1. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903; reprint, New York: Fawcett, 1961), 16-17.

2. For examples, Kwame Anthony Appiah, In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Houston A. Baker, Jr., Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987) and other titles; Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988) and other titles; Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993). African Americans in jazz and blues have attracted far more literary attention than those in other fields of music.

Baker's scheme, intended to apply to literary figures but appropriate as well for composers such as Still, involves complex and continuing negotiation among the "minstrel mask," the "mastery of formation," and presently the "deformation of mastery" in all fields of music. These categories generally refer to the portrayal of African Americans as European Americans wished or wish to see them and the mastery of the white formal languages by blacks and the consequent adjustment of the formal language to accommodate and express the creator's intention. These stages of expressiveness are not necessarily sequential; they may well overlap in ways as various as the creative artists involved.

3. See Willard Gatewood's chapter in this volume; also Gatewood, Aristocrats of Color (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990); and Du Bois.

4. Du Bois's visit is reported in Verna Arvey, "Scribblings," longhand notes on Still (no date, no page number). Gatewood is unable to confirm a visit to Little Rock by Du Bois; most likely Arvey was in error and the visitor was Booker T. Washington. (See Gatewood's chapter below.) Still's brief interest in becoming a chicken farmer was probably inspired by Washington's visit and his writings.

5. Andrew Ross, No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 1989), 76, quoted in Ingrid Monson, "The Problem with White Hipness: Race, Gender, and Cultural Conceptions in Jazz Historical Discourse," Journal of the American Musicological Society 48 no. 3 (Fall 1995): 396-422. See also Imamu Amiri Baraka [LeRoi Jones], Blues People: Negro Music in White America (New York: William Morrow, 1963), 231, 130, and passim, for expressions of concern about the integrity of the "autonomous blues" in the face of [Monson] "conformist and assimilationist demands of a black middle class that has dictated an 'image of a whiter Negro, to the poorer, blacker Negroes.'"

6. New York Age, February 12, 1921, 3, "In the Realm of Music," reports that Still was a member of the New Amsterdam Musical Association orchestra that gave a concert at the New Star Casino on 107th Street on Sunday evening, February 5, 1921, at 10:00 P.M . Dancing followed the formal program, a variation not modeled on symphony concerts downtown. Hall Johnson, later director of a black choir famous for its performances of spirituals, was among the violas. The program included music by Rimsky-Korsakov, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Montague Ring, Sarasate, Ethelbert Nevin, and Elgar. (Coleridge-Taylor and Ring had African ancestors.)

Michael W. Harris, The Rise of Gospel Blues: The Music of Thomas Andrew Dorsey in the Urban Church (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). See chap. 5, "Old-Line Religion and Musicians, 1920-1930," esp. pp. 106 ff. Harris documents a vigorous, widespread musical practice, although he regards it negatively as part of a borrowed middle-class culture that attempted to suppress indigenous African American musical customs. It is likely that most of these had features, like the dancing that followed the Star Casino performance, designed to accommodate both the location and the audience.

7. The nexus of blackface entertainment that provides part of the background from which the black musicals of the Harlem Renaissance is treated in, among other places, Robert Toll, Blacking Up (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974); David Nasaw, Going Out: The Rise and Fall of Public Amusements (New York: Basic Books, 1993); and Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). For discussions of the need for more broadly based and perceptive musical analysis, see Katherine Bergeron and Philip V. Bohlman, eds., Disciplining Music: Musicology and Its Canons (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), especially Don Michael Randel, "The Canons in the Musicological Toolbox," and Gary Tomlinson, "Cultural Dialogics and Jazz: A White Historian Signifies."

8. Still reacted to this incident by suppressing From the Land of Dreams . His experience raises the question of whether his next work to be performed at a similar concert, Levee Land, was intended as a practical joke. Levee Land, discussed in Murchison's essay, uses a blues singer and mixes "ultramodern" gestures with blues chord progressions. The performance of the work by the well-known blues singer Florence Mills, then appearing in a show with which Still was involved ( Runnin' Wild ), created a sensation, but the connection between Still's self-styled "stunt" and the response to From the Land of Dreams went unremarked.

