Continuing the series of articles for Black History Month, this week Niagara Discoveries features an internationally known musician from Niagara Falls.
Robert Nathaniel Dett was born on Oct. 11, 1882, in Drummondville, Ontario (now part of Niagara Falls, Canada). His father, Robert T. Dett, was a U.S. citizen and his mother, Charlotte Washington Dett, was Canadian. Charlotte’s mother may have arrived there via the Underground Railroad. All of the Detts were well-educated and musically inclined. Robert Nathaniel, who used his first initial and middle name, starting playing the piano at the age of 3 and by 5 years old he was able to play pieces by ear that his older brothers were learning by sheet music.
In addition to music, Dett's mother promoted the reading of English and American literature while his maternal grandmother sang to him the Negro spirituals she had learned as an enslaved person in America. When Dett was 11 years old, his family moved across the river to Niagara Falls, New York, where his father managed the Keystone Hotel at 333 Main Street (now the approximate site of the old Rainbow Mall). Dett continued his piano lessons with a local teacher and by age 14 was working as a bellhop at the Cataract Hotel. Within a brief time, Dett’s ability as a piano player became known at the Cataract and he was soon playing in the lobby of the hotel.
In 1901 Dett began his studies at the Oliver Willis Halstead Conservatory of Music in Lockport. This school had two studios, one at 77 Pine Street and the other at 132 Walnut Street. Dett attended the conservatory for two years and continued to play at the Cataract Hotel as well. In 1902, he composed a piano march and two-step, The Cave of the Winds, to commemorate the wonder of the world that he gazed upon each day. When he finished his course of study at Halstead’s, Dett began the next phase of his education at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Ohio.
At the end of his first year at Oberlin, the management of the Cataract Hotel allowed Dett to use one of the large rooms for a benefit recital to help raise funds to continue his studies at the conservatory. Several biographies state that this event occurred in 1897 and that it took place at the Niagara Falls Country Club. Dett would have been only 14 or 15 years old at that time and that club was not founded until 1901. Even if it had been confused with The Niagara Club, just around the corner from the Cataract Hotel, that too was not founded until 1901. (Interestingly, though, that club was housed in the former Jerauld home. Dexter Jerauld was related by his first marriage to the Whitney family who owned the Cataract Hotel and he had been a manager there. His second wife was a piano teacher, so undoubtedly Dett knew this family).
One of the people at the benefit recital was Frederic H. Goff, a Cleveland lawyer, banker and philanthropist. He was so impressed with Dett’s performance, he offered to pay the young man’s expenses so he could continue his education at Oberlin. Dett graduated from the conservatory in 1908 and was the first African-American to be granted a B.A. in Music with a double major, piano and composition. He had been particularly influenced by the works of Antonin Dvorak, who used the folk melodies of his native Bohemia in many of his compositions. Dett realized he could do the same thing using the African songs and spirituals that his grandmother sang to him as a young boy.
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