CONTRIBUTED ESSAYS

The Formative Years of William Grant Still:
Little Rock, Arkansas, 1895–1911

Willard B. Gatewood

Late in 1895 Carrie Fambro Still, a talented, well-educated, and strikingly handsome African American woman, left her home near Woodville, Mississippi, with her infant son headed for Little Rock, Arkansas. Within little more than a year after her marriage in 1894, the twenty-three-year-old Carrie Still had become a mother and a widow. Shortly after the sudden death of her husband, she decided to move to Little Rock where her mother and sister lived. She and her son moved into the house on Fourteenth Street occupied by her mother, her sister, Laura, and her brother-in-law, Henry Oliver, a barber. Carrie Still acquired a teaching position in the public schools within a year and quickly became self-supporting.^[1] It was in the capital city of Arkansas—very much a city of the "New South"—that she made a new life for herself and her son, William Grant Still, who would become known as the "dean of Afro-American composers."

The Little Rock in which Still spent his first sixteen years was a bustling center of the cotton trade located on the Arkansas River. Served by five rail lines in 1900, the city boasted thirteen miles of paved streets, a seven-story "skyscraper," a Grand Opera House, numerous handsome residences, commodious hotels, a public library with 3,200 volumes, sixty-odd social clubs, seventy-five churches, public high schools for blacks and whites, and a profusion of gardens and flowers that accounted for its being known as "the City of Roses." But no amount of roses or booster rhetoric could obscure the existence in the city of nu-

merous saloons, houses of prostitution, gaming parlors, and "low life dives," patronized by a substantial proportion of its population.^[2]

The city, however, exhibited a cosmopolitan character unusual in Arkansas and much of the South. In addition to native-born white Southerners, its population included transplanted Northerners, African Americans, and an assortment of foreign immigrants. Conspicuous among the latter were the Irish and Germans who, along with a few Poles and Italians, were responsible for a substantial Catholic presence in the city. Jews were sufficiently numerous to support a synagogue. A few other nationalities such as Slavonians, Italians, Greeks, and Syrians arrived around the turn of the century and like other groups perpetuated their identity through a wide variety of organizations. But by all odds the largest racial minority in Little Rock in 1900 were African Americans, who constituted more than 3 8 percent of its total population of 38,307.^[3]

If African Americans benefited from the diverse composition of the population, the city's distinctive political complexion also promoted their interests. Unlike most of Arkansas, which was solidly Democratic, Little Rock possessed something approaching a two-party system. Such a political environment was advantageous to black citizens, who traditionally supported the Republican party, the party of Lincoln and Emancipation, and helped to explain why they were able to influence city decision making and to obtain public schools of a quality absent in other areas of Arkansas.^[4]

Although Little Rock was a racially segregated city when William Grant Still and his mother settled there, the lines had not yet been rigidly drawn. Interracial association still existed to an extent that had virtually disappeared in the rural districts of the state. Not until 1903 did segregation on streetcars go into effect, and even after that date racial mingling persisted in various areas. Nor did residential patterns yet conform to a rigid color line. In many sections of the city blacks and whites lived in close proximity in what were known as "mixed neighborhoods." Isaac Gillam, Jr., a member of an old and highly respected black family and a well-known educator, was a neighbor and friend of a German immigrant family. That Gillam, a Howard University alumnus who had also attended Yale, spoke fluent German undoubtedly facilitated the friendship. Still himself grew up in one of the city's mixed neighborhoods, and his playmates were white boys. In fact, his best childhood friend was white, the son of a railroad engineer. But Still, unlike his white friend, did not have access to the city's public library, and beginning in 1903 the two could not sit together on the streetcar.^[5]

Still's residence in Little Rock from 1895 to 1911 coincided with the climax of a movement that substantially altered race relations—from a flexible to a fanatically rigid system of segregation, involving both legal and extralegal proscriptions imposed on African Americans. Contributing significantly to the shape of the new order in race relations in Arkansas was the flamboyant, freewheeling Jeff Davis, who after serving a term as an active, highly visible attorney general, occupied the governorship from 1901 to 1907. Few other southern political demagogues of the time were more adept than Davis in exploiting the racial fears of whites. Embracing the myths of white supremacy, he invoked incredibly crude racist rhetoric that often appalled those whites whom he called "the high collared roosters" of urban Little Rock but that made him the darling of rural "rednecks," a term that he used as one of endearment.^[6] For black Arkansans, as for black Americans in general, it was a time of shrinking opportunities, increasing discrimination, and what has been termed the "withering of hope." The Mississippi Way in race relations was rapidly becoming the American Way.

In 1903, when Still was eight years old, the state legislature in session a short distance from where he lived enacted measures that appeared to translate Governor Davis's racist rhetoric into legal reality. One measure required the segregation of state and county prisoners. Because the statute did not apply to city prisoners, Little Rock continued for some years what has been described as its "topsy-turvy arrangements" in dealing with black and white inmates in the city jail. More relevant to Still's family and most of the city's African Americans was a law requiring segregation of the races on streetcars, a measure that encountered opposition from blacks and some whites. Little Rock's most prominent black citizens vigorously protested the law and organized a boycott of the streetcars. One can easily imagine that the proud, fiercely independent Carrie Still was deeply offended by the Jim Crow streetcar law and participated in the "We Walk League." On an earlier occasion when a white streetcar conductor called her "Carrie," she had rebuked him for such familiarity and had given him a lecture on proper conduct and manners. Neither the boycott by African Americans nor the grumbling of some whites failed to deter the implementation of the streetcar law.^[7]

Despite the enactment of such measures, old patterns of race relations in Little Rock, the only place worthy of being described as urban in the state, adjusted only gradually to the new order. Racially mixed neighborhoods persisted as long as Still resided in the city. The city's police force continued to employ African Americans at least until 1920. Few

policemen, white or black, were held in higher esteem than Samuel Speight, a black detective who served on the force from 1879 to 1905, when he left to open his own private detective agency.^[8] That the color line did not become entirely inflexible while Still lived in Little Rock was also demonstrated by the fact that Dr. James H. Smith, a well-to-do black dentist with an office on Main Street, possessed "a large and lucrative practice among the wealthy white class."^[9] African Americans still figured prominently in the state's Republican party despite mounting pressures from white members who embraced the philosophy of "lilywhitism." Among these were two of Little Rock's best-known black citizens, Mifflin W. Gibbs and John E. Bush. Elected municipal judge in Little Rock in 1873, Gibbs was reputedly "the first Negro elected to such office in the United States." Thereafter, until his death in 1915, he was active in Republican party affairs and received a succession of federal appointments.^[10] More than thirty years younger than Gibbs, Bush was also prominent in Arkansas's Republican circles. He served as receiver of public monies in the United States Land Office in Little Rock from 1898 until 1913 and constantly waged war on the lily-white forces in the party.^[11] Other African Americans in Little Rock were the recipients of federal appointments, including Still's beloved stepfather, Charles B. Shepperson, whom Carrie Still married in 1904. As a clerk in the Railway Mail Service, Shepperson had an income that placed him among the city's most affluent blacks.^[12]

Notwithstanding such evidences of continuing interracial association and the access of a few blacks to federal government jobs, African Americans in Arkansas, including those in Little Rock, witnessed a steady erosion of rights, privileges, and opportunities. During the decade preceding the enactment of the two segregation measures in 1903, new election laws had rendered blacks politically powerless and eliminated them from public office. The "separate coach" law of 1891 had required racial segregation of railroads a dozen years prior to the streetcar law.^[13]

Confronted by the white majority's Jim Crow mentality that was evident in the increasingly rigid color line and diminishing options for the black minority, African Americans sought without success to arrest the assault on their rights, privileges, and even humanity. The new order in race relations prompted them to accelerate the withdrawal into a world of their own that was separate and distinct from the society of whites. The result was a more formalized dual society in Little Rock. Experienced in institution building as evidenced by the existence of their own cemetery, fraternal orders, churches, and home for destitute elderly women,

blacks followed the advice of Booker T. Washington, the premier spokesman for African Americans, by launching their own business enterprises that increasingly catered to a black clientele. In fact, Little Rock had a thriving chapter of the National Negro Business League, an organization created in 1900 and headed by Washington until his death fifteen years later. In 1903, Gibbs, a loyal disciple of the Tuskegean, launched the Capital Savings Bank, the second black-owned bank in Arkansas. The bank thrived for five years but failed, for various reasons, in the wake of the Panic of 1907. Other enterprises lasted much longer and even expanded beyond Little Rock.^[14]

One such enterprise was the Grand Mosaic Templars of America, organized in 1882 by Bush, Chester W. Keatts, and a dozen other prominent individuals. Much more than a fraternal order of "men of good character regardless of occupation or class," the Mosaic Templars operated an insurance company, a loan association, and a newspaper. It also owned extensive real estate throughout Arkansas. By the mid-1920s the organization had assets of a million dollars and one hundred thousand members in twenty-six states and six foreign countries. Just as young William Grant Still left Little Rock for college in 1911, the Mosaic Templars headquarters building, a three-and-a-half-story brick structure, opened on the corner of Ninth and Broadway streets.^[15]

