—inspired, he liked to say, by “the
sound of whippoorwills, bats, and hoot owls”—into a national
phenomenon.
After moving to New York City, Still
became part of the Harlem Renaissance, a surge of artistic and
intellectual expression among African American professors, artists and
writers. In the late 1930s, he was enrolled by two key figures in the
movement, arts patron Charlotte Mason and Howard University professor
Alain Locke, to compose the music for a defiant choral ballad, And They Lynched Him on a Tree.
It was originally performed by the New York Philharmonic
in 1940, at a time when anti-lynching legislation was being considered
by Congress. The ballad, which calls for two choruses, one white and one
black, will be performed as part of the Symphonic Spirituals program.
Though family members say he rarely spoke
of it, Still himself had seen a lynching in Alabama while traveling
with a company of blues musicians. Over the years, nearly 200
anti-lynching bills were introduced in Congress. Southern politicians
blocked them. None was ever adopted.
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