As an African American male with classical music ambitions confronted by a debilitating structural racial animus, his legacy is a statement of an extraordinary transformative resilience. In our changed world, impacted by the pandemic, the murder of George Floyd, and extremes of cultural-political divisions, the music of William Grant Still has found a permanence of acceptance and an organic sense of being not thought possible at the time of his birth.
As we celebrate Black History Month 2022 in concert halls nationwide, it is the music of William Grant Still which continues to center us in an appreciation of ideas about a Black lived experience.
Still’s legacy of a transformative resilience has acted as the bridge that connects us to an appreciation of an historical past and future about ideas of a Black cultural aesthetic in classical music. Importantly, it is also the bridge that has broken glass ceilings in the concert hall for Black composers, musicians, and conductors
The Jim Crow South of William Grant Still’s childhood was by design a restrictive state, a holding camp for maligned and displaced migrants whose plight overwhelmed a still-divided Union dawning into a new century, but yet still consumed by antebellum dissonances over structural racial hierarchy.
Still was one year old when Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 Supreme Court decision reinstitutionalized a structural white supremacy dismantled by the social utopianism of the assassinated President Lincoln with a re-enslavement through “separate-but-equal” segregation. Separate-but-equal mirrored, with its restrictive Black Codes, the convulsive repression of the 1830’s slave revolts.
Credit: Bill Doggett Race and Performing Arts Archive
The cultural and entertainment backdrop at the turn of the century found a White America infatuated with its antebellum era characterization of Blacks as comic yet conniving Jim Crows, uppity Zip Coons, neutered Mammies, and loyal Old Black Joes of minstrel shows.
This damning social and cultural narrative of Black inconsequentiality found push back in 1903 with the emergence of the black scholar and political progressive, W.E.B. Du Bois and his landmark book, The Souls of Black Folk, one of the first and most important investigations into the socioeconomic and psychological effects of racism. With this book, Du Bois established the critical paradigm of double consciousness, the individual and collective psychological dissonance that arises from perceiving oneself as “Negro” and as “American,” and recognizing that to be “Negro” is to be a foreigner and reviled as inferior by the larger society.
At the time of William Grant Still’s infancy, the vast repertoire and popularity of derogatory “coon songs” celebrated in blackface minstrel shows emphatically underscored the reality of Du Bois’ double consciousness paradigm in their irrefutable definition of “blackness” as incompatible with social parity and integration. However, a culturally significant and aspiring Black middle class, into which Still was born, resisted these demeaning stereotypes.
He was the son of two respected educators at Alabama A&M College. The death of Still’s father, when the child was three months old, and his mother’s remarriage to a Black man who was steeped in the love of music, and opera in particular, brought the boy into contact with a staple necessity of middle-class life. For their Victrola phonograph, Still’s stepfather purchased many operatic 78s and took the young Still to concerts. Still’s grandmother anchored his appreciation of the music of his people, Negro spirituals, which she sang to him. The world of the adolescent Still was a world that dreamed of uplift and found purpose in music.
During the first five years of Still’s life, lynching, a form of white supremacist racial control and terror instituted by Southern white men enraged at the Lincolnian idea of Black freedom, reached a crescendo. At the time, the idea of “racial uplift” embraced by Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. DuBois, Ida B Wells, and Carter G. Woodson seemed incompatible with reality. Yet it is the paradigm of racial uplift that would become transformational in the life of William Grant Still.
Racial uplift was an ideology for racial transfiguration advocated by Du Bois and “The Talented Tenth” with the organizing principle that the Black people would be best led forward by an elite group of upper class, well-educated Black men and women already more closely assimilated to white American cultural and business norms.
The Talented Tenth idea advocated that the way forward for African Americans faced with the extraordinary racial animus of the Jim Crow South was to prove themselves, in the arts and professional fields, to be as accomplished and successful as their white counterparts.
Black excellence in these metrics would, in this ideological viewpoint, prove to white America that Blacks deserved greater respect and were interested in assimilation and integration into the larger social cultural and political American fabric.
Racial uplift through the classical performing arts, for African Americans of 1900–1918, was defined by artistic excellence in music as instrumentalists, singers, composers, educators, and artistic administrators.
The young Still learned to play the violin, cello, clarinet, and oboe. Encouraged by his mother, Still’s higher educational pursuits led him to Wilberforce University, when he was 16 years old. While at Wilberforce for a medical degree he quickly abandoned, he became proficient as a performer. He was a violinist in the Wilberforce University String Quartet and also performed in and wrote arrangements for the school band. He left Wilberforce in 1915 before graduating, taking odd musical jobs, and spending summer 1916 playing and arranging in W.C. Handy’s bands. A legacy gift from his father allowed him to matriculate at Oberlin Conservatory of Music in early 1917, where he studied composition with George Andrews. World War I interrupted his studies, when he decided to join the Navy. Between 1917–1918, in an American military segregated in duties by race, Still’s proficiency as a concert violinist elevated his status as an enlisted Negro to playing dinner music for white officers
After the war, Still moved to New York City in 1919 where he wrote to W.C. Handy for work and began a notable association with him.
From 1919 to early 1921, Still created important arrangements of Handy works, including the first orchestra arrangements of the landmark “St. Louis Blues” and “Beale Street Blues.” An artistic manager for the Handy Band, Still also worked at W.C. Handy’s music publishing company, Pace and Handy Music, the nation’s signature Black Tin Pan Alley music publishing business.
Leveraging his Black jazz world connections during the nascent Harlem Renaissance of 1920-21, Still’s talents as an arranger and instrumentalist came to the attention of Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle who were writing the score of the epochal 1921 musical, Shuffle Along, the first Broadway show in over a decade to be written, produced, and performed entirely by Black talent. Still provided uncredited arrangements and also played oboe in the show’s pit orchestra.
While performing in Shuffle Along, during its Boston tryout, Still studied composition for four months with George Whitfield Chadwick, who was director of the New England Conservatory. (He also studied for two years, 1923-25, with French avant garde composer Edgard Varese.)
Still left Pace and Handy Music in spring 1921 and followed its senior partner, Harry Pace, to assist in the creation and founding of Black Swan Records, a black record company created for the documentation of black artistic talent emerging out of the shadows of The Great Migration and the First World War.
In Harry Pace, Still was associating with a brilliant businessman, a quintessential leader of the the Talented Tenth, and a close friend of Du Bois.
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