By the opening of the twentieth century, West Ninth Street was already emerging as the center of black Little Rock. Blacks had long been present in the vicinity of Ninth Street, but their number vastly increased after Emancipation in 1863. The Union Army constructed a hodgepodge of log shanties in the area to accommodate the freed slaves who crowded into Little Rock. By the turn of the century, black-owned businesses, mostly small, service-oriented enterprises, had substantially increased on Ninth Street, interspersed among establishments operated by people of Italian, Irish, and German descent. While Still was growing up on West Fourteenth Street, the black presence on Ninth Street increased even more. Not only did the street include the headquarters of the Mosaic Templars and other fraternal and mutual aid societies, it also had an assortment of tailors, grocers, barbers, boot makers, jewelers, confectioners, and other small businesses.^[16] Among these was the Spot Cash Drug Store owned by F. B. Coffin, a graduate of Meharry Medical College and for some years the only black registered pharmacist in Arkansas. Although Coffin made his living as a druggist, his first love was poetry. In 1897 a volume entitled Coffin's Poems was published and sold for $1.00.^[17]

By the 1920s Ninth Street had become virtually all-black and indisputably the economic, social, and political heart of Little Rock's black community. Black professionals—physicians, attorneys, clergymen—were found in this city-within-a-city. As one authority has observed, here African Americans could find everything from medical services and spiritual nourishment to Saturday night entertainment and excitement. Blacks often referred to Ninth Street as "the Line," because it functioned as the demarcation between black and white Little Rock.^[18]

This demarcation was evident in an article by John E. Bush chronicling the "progress" of African Americans in Little Rock that appeared in 1905 in the Colored American Magazine published in New York. Despite his boast about the absence of race friction "of any kind," Bush did not deny the existence of a racially dual society in which "the Negro has his own churches, his own schools, his own secret societies, and his own social functions." But within the racially segregated society of Little Rock, he declared, Negrophobia was "very far in the background" when it came "to trade and commercial relation." Certain white businesses such as the department stores owned by Gus Blass and M. M. Cohn, in fact, did assure black consumers that they were welcome and would be shown "uniform courtesy." The white owner of a jewelry store proclaimed the absence of any "colorlines" in his establishment.^[19] The optimism expressed by Bush was to be expected of one who was Booker T. Washington's chief lieutenant in Arkansas and who subscribed to his accommodationist, self-help philosophy. When Washington visited Little Rock in November 1905 at Bush's invitation and delivered an address at the Opera House, he had an opportunity to observe the degree to which his host and other blacks in the city had succeeded in implementing his self-help philosophy. His visit was "the occasion of a public holiday by the Negro people," thousands of whom crowded into Little Rock to get a glimpse of "the Sage of Tuskegee."^[20] It seems reasonable to assume that young William Grant Still and his mother and stepfather were among those who packed the Opera House to hear Washington's address, just as they had been on hand to greet President Theodore Roosevelt earlier the same year.^[21] Washington's visit in 1905, followed by another in 1911 when his National Negro Business League met in Little Rock, thoroughly convinced him that Bush had not exaggerated in his assessment of the economic progress made by the city's black citizens. "The Business League meeting in Little Rock," Washington confided to a friend in 1911, "was by far the best we have ever held. You would have

been surprised at the high type of the delegates and especially pleased with the many beautiful homes owned by our people in Little Rock."^[22]

Of special importance in the life of the city's African American community while Still was growing up there were its churches and schools. As elsewhere in the South, the black church was a multifunctional institution that served as an agency of education, social control, and economic cooperation and as a refuge from a hostile environment. Of the thirty-nine black churches in Little Rock in 1910, seventeen were affiliated with various Baptist denominations and fifteen were Methodist, including African Methodist Episcopal, African Methodist Episcopal Zion, and Colored Methodist Episcopal congregations. Other blacks in the city worshiped at Protestant Episcopal, Catholic, Presbyterian, Congregationalist, and Holiness churches. The largest black church was the First Baptist with a membership of 1,100 and a sanctuary that seated 3,000, followed by Bethel A.M.E. Church with a seating capacity of 1,000.^[23]

No less than churches, educational institutions were centers of African American social and cultural life. Particularly important were Little Rock's black colleges—Arkansas Baptist, Philander Smith, Williams Industrial, and Shorter (located in North Little Rock)—and the public schools. According to Bush, the public school system was "the pride of the city." Of the approximately ninety teachers employed in the city school system, thirty were black, including Still's mother, who was a teacher of English in the high school. This school, first known as Union, was moved and renamed Capitol Hill School in 1902. Moved again two years later, it was known as the Mifflin W. Gibbs High School. The high school was, in many respects, the centerpiece of black education in Little Rock and was undoubtedly the best black public school in the state. Although it included a vocational department, the emphasis was on a college-preparatory, classical curriculum that included literature, foreign languages, science, and social science taught by a highly qualified faculty.^[24] Here William Grant Still received his secondary education, and his mother, a graduate of Atlanta University, served for many years as a faculty member who not only introduced hundreds of students to Chaucer and Shakespeare but also wrote and directed dozens of plays.^[25] In addition to Still and Florence Smith (Price),^[26] the daughter of Dr. James H. Smith, both of whom achieved renown in the musical world, a host of other graduates of Little Rock's black high school demonstrated throughout their careers the high quality of the education they

received there. Among these was William Pickens of the class of 1899 who graduated, Phi Beta Kappa, from Yale and later won fame as an educator, writer, and official of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.^[27] In 1909, two years before Still departed for college, two other products of the same high school graduated from college: Jefferson Ish from Yale and his brother, George Ish, from Harvard Medical School. Both returned to Little Rock, one to become a teacher and later a businessman and the other to practice medicine in the city for a half century.^[28]

Such conspicuous achievement did little to eliminate the prevailing white perception of African Americans as a homogeneous mass without significant differences in background, attitudes, culture, behavior, and prestige. Whites in Little Rock, no less than those elsewhere in the United States, were rarely inclined to think in terms of a stratified black society across the color line. Reluctant to move beyond vague generalities about the black class structure, whites tended to classify African Americans as "good Negroes" or "bad Negroes" or to designate, for one reason or another, certain individuals and families as exceptional. Even though whites obviously knew that not all blacks were alike, no matter how often they voiced such a sentiment, they undoubtedly would have expressed dismay, even disbelief, at any suggestion that a well-defined class hierarchy existed in Little Rock's black community. Such a suggestion, on the contrary, would have come as no revelation to William Grant Still's parents.

Income, education, occupation, and other indices traditionally used to define the white class structure have proved to be inadequate in explaining the social hierarchy that evolved among African Americans in the decades after Emancipation. More subjective considerations related to historical experience and traditions and to a color-conscious, dominant society figured significantly in determining the contours of the black class structure. Much of what accounted for status and prestige in the black community had no counterpart in white society, because status and prestige among blacks were in large part bound up with their experience with slavery—their particular place in the slave system, their role in opposing it, and the extent to which their families had been free from it. In parts of the antebellum South, especially along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, there developed elites made up of free mulatto families who in some cases were slave owners. Such elites as flourished in Charleston, Savannah, Pensacola, Mobile, and New Orleans did not exist in antebellum Arkansas or its capital city.^[29]

The black upper class that emerged in post-Civil War Little Rock consisted largely of two groups: one was made up of those who had occupied the status of favored slaves in the city, such as the Andrews, Wallaces, Rectors, and others who came to be considered the "old families"; and the other was composed of talented, often well-educated émigrés including Mifflin W. Gibbs, Dr. J. H. Smith, and the Ish and Gillam families, who settled in the city during or shortly after Reconstruction. A member of the city's postwar black elite whose forebears enjoyed the status of "privileged" slaves in antebellum Little Rock recalled that "class distinction" existed among slaves "perhaps to a greater extent than among white people." Slaves of the highest stratum, she pointed out, cultivated good manners, proper speech, and "good form" in receiving guests attributes perpetuated by their descendants.^[30] The Andrews, Rectors, and others who could claim to be "old families" easily combined with the more recent residents such as the Ishes, Gillams, and Smiths to form Little Rock's small black elite whose behavior bore all the earmarks of gentility, super-respectability, and refinement. Reflecting their concerns with social ritual, E. M. Woods, the principal of a black school in Little Rock, lectured widely on etiquette and in 1899 produced a full-length etiquette guide, The Negro in Etiquette: A Novelty .^[31] Alongside this elite that functioned as cultural brokers who spoke to blacks and for blacks to whites, a black middle class drawn in large part from small entrepreneurs, such as those along Ninth Street, began to emerge and figure prominently in the public life of the city's black community.^[32] The vast majority of black citizens in Little Rock during Still's years were unskilled, uneducated, and low-income people who were largely employed as day laborers and domestics. This group formed the lower class in the black community. As elsewhere at the time, the city's black class structure resembled a pyramid: a broad base rapidly narrowing as it moved upward and culminating in a minuscule elite at the apex.