9. Francis R. Bellamy, Outlook and Independent, undated clipping in Wallace Thurman Papers, James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection, Beinecke Li- soft

brary, Yale University. Bellamy wrote, "One of the most interesting things about 'Harlem,' the new negro play at the Apollo, is its audience. For it is a prize-fight audience, a spectacle audience, and is fairly representative, we should say, of the element of American society among which the negro in real life has to make his way. . . . The white audience may seem more sinister to you than the colored play."

10. Wallace Thurman (1902-1934) spent several years in Los Angeles (ca. 1922-1925) before going to New York City and earning a reputation as a fine editor. There he met the younger Bruce Forsythe and published some of his early essays in a short-lived journal, so far unlocated, the Outlet . Thurman's influence on Forsythe's thinking about race will become clear in the separate chapter on Forsythe. For a recent study on Thurman, see Eleonore van Notten, Wallace Thurman's Harlem Renaissance (Amsterdam and Atlanta, Ga.: Rodolphi, 1994). See also n. 7, p. 110. The clippings quoted below are in the Wallace Thurman Papers, James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection, Beinecke Library, Yale University.

11. Francis R. Bellamy, Outlook and Independent .

12. John Anderson, New York Evening Journal, February 21, 1929. Clipping in Wallace Thurman Papers.

13. William Jourdan Rapp and Wallace Thurman, "The Negro Made Human: Two Authors Defend Their Play," unlabeled clipping, Wallace Thurman Papers.

14. In "Chosen Image: The Afro-American Vision in the Operas of William Grant Still," Opera Quarterly 4, no. 2 (Summer 1986): 1-23, Donald Dorr confuses Forsythe with Richard Bruce [Nugent], a writer, artist, and actor from Washington, D.C., who wrote the initial sketch for Sahdji that appears in The New Negro (1925). (Bruce's sketch was expanded by Locke for Plays of Negro Life two years later; the expanded version became the source for Still's ballet.) Several years later, Locke wanted to recruit Bruce, not Forsythe, to write a libretto, for which Locke had constructed an outline, on the subject of Atlantis. Dorr cites a "Dear Bruce" letter from Locke, in the Department of Special Collections at Howard University. From its contents, the undated letter was written between the premiere of Sahdji in May 1931 and Locke's departure for Europe on June 13, 1931. Many of Locke's letters to Still begin "Dear Still," suggesting that Locke addressed males by their last names in his letters.

Although Locke claimed in the same letter to have registered the title and outline for "Atlantis," no record of it now exists in the Copyright Office. I am grateful to Wayne Shirley for making the copyright search and for pointing out that the material submitted by Locke for copyright, if it was in outline form, would probably have been rejected.

15. Forsythe's letter dated "1933" by a hand that is probably Still's is reproduced as an addendum to Forsythe's monograph. This letter elicited Still's "Personal Notes," also reproduced here.

16. Edward R. Reilly's remark that "widows of composers can have a considerable effect on the posthumous images we have of their husbands" surely applies to the Still-Arvey relationship. Quoted in "Snapshots," Nineteenth Cen - soft

tury Music 20, no. 2 (Fall 1996): 199, referring to Herta Blaukopf, ed., Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss: Correspondence, 1888-1911, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).

17. In April 1937, Fischer wrote to Still, "Frankly speaking, I am of the opinion that it would seem rather premature to now already publish an extended biography relating to yourself. In my opinion, this ought to be postponed for yet a few years until your name as a composer is still better known in every musical household." Two other letters from George Fischer to Still, September 24 and November 1, 1937, reveal his change of mind. Box 18, Still-Arvey Papers. The Fischer correspondence takes up more than one full box. Fischer handled several of Still's most successful publications in the late 1930s and promoted them assiduously.

18. Forsythe, "Frailest Leaves," undated typescript [ca. 1935], p. 445. Forsythe Papers, The Huntington Library.