MAJOR SOURCES ON STILL

William Grant Still and Verna Arvey gave their papers to the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, where they are catalogued as Manuscript Collection 1125 (126 boxes, 84 volumes) in the Department of Special Collections, Fulbright Library. This remains the largest and by far the most important source for materials on the Stills. Its finding aid is available in photocopy from the Department of Special Collections. The scrapbooks, an important component of the collection, are available on microfilm through William Grant Still Music, Flagstaff, Arizona. Still Music publishes and holds performing rights to Still's music that was not published elsewhere in his lifetime; in addition, it retains certain items not at the University of Arkansas.

Harold Bruce Forsythe's surviving papers, long in the possession of his son, are now the Forsythe Papers at The Huntington Library, San Marino, California. Much of his output is lost, however. The Forsythe Papers include Still's "Personal Notes" and an early draft of "A Study in Contradictions." There is much else of interest to Still scholars and students of African American music and culture: a lengthy monograph on the ballet Sahdji, a report of an interview with Still on music for radio, a lengthy novel on the New Negro culture of Los Angeles (alternately "Frailest Leaves" and "Masks"), and more. The Forsythe Papers include Forsythe's own list of his literary and music manuscripts, some of which are noted as lost. The surviving music manuscripts are mainly youthful songs, along with some piano music. The most important of the surviving manuscripts, in addition to an earlier draft of the monograph published here, are "The Rising Sun: A Biography of the Sahdji of William Grant Still, with a note on the Choreography by Thelma Biracree "(128 + 22 pp., music examples, Oc-

tober, 1934); "Some Meanings in the Drama of Blue Steel " (4 pp.); and "Frailest Leaves," a novel (600 + pp.). The collection also contains a handful of Forsythe's later letters to Arvey and his mother's letters to him while he was in New York City. In addition to the collection at The Huntington Library, the Still-Arvey Collection contains part of a published article on Still by Forsythe, two letters (one each to Still and Arvey), and four short compositions for piano. Four more short manuscript compositions for piano are at WGSM. "A Study in Contradictions," a mimeographed typescript dated October 1930 (the version published here), is in both places. Several letters from Forsythe are in the James Weldon Johnson Collection, Beinecke Library, Yale University.

The Still-Schwerké correspondence was assembled mainly from the Still-Arvey Papers and holdings in the Library of Congress, which also has a number of Still's scores. The papers of Alain Locke in the Moorland-Spingarn Library at Howard University also contain correspondence with Still. The Performing Arts Division of the New York Public Library contains materials on the New York City Center for Music and Drama (particularly the Hedi Baum Papers) and program books from theatrical productions for which Still made arrangements, among other things. An undetermined number of Still arrangements, most not clearly identified, and some other useful materials are in the Eubie Blake Papers, Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore, as well as in the Ellington Collection, the Smithsonian Institution, the Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University, and private collections.

Scores of articles on Still, including many written by Still or Arvey, were published in Still's lifetime. A number of them are cited in the notes here. A fuller but incomplete (particularly with reference to Arvey's writings not directly related to Still) list appears in Judith Anne Still, Michael J. Dabrishus, and Carolyn L. Quin, eds., William Grant Still: A Bio-Bibliography (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996). This essential if imperfect volume lists 173 concert works by Still with performance and publication information and cites numerous reviews as well. Its general bibliography on Still contains more than four hundred entries. Unfortunately, its discography, list of Still's commercial arrangements, and index are not complete and cannot be until much more research is done on popular music in the 1920s.

The most important of Still and Arvey's publications have been reprinted in various collections, some of them more than once. Among volumes devoted entirely to Still, Verna Arvey's memoir, In One Lifetime (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1984), is essential if quirky reading. "The Life of William Grant Still," Benjamin Griffith Edwards's Ph.D. dissertation (Harvard University, 1987), is a biography that addresses cultural issues in Still's career from a different point of view. Though now outdated, it was the first to construct a narrative of Still's life on the basis of the primary sources, especially the scrapbooks, and therefore remains useful. Eileen Southern edited A Birthday Offering to William Grant Still, a special issue of The Black Perspective in Music, vol. 3 (May 1975), one of several useful collections of essays, in honor of the composer's eightieth birthday. William Grant Still and the Fusion of Cultures in American Music, edited by Robert B. Haas (Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1972), is a collection of several of Still's most important essays. Judith Anne Still,

in collaboration with Celeste Anne Headlee and Lisa M. Headlee-Huffman, has edited a revised and much enlarged version of Haas's collection, William Grant Still and the Fusion of Cultures in American Music (Flagstaff: Master-Player Library, 1995), especially valuable for its reprint of Still's (incomplete) thematic catalog as it was edited by Arvey. Some of the same essays are also anthologized in Jon Michael Spencer's The William Grant Still Reader, a special issue of Black Sacred Music: A Journal of Theomusicology 6, no. 2. (Fall 1992.), which also contains a lengthy and interesting introduction by the editor. Gayle Murchison, "Nationalism in William Grant Still and Aaron Copeland between the Wars: Style and Ideology" (Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 1998) contrasts the work of Still and Copeland in limited areas, contributing substantial new material in the process. For a general overview of the work of African Americans in music, Eileen Southern's The Music of Black Americans: A History, 3d ed. (New York: Norton, 1997), remains the standard. More scattered but valuable commentary on Still by Samuel S. Floyd, Jr., Gayle Murchison, Carol J. Oja, Wayne D. Shirley, Jon Michael Spencer, Judith Anne Still, and many others is cited in the notes in this volume.