The black upper class in Little Rock always exhibited a degree of flexibility that allowed admission to those who, unable to claim old-resident status, possessed other essential qualifications. Recent émigrés such as Carrie Still, who was a college graduate and adhered to the "genteel performance," were readily incorporated into what was termed the "upper tens" of black society. Although wealth was a stratifier, it alone did not ensure one a place at the top of the class structure. For example, John E. Bush, perhaps Little Rock's wealthiest black citizen, made his lofty status secure by marrying the daughter of Solomon Winfrey, a highly respected

building contractor and old resident of Little Rock. To a remarkable degree the city's black upper class constituted an educational elite, composed of those possessing a tradition of literacy or advanced education. Various members of the Ish, Rector, Gillam, and Andrews families were identified at some point in their careers with either the colleges or the public schools in the city. Conspicuous among this educational elite was Charlotte Andrews Stephens, an Oberlin graduate who was a teacher in Little Rock for seventy years. She, along with Mary Speight, the wife of the detective, Marietta Ish, Carrie Still Shepperson, and various other teachers and school administrators, possessed enormous prestige and influence in black Little Rock.^[33]

Church affiliation in Little Rock's black community also reflected the prevailing class structure, and association with certain denominations provided an index of social preferment. Although members of the city's black upper class were found in the congregations of the oldest and most prestigious Baptist and Methodist churches, perhaps the largest number of such people belonged to the First Congregational Church, where the Ishes, Winfreys, and "many of the best people of the city" worshiped. Dr. Smith's family was active in Allison Presbyterian Church, while many of their friends were communicants at St. Philip's Episcopal Church, which, according to a black observer in 1901, consisted largely of "the blue veins," a term used to refer to African Americans who were so near white in complexion as to reveal their blue veins. Although many of those in Little Rock's black upper class were fair-skinned, the linking of skin color with social status does not appear to have created the mischief in the city that it did elsewhere. But that such a connection was not entirely absent is suggested by the fact that the New Handy Map of Little Rock, published in 1905, cited St. Philip's Episcopal Church as "blue-vein, col[ored]."^[34]

There is little evidence to suggest that Still's family was particularly religious or that the church was the focal point of their lives. The family appears to have worshiped at Allison Presbyterian Church with the Smiths, their daughter, Florence, and other members of the black "upper crust." Attracted to St. Philip's because of the "glorious music" sung by the Episcopal choir, Still briefly attended services there and even joined the choir. But wearying of the constant kneeling and rising, he left the "glorious music" of St. Philip's behind to concentrate "on the violin, without calisthenics."^[35]

Much of the social life of Little Rock's black upper class was home-centered; therefore, attention was focused on securing commodious

homes in respectable residential areas. The white reporter of the Arkansas Gazette who interviewed Frederick Douglass in 18 89 at the home of Dr. J. H. Smith was surprised at the elegance of the Smith residence. The extensive library, oil paintings, and a variety of musical instruments in the Smith home reflected the family's wide cultural interests. Dr. Smith himself was not merely a dentist but also a successful inventor, a talented artist, and a novelist. One of his paintings was exhibited at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, and his lengthy novel about miscegenation, Maudelle, appeared in 1906.^[36] The Smiths, as well as their friends, entertained mostly at home with small, selective affairs such as teas, receptions, dances, card parties, and musicales. William Grant Still later recalled such social gatherings at the Shepperson home, which was also the meeting place on occasion for the various literary and musical clubs to which his mother belonged.^[37] The Sheppersons, like other members of the city's black elite, often entertained out-of-town guests, especially when fraternal, church, and other organizations met in Little Rock. Because of the absence of enough black hotels considered "respectable," the homes of the upper class tended to be the stopping-off place for those of comparable status from elsewhere who were en route to other cities such as Hot Springs, the famous Arkansas spa.

William Grant Still's mother and stepfather moved in the highest circles of the city's black community and actively participated in the rich intellectual and cultural life of its black upper class. Charles Shepperson, a strikingly handsome, fair-complexioned man, whom everyone black and white addressed as "Mr. Shepperson," shared his wife's love of "good" music. It was his stepfather's sizable collection of Victor Red Seal phonograph records that introduced young Still to the world of operatic music. A doting, even indulgent father, Shepperson often took Still to the theater to see stage shows such as Ben Hur, The Wizard of Oz, and Robin Hood . On other occasions the two journeyed to theaters on Ninth Street to attend performances by Cole and Johnson, one of the most famous African American troupes in the country. Young Still was also exposed to performances by well-known black artists, including a violin concert by Clarence Cameron White, a vocal recital by Mme Azalia Hackley, and a Shakespearean reading by Richard B. Harrison. The Sheppersons encouraged their son to learn to play the violin and employed a white teacher to provide private lessons.^[38]

Although Still's maternal grandmother, Anne Fambro, an illiterate former slave, scarcely fit into the cultured, sophisticated circles in which her daughter and son-in-law moved, she nonetheless exerted a profound in-

fluence on "Baby Will," as she called her beloved grandson. "Grandma" Fambro more than compensated for her daughter's lack of culinary skills and delighted Still with pastries and other delicacies from her kitchen. When he was a young child his grandmother took over management of the household, including "Baby Will." On trips to Georgia with his grandmother he visited his mother's birthplace and became acquainted with his Fambro relatives. His grandmother told him endless stories from the days of slavery, relating in minute detail the "weather portents" just prior to the Civil War and the nocturnal activities of slave patrollers who tried to keep slaves under tight control. Young Still reciprocated by reading books to his grandmother. Anne Fambro not only introduced him to black folk music with her regular singing of spirituals, hymns, and other songs but also connected him to an important aspect of his heritage with her repertoire of stories.^[39]

The central figure in Still's life in his formative years was his mother, a person of wide-ranging interests and enormous energy. A serious student of literature, music, and drama, Carrie Shepperson won prizes for her embroidery and other needlework, painted fine china, was an accomplished pianist, and possessed sufficient business acumen to acquire substantial real estate, including the house in which her mother and sister lived. A strict disciplinarian who was a stickler for proper manners and "good taste," she tolerated no use of what was called "dialect" and constantly reminded her son that he "must amount to something in the world."^[40]

Like others of her station, Carrie Shepperson was committed to a mission of service and racial uplift so that disadvantaged African Americans could also make something of themselves. For example, one summer she, accompanied by Still, traveled to a rural community to teach black children who otherwise had no access to schooling. She labored to correct their speech and personal habits, which she considered "uncouth," and to provide them with the rudiments of education. The children of poor black sharecroppers no doubt looked upon Carrie Shepperson, an educated woman with impeccable manners, as the quintessential lady, a paragon of knowledge and a perfect role model. In Little Rock, Still's mother found time to engage in various civic and social activities. Deeply concerned that African Americans were denied access to the city's public library, she organized and staged performances of Shakespearean plays to raise money for a library of their own. The proceeds from these annual performances purchased books that formed the nucleus of a library for blacks established at Capitol Hill High School. A founding

member of the Little Rock chapter of the Phyllis Wheatley Club and active in the Lotus and Bay View Reading clubs, two women's literary organizations, she supported the M. W. Gibbs Home for Elderly Women, wrote a book-length manuscript dealing with women's rights, and later helped to organize a local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.^[41]

Reared in a comfortable home filled with books, musical instruments, and all the attributes of what was simply termed "culture," Still lived in a world far removed from the black masses, and, in view of the strong discipline imposed by his mother, he undoubtedly lacked any direct knowledge of the seamier or "lowlife" aspects of life in Little Rock. "I grew up," Still later recalled, "in an atmosphere of literary clubs, lectures, musical recitals [and] stage shows, Red Seal operatic recordings, lots of homework, and violin lessons.^[42] He could scarcely have been unaware that he and his family were indeed different from the vast majority of blacks in the South who in the early years of the twentieth century suffered from poverty, ignorance, and daily encounters with racial prejudice. Indicative of his class consciousness were references to "our group," a term he used to identify friends and associates whose social life conformed to all the prevailing canons of polite society. Furthermore, his reaction to the black residents of the rural community in which his mother conducted a summer school can only be described as cultural shock. The product of a relatively affluent, sheltered environment in an urban setting, Still was appalled at the "primitive" life of these rural blacks—their appearance, living condition, speech, and even worship services.^[43]

Notwithstanding the proliferation of Jim Crow contrivances directed against all black Arkansans, both Carrie Shepperson and her son considered Little Rock a center of racial enlightenment and "open-mindedness." In view of the racial climate in rural Mississippi, where Still's mother had lived immediately before settling in Little Rock, such a view scarcely seems unreasonable. As for Still himself, he remembered his boyhood in the city as a time of happiness in which he had white playmates, including several who remained his lifelong friends, and strong, loving parents who shielded him from the grosser forms of racial prejudice to the best of their ability, maintained high standards and ideals, and provided a home in which, as Still later observed, "we were not accustomed to think along racial lines."^[44]

By the time Still graduated from high school at the head of his class in 1911, his primary interest was clearly in music. He had long since abandoned the fleeting idea of attending Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee

Institute in Alabama to learn how to raise chickens. If Carrie Shepperson found such an idea repugnant, the prospect of her son embarking on a musical career was scarcely more appealing. For her, Still recalled late in life, "the majority of Negro musicians of that day were disreputable and were not accepted into the best homes." That her son would be unwelcome in "the best homes" was unthinkable to Carrie Shepperson. Her plans for Still to attend college with a view toward studying medicine prevailed, and at her insistence he entered Wilberforce University in Ohio. An institution supported by the African Methodist Episcopal Church and often the scene of fierce ecclesiastical politics, Wilberforce was especially well known for its strict discipline, military science training, and premedical curriculum. In the fall of 1911, William Grant Still left Little Rock to begin the protracted process of preparing to become a physician. Instead, he became a world-renowned musician and composer.^[45]

Reflecting on his early years in Little Rock from the perspective of almost six decades, Still described his boyhood there as "a typically American one, far removed from the ordinary concept of a little colored boy growing up in the South."^[46] Because his family neither possessed the substantial wealth of some whites and a few blacks in the city nor experienced the grinding poverty of most of its African American residents, Still described himself as a product of the "middle class," who had enjoyed the luxuries and amenities characteristic of that class at the turn of the century.^[47] His reference to his "middle-class" origins was a case of using generic terminology to describe what was actually the upper-class status of his family within the black community of Little Rock more than a half century earlier. But Still's intention was not to provide an accurate analysis of the city's black class structure; rather it was to underscore the fact that, given the time and place in which he grew up, he had possessed extraordinary advantages.

Those of the class to which Still belonged were keenly conscious of their family background and often viewed themselves as heirs to a legacy that commanded authority, bestowed prestige, and imposed responsibility within the black community. Such people, according to an African American journalist in 1902, dealt "heavily in family trees." Other blacks ridiculed the pretensions of these so-called thoroughbred families. There is no evidence that Still's family drew up elaborate genealogical charts that included an assortment of African kings, Indian chieftains, European noblemen, and white American statesmen, as some upper-class black families did,^[48] but Carrie Shepperson and her mother possessed intimate knowledge of their ancestry. Still clearly understood that he represented

a "mingling of several bloods"—Negro, Native American, Scotch, Irish, and Spanish.^[49] Such blending was obvious in the physical appearance of Still and his mother no less than his stepfather, all of whom possessed light complexions, but not as light as some of their African American acquaintances in Little Rock who chose to "pass" for white.^[50] Regardless of his "mixed-blood" ancestry and light complexion, Still grew up in an era in which whites adhered to the "one drop" rule that classified all persons with any black ancestry whatsoever as Negroes and subjected them to Jim Crow proscriptions.^[51] Although his parents never encouraged him to "think along racial lines," Still was fully aware that he was a Negro and was painfully reminded of the fact by the occasional slurs and insults directed at him by whites. On a trip to Georgia with his grandmother he witnessed a frenzied mob of whites "out for the blood of a Negro accused of rape." Such early experiences with racism could have easily created within him an enduring bitterness toward whites in general, but they did not for a variety of reasons. His pleasant association with whites, especially those in his neighborhood, coupled with efforts of his parents to impress on him the necessity of evaluating others in nonracial terms, enabled him to conduct himself "as a person among people instead of as an inferior among superiors."^[52] The "mingling of several bloods" in his ancestry meant that the notion of proud hybridization also figured in his sense of himself, making it all the easier for him later to characterize his extraordinary musical achievements in terms of a fusion of diverse cultural traditions.

Still repeatedly insisted that "Negro music" per se was not an important part of his youth in Little Rock and noted that during the summer when he accompanied his mother to a rural community to conduct a school, he laughed at the shouting and singing of the black residents during religious services. "The thought that I was hearing 'authentic Negro music at its source,'" Still recalled, "never entered my irreverent little mind."^[53] But "Grandma" Fambro's continual singing of "Negro songs" as she worked, coupled with her seemingly endless supply of stories about black life both before and after the Civil War and the performances of Cole and Johnson and other black troupes that Still witnessed in Little Rock, became elements in a memory bank that, either consciously or unconsciously, must surely have figured in the musical compositions that later won him wide acclaim. By the time Still left Little Rock in 1911, he had been exposed to both black vernacular and classical musical traditions that he used to produce a music that expressed the rich diversity that is America.

"Dean of Afro-American Composers" or "Harlem Renaissance Man":
The New Negro and the Musical Poetics of William Grant Still

Gayle Murchison

Often referred to as the "Dean of Afro-American Composers," William Grant Still has been credited with pioneering the way and establishing a place for the African American composer of twentieth-century art music. Despite the recent increase of publications on Still and the issuance of numerous new recordings and re-releases of his music, there is still a need for critical study of his career and musical works. Still remains in many ways an enigma, both musically, as the figure he represents in African American art music, and historically, as an individual who lived during sweeping changes in American social history. The title "Dean of Afro-American Composers" is Still's due. Yet it does not aptly describe his accomplishments or the artistic and aesthetic ideals he pursued in his work. Such a title is easily bestowed on Still, who crossed many racial barriers during a period in American history when the achievements of African Americans were measured by firsts as a marker of racial progress and improvement in race relations. But to see him in this way is to accord him a place in American music history largely on the basis of his race and to consider only one facet of his accomplishments.

A more complete understanding of Still and his music results from situating him in music history and intellectual history based on other criteria. He participated in three musical trends in art music during the first half of the twentieth century. One of these was American musical modernism. During the period between the two world wars, young American composers, like their European counterparts, sought independence

from the aesthetics and conventions of nineteenth-century German romanticism and explored new musical styles and modes of expression.^[1] The second trend reflected American musical nationalism; American composers were engaged in a self-conscious attempt to create an art music that would be of an artistic quality equal to that of Europe and also reflective of American culture. The third was the cultural movement known as the Harlem Renaissance, which engaged a number of African American artists and intellectuals. The Harlem Renaissance, or New Negro movement, took place during a period of self-conscious African American culture definition lasting from approximately 1919 to 1934 and found expression in literature, art, music, theater, and the performing and plastic arts.

A deeper understanding of Still's position in American art music history begins by considering his position in African American art music history. Still should be viewed as a composer who reached artistic maturity in New York during the Harlem Renaissance. He can be deemed appropriately a Harlem Renaissance composer: throughout his career, his musical works and professional activities reified the visions of the leaders of the movement; his aesthetics, as voiced through his writings, amplified the mission of the figures associated with the Harlem Renaissance.

The Harlem Renaissance

The Harlem Renaissance is conventionally perceived primarily as a literary movement, one that began toward the end of World War I and flourished during the 1920s and 1930s.^[2]The New Negro, a collection of essays, poetry, and graphic art edited by Alain Locke, a professor of philosophy at Howard University, in 1925, served as a cultural manifesto, expressing the aspirations and visions of the movement. Locke identified New York's Harlem as a cultural and social mecca for African Americans, or the race capital. Attracting blacks from throughout the world, Harlem represented a place where "Negro life [was] seizing upon its first chances for group expression and self-determination."^[3] Thus it symbolized the progress made by blacks from slavery through the mid-1920s. In his foreword, Locke described his efforts as presenting the "first fruits of the Negro Renaissance."^[4] As such his book provides an important piece of the literary and philosophical background against which Still's work may be viewed. It contains poems by Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, James Weldon Johnson, and Arna Bon-

temps; short fiction by Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Toomer, and Richard Bruce (Nugent); essays on African American visual and graphic art, literature, legitimate and musical theater, and comedies; and a play by Willis Richardson. Music figured prominently in The New Negro . Locke contributed an essay, "The Negro Spirituals," and J. A. Rogers wrote "Jazz at Home." The book surveyed more than the arts. There were also essays on the life and culture of the African American in general, ranging from E. Franklin Frazier's "Durham: Capital of the Black Middle Class" to essays by Walter White and Melville Herskovitz on the new urban culture of the African American as reflected by Harlem.

The works of numerous writers—novels, poems, plays—were produced and published during this period, as were journals, newspapers, and magazines. These literary products served as vehicles for the ideas and aspirations of the exponents of the movement. Foremost among the writers who expressed the visions of the Harlem Renaissance were Locke, Johnson, Hurston, Cullen, W. E. B. Du Bois, Sterling Brown, and Langston Hughes. However, the movement was not confined to literature, for the artistic life of Harlem outside of literature was very rich. African Americans found opportunities in other arts such as painting, sculpture, and legitimate theater. Black vernacular music—jazz, blues, and musical theater—thrived. The all-black musical Shuffle Along (1921) sparked an interest in African American culture among white Americans. The music of artists such as Duke Ellington and Bessie Smith reached beyond the African American community and emerged on the local New York cultural scene, and into American popular culture. The decade of the 1920s was the heyday of black revues at Harlem theaters such as the Apollo and the Lafayette.^[5]

Recently there has been a move toward a more inclusive conceptualization of the Harlem Renaissance, broadening its scope to view it as an intellectual and cultural movement as well as a literary movement. Although it was not specifically political, there were political dimensions to its vision. The chronology has been extended beyond the 1920s and 1930s. Samuel A. Floyd, Jr., considers the Harlem Renaissance as beginning before the end of World I and extends the movement even beyond the location of Harlem itself, viewing it not as an isolated period in African American literary history but as part of a continuum. Reviving Locke's term and referring to it as the Negro Renaissance, Floyd locates its origins in towns and cities across the country before the turn of the century and links it to changes in African American life and intellectual history. He links the Negro Renaissance to the trends of nineteenth-

century African American nationalism, the movement of African Americans "from slavery to freedom" and their migration from "rural to city living."^[6]

Not only was the Harlem Renaissance concerned with literature and popular music, but art music was a significant part of Harlem musical culture during the 1920s and 1930s. The watershed in art music and the Harlem Renaissance, according to David Levering Lewis, was tenor Roland Hayes's December 1923 Town Hall concert, where he performed both lieder and spirituals. Hayes, and other concert artists such as Marian Anderson and Paul Robeson, demonstrated that African American musical artists were more than capable of performing the classical repertoire. By performing spirituals on the same programs with Italian arias and German lieder, these soloists elevated the African American spiritual to the same artistic level.^[7] Performers were not the only figures in African American art music who gained prominence: composers created a body of large—and small-scale works—symphonies, operas, solo and chamber music—many of which were programmed and performed by leading figures and musical institutions in American music.

Still and the Harlem Renaissance

The biography of William Grant Still allows us to situate him chronologically within the framework of the Harlem Renaissance. Still was born in 1895 in Woodville, Mississippi, was raised in Little Rock, and came to maturity during the early years of the Harlem Renaissance. Still was also geographically in the midst of the Harlem Renaissance. Eileen Southern first drew attention to the fact that Still's move to New York coincided with the traditionally understood start of the Harlem Renaissance.^[8]

Not only was Still in New York during this period, he also participated in the musical life of Harlem. Throughout his residence in New York, Still took part in myriad musical activities that ranged from jazz and popular music to art music to musical theater. During the earliest stages of his career, he was involved in popular music as a performing musician on oboe and cello and as an arranger. He was first drawn to New York by W. C. Handy with an offer in 1919 to work in the Pace & Handy Publishing Company, one of the earliest black-owned and operated publishing companies, and to play in Handy's band. After leaving Handy's band in 1920, he performed with numerous Harlem jazz and popular music ensembles such as the Clef Club orchestras.^[9] In 1921 Still was in-

volved in the black musical revue Shuffle Along, in which he played the oboe and did several of the show's orchestrations. Later he worked for the Pace Recording Company (the Black Swan label), the first black-owned and operated record company, whose recordings included concert music. Still also performed art music, playing oboe in the Harlem Orchestra, a classical music organization. Following his departure from Pace Recording Company, Still turned more and more to orchestrating and arranging professionally, spending the second half of the twenties working not as a performing musician but as an arranger for several musical shows, such as Rain or Shine (1928), Earl Carroll's Vanities of 1926, and the black revue, Dixie to Broadway (1924).^[10]

Still's involvement in the Harlem Renaissance extended beyond merely "being in the right place at the right time." He maintained close personal and professional relationships with several prominent novelists, poets, and playwrights. In his most publicized and documented collaboration, he composed the opera Troubled Island, a setting of Langston Hughes's libretto of his play Drums of Haiti, which was based on the story of Haiti's first emperor, Jean-Jacques Dessalines. Still wrote the opera between 1937 and 1939, completing it five years after his move to Los Angeles (Verna Arvey made minor changes to the libretto in 1941).^[11] His collaborations with Harlem Renaissance literary figures began much earlier in New York. During the late twenties Still, desiring to write an opera, had approached several Harlem Renaissance writers and requested librettos from them, including in addition to Langston Hughes, Arna Bontemps and Countee Cullen.^[12]

In late 1927 Cullen began to collaborate with Still on an opera originally entitled "Roshana" (later changed to "Rashana"). Cullen was enlisted to provide poetry for Grace Bundy Still's outline. In 1928 Cullen received a Guggenheim Fellowship and in June set sail for France. With Cullen less than enthusiastic about the project, their collaboration came to an end.^[13] Another collaboration with a Harlem Renaissance artist during the thirties produced a completed work. A short story by the playwright and actor Carlton Moss provided the basis for the opera Blue Steel, and Harold Bruce Forsythe, a Los Angeles writer and musician whose work appears elsewhere in this volume, supplied the libretto.^[14]

Still was an artistic collaborator with Alain Locke. Locke first became aware of Still in the twenties and heard at least two of Still's early works.^[15] Taking an interest in Still's career, Locke listed his compositions in the "Bibliography of Negro Music" in The New Negro . He brought several texts to Still's attention, one of which would serve as the basis for a ma-

jor theater work. In 1927 Locke sent Still Richard Bruce's brief fiction, "Sahdji," which had appeared in The New Negro, suggesting it as the basis for an African ballet: "Frankly I would like to see you try your hand at this. Will you? Does it interest you?"^[16] Locke was persuasive, and contributed to the final version of the scenario. Following the failure of the Still-Cullen collaboration on "Rashana," Locke suggested to Still that he should write an opera with Bruce as librettist. Though the proposed project ("Atlantis") never materialized, Locke remained interested in Still's career, attending performances of his music and corresponding with him.^[17]

Locke recognized Still's importance as one of the few African American art music composers and as someone who could contribute to his program for the promotion of African American culture and race relations. Following the first performance of Still's second symphony, on December 20, 1937, Locke wrote to Still encouraging him to continue his work of composition. Seeking to dispel the sting of negative reviews of the Symphony in G Minor, Locke offered his views on the future forms and styles of African American art music. Locke supported Still's musical ideas—his departures from conventional musical forms and musical language—and urged him to continue in the same direction. In addition, Locke expressed concern about the lack of interest among many African American musicians in art music: "It is so strange that nowhere among Negro musicians do you find any really intellectual interest in new works and experimenting."^[18]

Thus Still may be situated within the context of the Harlem Renaissance on the basis of chronology, location, and his association with prominent artists and intellectuals. However, Still's involvement with the movement and its influence on his thinking and musical style is much more extensive. The depth of Still's participation in the Harlem Renaissance can be measured by first considering Locke's purpose in publishing The New Negro . Examining Still's own writings and his musical works reveals not only how they accord with those of Locke on aesthetic and philosophic points but also how they reflect the visions set forth by Locke and speak the voice of the Harlem Renaissance art music composer.

First appearing in an issue of the Survey Graphic dedicated to Harlem, Locke's cultural manifesto was expanded to become a book. In the foreword Locke described the purpose of the book: "to document the New Negro culturally and socially,—to register the transformations of the inner and outer life of the Negro in America that have so significantly

taken place in the last few years."^[19] Recognizing progressive changes in African American life such as the migrations from the rural South to the urban North and Midwest, Locke constructed the metaphor of the "New Negro." The "New Negro" of 1925 embodied the progress made by blacks since slavery and Reconstruction. These northward migrations produced not only a change in the geography of the black population, or outer life, but also a new psychological outlook and sense of self-awareness, or inner life, which awakened racial identity and racial pride. Locke also sought to show the progress that African Americans had made since the appearance of an earlier work that The New Negro evokes, Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk .

In his book, Du Bois laid the intellectual foundation for Locke's volume and Still's intellectual aspirations. Examining the African American condition in 1903, almost a half century after Emancipation, and discussing problems facing the United States, Du Bois defined racism as the problem of the twentieth century and addressed issues of social, economic, and political inequality of African Americans. In the opening essay of his book, "Of Our Spiritual Strivings," Du Bois directly refers to the "Race problem" with the question, "how does it feel to be a problem?"^[20] Denied the opportunity to speak for themselves and viewing themselves through the eyes of others, blacks lacked a "true self-consciousness.^[21] Rather, they possessed a "double-consciousness," which arose from the complex of knowledge of the racial self and knowledge of the American self. The tensions between American democratic ideals, which declared all men equal, and American racism, which denied individuals social, political, and economic parity, resulted in the irony of being both American and black.

Du Bois wrote about racial progress or uplift in "Of the Strivings of Men," which dealt with the black man's striving to merge his two selves. Advancement could be achieved partly through education, artistic culture, and the efforts of the best members of the Race, which he called the "Talented Tenth." In the essay "The Training of Black Men," Du Bois discusses the role higher education could play in the economic progress of the Race by giving blacks the "key to knowledge" and a chance to become professionals rather than laborers or tradesmen.^[22] Educated, cultured black individuals could contribute to advancement through the education of other blacks, to their social regeneration by teaching them about life, and to the solution of the race problem through contact and cooperation with whites.^[23] These educated individuals would be the new leaders of their communities and would play a role in the future devel-

opment of the South in improving race relations by promoting racial understanding and working to empower blacks.

In Du Bois's view, music and the arts played an important role in race progress and race relations. In the first essay, where Du Bois speaks of the African American as being handicapped, he wrote about the double bind of the black who desired to compose music. Du Bois described the artistic aspirations of blacks who, wanting "to be a co-worker in the kingdom of culture, to escape both death and isolation, to husband and use his best power and his latent genius," had lacked the opportunity to realize this potential. Speaking of music, he said that though black music was appreciated by blacks, if a black musician composed or performed black music, it was scorned by the "larger audience" outside the race. Without extensive musical training, a black artist had no chance to express his musical art in the concert hall; the black artists of the past could not articulate the message of another people."^[24] In "Of the Sorrow Songs," he described the gift and beauty of black music, specifically the spirituals, noting that they had long been "neglected, . . . half despised, . . . persistently mistaken and misunderstood." These songs were more than just music; they were the voice of the slave through which he spoke of his experience, through which he expressed the conditions of his life and messages of hope.^[25] Du Bois considered them the "singular spiritual heritage of the nation and the greatest gift of the Negro people."^[26] These "sorrow songs" were also part of America's musical heritage and were America's true cultural gift to the world.^[27] For Du Bois, in achieving full participation in American culture, African Americans should be allowed to develop and create their own artistic forms.

Du Bois believed education, the arts, and the Talented Tenth would not only achieve progress in the life and condition of the lives of blacks; together they would also be factors in promoting racial understanding. Locke continued the same themes in his 1925 volume. He described a new generation in his own contribution, "The New Negro."^[28] The New Negro was the Young Negro—urban, educated, with poetry, art, and a new outlook that promised a new leadership after fifty years of freedom.^[29] The northward migrations then under way were a marker of two types of progress, one economic and the other of ethnic identity. "In the very process of being transplanted," he wrote, "the Negro is being transformed." The changes in African American culture and psychology that accompanied the migration resulted in the development of a new outlook, or a new consciousness. The most important change in the life of

African Americans, as represented by the New Negro, was, in Locke's terms, "spiritual emancipation."^[30]

Music was central to Locke's beliefs about the cultural strivings of the New Negro. Locke concurred with Du Bois that the spirituals were truly American, the gift of the Negro to American music, and were expressive of African American life, culture, history, and condition. In addition to their beauty and special position as a folk form to be treasured and preserved, the spirituals contained "the richest undeveloped musical resources anywhere available.^[31] Thus, in Locke's view, the spirituals held promise for contemporary art music—a potential that had only been touched on by composers such as Dvorak^[*] For Locke, it would not suffice to merely preserve the spirituals; they must also be cultivated.^[32] Although Locke acknowledged that the masses were on the vanguard of change in African American life (e.g., migrations, vernacular music such as folk traditions, jazz and blues, and other vernacular culture), it was not folk or popular music that would be redemptive in his vision of artistic culture. Rather, it was a genius, or a member of the Talented Tenth, who should use the spirituals and other black vernacular musical idioms as a resource to create the foundation for an African American art music. Locke cast Still in this role.^[33]

Referring to the "voluminous literature" written by others about the Negro, Locke intended to encourage blacks to represent themselves and to view themselves not as a "problem in common" but as a "life in common." In this respect, the arts had more than entertainment, religious, or creative purposes. By allowing the New Negro to speak in his or her own voice, the arts could serve a social purpose beyond individual creative self-expression: the arts were redemptive, serving the strivings of African Americans to develop an ethnic identity. The arts were useful in achieving the Negro's inner objectives as he or she attempted to repair a damaged group psychology and reshape a warped social perspective. By writing about themselves, these New Negroes were "shedding the old chrysalis of the Negro Problem."^[34] Through their writings, paintings, poems, plays, ballets, and music—through the creation of a body of artistic works that were expressive of African American thought, history, and contemporary life—African Americans were actively forging a new self-image and ethnic identity other than that of the slave past or of socioeconomic despair. The arts also had a place beyond the African American community in reinforcing the democratic ideals on which America was founded. By means of self-representation achieved through the arts,

this younger generation of African Americans could promote racial understanding by combating the myth of the "Negro" and present a more accurate picture of the African American. Locke was not so naive as to believe that racism could be successfully combated by the arts acting alone. Rather, he recognized the need for mutual understanding between the races as a basic prerequisite for furthering race relations in America. The arts could be used to promote greater knowledge among blacks and whites by contributing to a "revaluation by white and black alike of the Negro in terms of his artistic endowments and cultural contributions, past and retrospective."^[35]

Still's musical poetics reflect the ideals of the Harlem Renaissance. Throughout, his writings resonated with many of the themes expressed by Du Bois and Locke and amplified them. Still also moved the ideals of the Harlem Renaissance in his music from the realm of abstract thought about the role of music to the aural realm of musical composition and performance. Though the Harlem Renaissance is considered to have ended in the early 1930s, Still continued these themes until his death, attesting to their enduring mission.

Still and his musical compositions fully realized Locke's ideals in two respects. Still created a substantial body of music, composing primarily large forms such as symphonies, operas, ballets, and choral works. Endeavoring to create both an African American art music and an American art music, Still drew on black vernacular musical traditions for his art music compositions.

Still grouped his mature musical output into three broad stylistic periods. The first spans the early to mid-twenties prior to his studies with the avant-garde composer Edgard Varèse and his modernist period during which he explored modernistic techniques; this period ends in 1925. During the second, 1925 to 1932, Still adopted what he described as the "racial idiom." These dates correspond to the appearance of Locke's book and the accepted end of the Harlem Renaissance. The third began In 1932 when he turned from the specifically racial idiom toward the "universal idiom."

Still's earliest pre-Varèse compositions can be counted among the earliest works of the Negro Renaissance. Orchestral music and opera greatly appealed to Still. He first attempted to combine popular musics such as jazz and blues with modernistic techniques in these idioms when he arrived in New York and participated in jazz and popular music ensembles. The work Three Negro Songs for orchestra has movements entitled "Negro Love Song," "Death Song," and "Song of the Backwoods,"

all three composed in 1921 in New York. An early work, it nonetheless shows Still incorporating African American melodic idioms in an orchestral work that predates the publication of The New Negro . Still had an interest from the beginning of his career in composing art music on Negro themes.^[36]

The Ultramodern Idiom

During his study with Varèse, Still composed several "ultramodern" works in which he attempted to assimilate experimental techniques of the New Music into his own musical language.^[37] He sought to combine traditional African American music with the atonal harmonies of modern music. Darker America, a work for orchestra composed in 1924 and one of the few surviving works from Still's study with Varèse, is discussed in several other places in this book.^[38] Still used melodic types found in African American music such as the descending melodic curve, the pentatonic scale of the spirituals, and the "blues scales" of the blues. The primary harmonies used were the tonic, subdominant, and dominant harmony of the spirituals. Rhythmically, the "Theme of the American Negro" features syncopation, or if viewed in another way, additive rhythm.^[39] Structurally, this theme uses the call-and-response that reflects the choral tradition of the spirituals.^[40] Combined with African American musical traits are the dissonant harmonies of modern music, which Still used to dramatic end.

Though in his Varèse period works Still found ways of integrating modernist techniques with traditional African American music, he decided to limit the use of what he referred to as the ultramodern style: "Experiments proved to me that the Negroid idiom tends to lose its identity when subjected to such treatment. I wanted to employ an idiom that was unmistakenly Negroid because I wished to do my part in demonstrating to the world that the American Negro is capable of making a valuable contribution in the field of symphonic music, and I wanted to write a Negroid idiom, music that would help build more harmonious race relations."^[41] The two musical idioms were not always compatible and when used together produced what he saw as incongruous results. Still felt limited by the dissonant style of Varèse and after ending his studies, began to change his style. He desired to show the beauty of black music and realize its possibilities in the concert hall by example. Dissonant modern music met with great resistance from audiences. If he was to show the beauty and worth of black music, he would have to turn

away from dissonant music and compose in an idiom to which audiences would be more receptive. Furthermore, though he had leaped at the chance to study with Varèse, Still was not very comfortable assimilating this style. Still's musical aesthetic placed an emphasis on melody and music that an audience could find easily accessible.

Following his study with Varèse, Still sought a style that would reflect his racial background. He moved away from overt attempts to be modern and concentrated on realizing in an art music context the potential inherent in African American traditional music. By his own account, Still committed himself to black music during the mid-twenties: "After this period, I felt for a while that I wanted to devote myself to writing racial Music."^[42] In his first efforts at writing "racial music," Still turned to jazz. He had experimented with jazz earlier but had destroyed many of those works. His first mature jazz work was Levee Land, a suite for chamber orchestra and soprano soloist in three movements, composed in 1925 in New York City on texts by Still. "This was one of the very first efforts toward a symphonic treatment of jazz motifs."^[43] Still used instrumentation suggestive of a jazz or popular music orchestra of the twenties. Melodically, harmonically, and rhythmically, the style of the work resembles various types of popular jazz from the twenties. Carol Oja has identified the manner in which Still combined modern dissonant harmonies with standard blues harmony and vocal and instrumental techniques.^[44] Levee Land has additional experimental features, particularly the text and the way in which Still uses the voice. The voice is used not in a narrative fashion but instrumentally, repeating a text consisting mostly of short phrases such as "hey" and "baby" that were inflected to express different emotions ranging from sadness to humor and surprise. (This is in contrast to the use of three untexted voices in From the Land of Dreams, another work from the same period.)^[45]

Aside from the limited use of modernistic techniques, Levee Land can be considered modern in the context of African American music and culture; it was a departure from Du Bois's and Locke's concept of "traditional music." Both Du Bois and Locke felt that African American folk materials of the spirituals and other "sorrow songs" could be used to build a great African American and American art music. Other proponents of the movement differed in their views on the use of folklore. Writers such as Sterling Brown, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston held the view that the "folk" materials of jazz and blues, the vernacular of African Americans, were the substance of African American art. Their creative efforts used the expressions of African American

speech, folktales, and the lyric forms of the blues. Forms such as the spirituals were rooted in pre-twentieth-century, rural African American history. The musical forms of jazz and blues, when Still began using these, were associated primarily with urban centers such as Memphis, New Orleans, Chicago, and New York and with the "city blues," or singers such as Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith, respectively. Just as Locke had documented the New Negro as urban, Still was expressing the contemporary African American, the urban black, of the mid-twenties, not the Negro of the slave or rural past. Still was also attempting in Levee Land to show the beauty of jazz and its usefulness as a basis for modern art music by integrating it within an experimental work.

The Racial Idiom

In the early 1930s Still, desiring to demonstrate the worth of an African American music that was denigrated by both whites and middle-class blacks, expressed his views in a typescript that may have been an early version of his earliest published essay, "An Afro-American Composer's Point of View."

I feel that it is best for me to confine myself to composition of a racial nature. The music of my people is the music I understand best. It offers the medium through which I can express myself with greater clarity and ease. Then too, I am convinced that the time has arrived when the Negro composer must turn from the recording of Spirituals to the development of the contributions of his race, and to the work of elevating them to higher artistic planes.^[46]

Still thus shifted his musical aesthetic from an objective modernistic one toward a proactive one that aligned more directly with Locke's aesthetic of redemptive culture but differed from it in one important respect.

The change in aesthetic resulted in a change in Still's musical style. He curtailed the use of dissonance but continued to create new forms, frequently drawing on folk forms and modifying them. Among his early compositions in his "racial" idiom were songs such as "Winter's Approach" and "Breath of a Rose" (composed in New York City in 1926–1927), settings of poems by Paul Laurence Dunbar and Langston Hughes, respectively. Analysis of both these songs reveals that Still combined African American vernacular musical forms such as the eight-bar blues with suggestions of modern dissonant harmony. Although Still continued to compose art songs, he was never completely drawn to

the genre. He wrote, "Frankly, this art form has never appealed to me sufficiently for me to devote much thought to it."^[47]

Still also turned to sources other than jazz or the spirituals. In the Afro-American Symphony, composed in New York City in 1930, Still turned to the blues, explaining, "I wanted to prove conclusively that the Negro musical idiom is an important part of the world's musical culture. That was the reason I decided to create a musical theme in the Blues idiom and develop it into the highest of musical forms—the Symphony."^[48] Still had extensive experience with the blues during his tenure with W. C. Handy in Memphis. He assimilated elements of the idiom into his personal style. The first theme of the Afro-American Symphony displays essential features such as the "blues scale" of the lowered third and seventh scale degree, a falling melodic contour, and the call-and-response structure. He integrated African American musical elements into the formal aspects of the piece, basing parts of the first movement's internal sections on the twelve-bar blues form. These internal divisions were incorporated into a modified sonata form, a conventional form used in the Western European art music genres of symphony and sonata. Thus Still embedded a local form within a global form. By composing original music in an African American idiom, Still began to realize Locke's vision. By example, Still demonstrated that folk music could migrate from the dance hall to the concert hall. African American folk and vernacular music could be transformed into high art.

Still reified the Harlem Renaissance ideals not only aurally but also philosophically and historically. Many of his works bear programs. Considered by themselves, several of his works present a slice of African American life in music; considered as a group, they present a varied picture of the history, culture, and psychology of blacks in America. Darker America operates on multiple levels as Still's representation of his own culture and history. The themes taken in sequence depict the history of the American Negro, or the triumph over sorrow through prayer and hope.^[49] At the end of the piece, Still constructed a musical profile of the psychology of the American Negro by presenting the three principal themes in counterpoint, using the dense texture of interwoven melodic lines to represent a complex psyche, or racial Self. The complex inner life of the American Negro is further expressed through Still's use of dissonance. Introduced after the first statement of the "Theme of the American Negro," the modern dissonances following the consonant "spiritual" melody illustrate irony—or double-consciousness, after Du Bois—the irony of being an American Negro in the United States, or a

member of Darker America. The Afro-American Symphony was also meant to be a psychological or emotional portrait of the Negro, as spelled out more fully elsewhere in this volume.^[50]

Pairing the Afro-American Symphony and the Symphony in G Minor further reveals the nature of Still's historicism. The Symphony in G Minor was subtitled "Song of a New Race" by Leopold Stokowski, who suggested Still add subtitles that expressed what feeling or thought had inspired him to each movement in order to "help [the] public to enter more intimately [the] mood of each movement."^[51] Still considered this symphony, composed in 1937 in Los Angeles, an extension of and companion piece to the Afro-American Symphony .^[52] "The principal theme of the first movement of the G Minor is allied, indeed derived from, the thematic material in the final movement of the 'Afro-American.' "^[53] Still described his intentions in composing the symphony: "It may be said that the purpose of the Symphony in G Minor is to point musically to changes wrought in a people through the progressive and transmuting spirit of America."^[54] The two works are analogous to the Souls of Black Folk-New Negro pair that documents the progress of blacks from the nineteenth-century rural "Old Negro" to the urban, educated New Negro of the twentieth century. As a pair, Still's symphonies reflect this race progress, documenting the life and culture of blacks, in musical terms, in much the same way that both Du Bois and Locke set about to describe the condition of the Negro in letters. Outlining the program, Still wrote that "the Afro-American Symphony represented the Negro of the days not far removed from the Civil War."^[55] He described the Symphony in G Minor as "represent[ing] the American colored man of today."^[56] The first symphony expressed emotional longing, sorrow, humor, and aspirations; the second symphony expressed more immediate optimism and the self-empowerment of a people who could now take action.^[57] Still continued to write a history of African Americans in music, tracing various stages from origins in Africa through slavery to the twentieth century. In composing his history in music, Still drew largely on musical styles of the urban New Negro and was actively expanding the range and scope of African American art music.

Still's output was not limited to musical composition. He also spoke and wrote extensively on music. In his earliest published articles, such as "An Afro-American Composer's Point of View" in Henry Cowell's American Composers on American Music (1932), Still wrote as a representative of the race.^[58] Subsequent articles written by Still, and those on which he collaborated with Verna Arvey, addressed various subjects

ranging from music to interracial marriage and politics. Still also gave numerous addresses before various groups: professional and student music organizations, college audiences and faculty, church groups, and schools. Since his days in New York, Still had spoken on music. On May 5 of the same year his first article was published, Still delivered the address "Modernism in Music." He spoke during the session "Modern Trends in Music," one of the events held during the Ninth Annual Music Week in Harlem, sponsored by the New York branch of the National Association of Negro Musicians and the West 135th Street branch of the YMCA.^[59]

Throughout his writings and speeches on music, Still revealed his personal musical aesthetics, addressing modern music, American musical nationalism, African American music, and the African American musician. While his writings expressed his own ideas, within them resonate the philosophies of the Harlem Renaissance. After the public success of his Afro-American Symphony, Still began to occupy a prominent position from which he could speak with authority on African American music. He addressed musicological questions such as the history and stylistic features of African American vernacular music and aesthetic questions such as their value and position in African American culture and American music at a time when American art music was seeking to define itself. His writings and speeches served a twofold purpose: (1) they articulated the voice of the black composer on his own music, and (2) they educated others, black and white, about black music.

In his articles and speeches on the spirituals, jazz, and blues, Still sought to do in words what he had done in music. Since most of his writings appeared in the mainstream press, Still was addressing primarily a white audience. He dissociated black vernacular music from its negative stereotypes by explaining its style and history. Expounding on its beauty and virtues, he defended its importance and place in American art music and culture.

The promoters of the Harlem Renaissance, James Weldon Johnson and Alain Locke, had an uneasy position on jazz. They thought it could be useful in building a great art music, but by itself, it was not art.^[60] Sterling Brown and Langston Hughes maintained a more amiable position toward the vernacular, basing many of their poems on the blues. Many middle-class blacks disapproved of jazz and blues, associating them with nightclubs and brothels. Still often pointed out that during his younger days, the blues were considered immoral. This he attributed to their association with barrooms and brothels and to the belief that they

expressed only, in his own words, "sexual cravings." The nightlife origins of these musical forms went against black middle-class propriety and also reinforced negative white stereotypes of black sexuality. Still attempted to free both jazz and blues from their negative associations by emphasizing their beauty, their unique musical qualities, and their overall value to American music.

Still departed from Locke in recognizing the inherent value in jazz and blues. His experience touring with Handy and his blues band as a performer and arranger during 1916 and 1919 created a lasting impression on him: "I learned, for example, to appreciate the beauty of the blues, and to consider this the musical expression of the yearnings of a lowly people, instead of accepting it superficially as being immoral and sexy, as so many other people did."^[61] He sought to educate others about the music, distinguishing between two distinct types of blues—rural or country blues and urban or city blues. The first was the "traditional blues," or rural folk blues, which he "associated with emotional expression." The second type was the "sophisticated blues," or city blues, which was usually associated with dancing.^[62] For Still, the primary value of both types lay in their unique musical features. Assuming the role of music theorist, he noted that the blues used both a special scale and a unique form, the twelve-bar blues, neither of which was found in any other type of music.

The second redeeming feature of the blues was their emotional expressiveness. Still believed that the "emotional content of Blues springs from a deeper and worthier source than mere sexual desire." "I refer specifically," he wrote, "to the traditional type of Blues which seems to me to express a yearning for unattainable happiness."^[63] Du Bois considered the spirituals to be expressive of the emotions or the inner life and strivings of the Negro during slavery. As a type of syncretic music in which African melody, rhythm, and musical structure were combined with Western musical elements such as functional harmony, they embodied the twoness of the Negro in that they were both African and American. Still's ideas on the blues as expressive of blacks' longings and desires and their unique African American features parallel those of Du Bois. The emotional content of the blues expressed the history and consciousness of African Americans in the United States as they fought slavery and racial discrimination.

Still held a similar position on jazz, which represented to him an important development in American music: "It appears to me that any form of expression which has spread over America and from there all

over the world, which has (after many decades of public recognition) retained the power to interest intelligent thinkers like Mr. [Winthrop] Sargeant and which has found its way, in some form, into serious American music of all types, is a vital force that cannot be pushed aside lightly."^[64] Like blues, jazz was rich in emotional expressiveness: "Negro music has given to those who create it, who interpret it and who merely enjoy it a sincerity and an emotional freedom that provides a release for pent-up feelings. The sensuous Jazz as well as Negro folk music and the serious, sophisticated music created by Negroes, partake of this sincerity."^[65] Still recognized the contributions that jazz musicians had made to American music, particularly in the areas of instrumental technique, orchestration, and rhythm.^[66] In addition to its musical value as a vernacular art form, Still held the view that jazz should also be used in creating art music and believed further that all American composers should familiarize themselves with the idiom and use it as one of many musical resources.

Still also sought to dispel myths about jazz. The great misconception was that jazz was the African American's sole contribution to music. Having begun his career performing popular jazz, Still greatly valued this type of music; however, he sought to counter any judgments of black musicians that limited them to jazz or popular music and to bring attention to the endeavors of black composers of art music. Still did not seek to denigrate vernacular music but to clarify the public's understanding of the range of African American musical activity. He also valued the spirituals highly, considering them perhaps the African American's single most important contribution to the music of the nation. Addressing the controversy over the origins of the spirituals—whether they were of black origin or merely paraphrases of white Protestant hymn—he staunchly defended their African American origin. He addressed more than their history. The spirituals were greatly esteemed because of their history and redemptive power: "Long before the advent of Jazz, Negro Spirituals had made a large dent in the public consciousness on more than one continent, and their wide dissemination also was a contribution to good race relations."^[67] The spirituals were also valuable for the composer. This repertory presented the musician, in Still's estimation, with "a large amount of new and untouched musical material—material that will, in fact, always be new and untouched because it is constantly being re-born, just as the folk music in other lands."^[68] African American vernacular music, sacred and secular, rural and urban, could be used by American composers, black and white, as a musical resource for art music.

Although Still consistently and strongly advocated positioning African American vernacular music within the American musical heritage, he believed that African American music should not be limited to vernacular music. In effect, he was a Talented Tenth Race leader, demonstrating that it was possible for a black man to be active as a composer of art music and encouraging young, aspiring black musicians. Still believed that art music was a new field open to African Americans. That black art music was welcomed in the concert hall was, for Still, proof of "America's basically democratic spirit" and emblematic of an improvement in race relations.^[69]

Still was quite aware of the dilemma faced by the black composer. Aware that Americans patronized popular music more than they did serious music, Still advised the black composer to go into popular music if his or her goal was to become wealthy, but to resist being arbitrarily shunted into popular music. As he pointed out, "Another reason [black composers could become wealthy in popular music] is that a Negro in this field conforms to many people's idea of where a Negro ought to stay.^[70] But Still encouraged other African Americans who were interested and possessed the talent to enter art music. Although not as financially remunerative as popular music or jazz, art music had greater social value for the Race. "In serious music, a Negro can be a pioneer and thus contribute to racial advancement and to inter-racial understanding, and he can have the satisfaction of doing something eminently worthwhile."^[71] In the philosophy of redemptive culture, an African American working in art music served the Race both as a leader and role model and as a cultural ambassador to whites. These individuals were not merely artists but cultural activists—promoters of race relations. In the aesthetics of redemptive culture, works created by these composers were not merely artistic products but rungs in the ladder of racial uplift and racial progress.

Still directly addressed racism and race relations in his writings. Aware of racism from his own painful experiences, Still knew that though he was an accomplished man, there were obstacles facing him in society. Publicly, he tended to downplay racism, frequently stating that racial prejudice had not greatly hindered his progress and career as a composer. In his diary and in personal correspondence, however, Still frequently expressed sentiments to the contrary. For example, in a letter to Irving Schwerké, his friend and Paris-based American music critic, Still confided his frustration: "It is unfortunate for a man of color who is ambitious to live in America." At a moment when he had been unemployed

for some months, he spoke of those "who are opposed to placing a colored man in any position of prominence."^[72] Still expressed these sentiments in 1931, within a month after completing the Afro-American Symphony .

Views presented in "Are Negro Composers Handicapped?" in the November 1937 issue of the Baton are representative of his public statements. There, Still addressed whether the African American art music composer was denied opportunity and success because of his or her race. Though Still admitted that he had experienced racial prejudice and segregation, he did not believe that race presented a problem to the black composer. In music a composer could not succeed solely by virtue of his or her race; talent was the great determining factor. "Thus musically, the colored man is handicapped solely by the extent of his own capacity—or his lack thereof—of advancement."^[73] Still did concede that African Americans faced difficulties, but these were not specific to any particular field: "No, the handicap of the Negro composer has nothing to do with music; it is one that must be faced not only by the composer but also by every person of color in America."^[74] Despite incidents of racism, Still remained optimistic, believing relations between the races were improving and prejudice was being gradually replaced by racial understanding: "These and other handicaps of similar nature would probably grieve me greatly were it not that I find them gradually but steadily being displaced by better understanding and more harmonious relationships."^[75] He believed that it was ignorant, "ill-bred" people who were racially prejudiced and that "cultured people in the country are those who are free from racial antipathy."^[76] Through education and culture, people could overcome racism.

Music could play an active role in Still's vision of racial understanding and progress in race relations. Black art music could redeem the nation and aid in fulfilling the promise of democracy in America. A profound believer in American democracy, Still accorded the African American artist in the United States special significance: "The Negro artist is important in American society because he demonstrates that achievement is possible in our democracy."^[77] The black artist was the Talented Tenth Race leader who, through the arts, dissolved the Du Boisian irony of being both black and American by merging the two selves and fulfilling the longing of being a "co-worker in the kingdom of culture." The African American artist promoted good public relations. African American composers and African American art music were powerful embodi-

ments of the Lockeian vision of redemptive culture: "Negro music is also important to the world as well as to the nation, for as we place emphasis on our worthy cultural products, we also further the cause of better human relations, as well as better race relations. In a concrete way, we are helping to negate the bad effects of the actions of delinquents and others who are publicized in such a way as to give the Race a bad name. Everything we can do to help propagandize our good points should be done at this time, and also in the future."^[78]

The Universal Idiom

Though Still spoke specifically as a "Race Man," articulating the Harlem Renaissance/New Negro themes of racial progress and racial understanding, his vision was not limited to African Americans. He believed that each ethnic group had something to contribute musically, and therefore culturally and socially, to the fabric of the United States. The contribution of various groups to the artistic culture of the nation would unite the nation across racial boundaries. He expressed himself in what he referred to as the Negro idiom because of his desire to show the beauty of the music. However, his style was not limited to the racial idiom. During the early 1930s, he turned to what he later called his universal idiom. In addition to black vernacular music, he also drew on other American and New World folk music sources, such as cowboy songs, Latin American and Caribbean traditions, music suggestive of Native Americans, and Hispanic missionary music from pre-statehood California. The race issue was not limited to just blacks and whites but encompassed all racial and ethnic groups. Still believed that "when we all awaken to the fact that each group has something important and worthwhile to contribute to the culture of the entire country, then we will have a society that is well integrated—in which all of us will be working for the common good."^[79]

Yet Still was not a political activist; he was a composer. Though his compositions bear racial titles, such as the Afro-American Symphony and Darker America, for the most part these works were not overtly political. They depict abstractions of the history or the psychology of blacks. As he put it, "Some people have tried to work through legal or political means, but I have sought to work through friendship and music, expressed in my own way and according to my personal beliefs."^[80] In this respect, two works stand out in that they directly addressed racial

violence and racial injustice. The composition And They Lynched Him on a Tree (1940), a setting of the poem by Katharine Garrison Chapin, confronted the issue of racial violence. Still employed two choruses as personae in the lynching drama: the white chorus assumed the role of an angry, unruly, hate-filled mob; the black chorus assumed the role of the victims and opposers of racial hatred. The soloist sang the role of the mother.^[81] At the end of the work the choruses joined together to plead for racial tolerance and the brotherhood of man. Wayne Shirley has established that Still was composing the piece as an antilynching bill was passed by the House of Representatives and was being argued before the Senate.^[82] Once again, Alain Locke played a major role in the genesis of a Still composition, sending Still a copy of the poem and recruiting him to compose the music. Locke described the poem as "really an epic indictment but by way of pure poetry not propaganda."^[83] Following its first performance, Locke applauded its success in a review in the pages of Opportunity . The review read, in part, "[It] universalizes its particular theme and expands a Negro tragedy into a purging and inspiring plea for justice and a fuller democracy." A work such as this was a prime example of Locke's aesthetic of redemptive art: "When, on occasion, art rises to this level, it fuses truth with beauty, and in addition to being a sword for the times it is likely to remain, as a thing of beauty, a joy forever."^[84]

During World War II, Still, like many other composers, turned to patriotic themes. His music, however, took on dual significance. In Memoriam: The Colored Soldiers Who Died for Democracy carried an ironic subtext. The work was dedicated to black soldiers who were facing discrimination both in the segregated units in the armed forces and at home yet were fighting "to make the world safe for democracy." It signified both the double-consciousness of the Negro and the incongruousness of democracy, racism, and war. It, like And They Lynched Him on a Tree, served a social end through artistic means.

The writings and music of William Grant Still are suffused with the ideals and spirit of the Harlem Renaissance. Resonating with Still's writings and music are central themes raised by Locke, Du Bois, and Hughes (with whom he later worked): the creation, preservation, and cultivation of African American music—art music primarily but also vernacular music; progress of the race from slavery to the early twentieth century;

and redemptive culture, or the aesthetic that the arts could serve to combat racial discrimination by promoting racial understanding. Still believed that the African American composer should not be limited only to black musical idioms—to expressing only his or her racial background. All styles were open to the African American who could compose in any genre, form, or style of music he or she chose. Still himself eventually chose to move beyond a racial idiom, turning to what he described as the "universal idiom" in the 1930s. In his writings and works that specifically address issues of race relations and racism, one can hear the philosophies of Du Bois and Locke and their ideas on how art could be redemptive and serve as one tool to bring about progress in race relations and racial understanding. Although committed to using his efforts in the field of art music to serve this purpose of promoting better race relations, Still saw his work as not just serving America and African Americans. He approached his compositions with great spirituality and believed that his music should serve all of humanity and promote universal brotherhood. Despite Still's move toward the universal idiom, he remained a strong advocate for African American music. The Harlem Renaissance came to an end in the early thirties, but for Still, who came to artistic maturity at about this time, the spirit and visions of the Renaissance endured.

Still's work in African American and American art music should be reassessed at least partly on the basis of his participation as a modernist and his participation in the Harlem Renaissance. He should be seen not as the "Dean of Afro-American Composers" but more suitably as a "Harlem Renaissance Man." Like Du Bois and Locke and his other contemporaries, he was a Race Man, advocating progress of the Race and progress in race relations so as to fully realize the democratic ideals of the nation. Indeed, his ideas about the rise of modernism and twentieth-century American musical nationalism were dominated by his position as a Race man.

Still left a substantial body of music—nearly two hundred works. In many of these, just as he sought to realize the aesthetics of the Harlem Renaissance, he also sought to create a style of music that was expressive of America. Perhaps the years following the 1995 centennial of Still's birth will bring about a renaissance of Still studies and result in a deeper understanding of Still as a man of letters and as a man of music. Perhaps he will be seen, more properly, as "Still, American Composer of American Music."