1. This chapter is extensively revised from an earlier essay intended for an exhibition, "The Musical Renaissance of Black Los Angeles," originally scheduled for 1991 and opened in February 1995.

2. Still's arrangements are widely scattered. Some early arrangements published by Pace & Handy in Memphis have been located at the Hogan Jazz Archive at Tulane University. Approximately one hundred are in the Paul Whiteman Archive at Williams College. About half that number of arrangements for Robison's Deep River Orchestra have been identified in the Ellington Collection at the Smithsonian Institution. Some arrangements of spirituals were published. A few other arrangements are in the Eubie Blake Collection at the Maryland Historical Society. Many others are lost or unlocated.

Judith Anne Still has counted some four hundred such arrangements listed by title in Still's diaries, which are only known for 1929-1930 and 1937—and thus do not include many of his busiest years. The estimate of one thousand is mine, based on this admittedly incomplete information. Research on Still as an arranger and composer of popular music is in its infancy; copyright deposits are one example of a major source that remains virtually untouched.

3. Diary, October 24, 1930.

4. According to Thomas Warburton, "Still, William Grant," in Amerigrove, 4:544, Howard Hanson, the major champion of Still's music, coined this phrase. Intended as high praise, its limiting function soon became evident.

5. W. C. Handy's (1873-1958) importance to the history of the blues is well established. Biographical information appears in print as early as 1908, in G. P. Hamilton, The Bright Side of Memphis: A Compendium of Information Concerning the Colored People of Memphis, Tennessee, Showing Their Achievements in Business, Industrial and Professional Life and Including Articles of General Interest to the Race (Memphis, 1908). He published an autobiography, Father of the Blues (New York: Macmillan, 1941). Most of Handy's surviving correspondence, business records, and music are in a closed private collection.

The songs were published in band arrangements by Pace & Handy, Memphis. I am indebted to Dr. Bruce Boyd Raeburn, Curator, Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University, for pointing out the existence of eight of these arrangements in the John Robichaux Collection. One, "No Matter What You Do," sets lyrics by his first wife, Grace Bundy, whom he met at Wilberforce; the lyrics are not included in the arrangement. Several other of Still's early stock band arrangements have been located by Gayle Murchison in a private collection.

6. For information on the enterprising Europe, whose untimely death interrupted the development of a distinctively African American symphonic tradition, see Reid Badger, A Life in Ragtime: A Biography of James Reese Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); also Robert Kimball and William Bolcom, eds., Reminiscing with Sissle and Blake (New York: Viking Press, 1973). Eubie Blake, who composed most of the music for Shuffle Along and was a longtime friend of Still, was Europe's assistant conductor. The Blake Collection contains folders of music used by Europe's band. Luckeyth [Luckey, Luckyeth] Roberts (1887-1968) was a pianist, bandleader, and composer of musical comedy.

7. For information on Shuffle Along, the Clef Club, and the influential James Reese Europe, whom Still probably did not meet, see Kimball and Bolcom, Reminiscing with Sissle and Blake .

8. There is surprisingly little information on Vodery despite his prominence. See Mark Tucker, "In Search of Will Vodery," BMRJ 16, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 128-182. A collection on Donald Voorhees (1903-1989) is located in the New York Public Library at Lincoln Center.

9. Olin Downes, review of International Composers' Guild concert of February 8, 1925, that included Still's From the Land of Dreams, published February 9.

10. J. Brooks Atkinson, review of show opening August 6, 1928. Arrangers worked under pressure of time with little thought beyond the immediate production or performance. Since they worked on an ephemeral product in collaboration with composers, conductors, performers, and perhaps authors and directors as well, the evidence about their contributions is often anecdotal in nature.

11. See Wayne D. Shirley, "Religion in Rhythm: William Grant Still's Orchestrations for Willard Robison's 'Deep River Hour," BMRJ 18, no. 2 (forthcoming). Archival tapes of air checks from the "Deep River Hour" are at WGSM. Still's later comments on arranging and composing for radio, along with his ideas about "American" music, appear in an interview done by Forsythe, now in the Forsythe Papers.

12. Sigmund Spaeth, A History of Popular Music in America (New York: Random House, 1948), 478-479.

13. No formal record has been found of Still's study with Chadwick, who was in ill health by 1921. See Steven Ledbetter, "William Grant Still, George Whitefield Chadwick, and the New England Conservatory," paper read at "A Tribute to William Grant Still," Flagstaff, Arizona, June 25, 1998.

14. See Still's "Personal Notes," below, for his log of these performances and critical responses.

15. Still expressed his admiration for Varèse several times. A letter from Varèse to Dane Rudhyar, listing his best students and describing them, gives his teacher's view of Still:

7 March 1928

 . . .

William G. Still—A Negro, my student since 1922, lyrical nature, typical of his race. I handle him with care, not wishing that he should lose these qualities, but not wishing that he should keep the banalities of the whites that was inculcated through the course he followed at the New England Conservatory. . . . These [i.e., Edouardo Fabini, Adolf Weiss, Colin McPhee, Sam Reichmann, and Still] are the students who do themselves credit and for whom we await with confidence and hope what the future will allow them to achieve.

William G. Still négre—mon élève depuis 1922—nature lyrique—et typique de sa race. Je le pendle avec précaution—ne voulant pas qu'il perde ses qualités—mais ne voulant pas non plus qu'il garde les poncifes "des blancs" qui lui ont été inculquè par les cours qu'il a suivi au New England Conservatory. Ceci. . . . Faites lui crèdit et attendez avec confiance et espèrè ce que le futur leur permettre de réaliser .

Rudhyar Collection, Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Library, Stanford University.

16. Thomas A. DeLong, Pops: Paul Whiteman, King of Jazz (Piscataway, N.J.: New Century Publishers, 1983), 102. According to DeLong, Whiteman decided to improve the quality of his already popular group by adding some Afro- hard

American musicians. Dissuaded by the argument that a racially mixed group would create insuperable problems with accommodations when it traveled, he settled for hiring some Afro-American arrangers, of whom Still was the most successful. Don Redman also made a few arrangements for Whiteman.

17. Ferde Grofé (1892-1972) was hired to work on the film. His orchestrations for King of Jazz are in the Grofé Collection, LC.

18. Eileen Southern, "Conversation with William Grant Still," BPiM 3, no. 2 (May 2975): 165-176.

19. Bruce, a native of Washington, D.C., was a prominent Harlem Renaissance poet and artist who published relatively little. Locke published his two page sketch of "Sahdji" in his 1925 The New Negro .

20. The title page, an isolated single page, is at WGSM.

21. See "Personal Notes," Arvey's "William Grant Still," and "William Grant Still and Irving Schwerké," all in this volume, for evidence of Still's dissatisfaction with Darker America .

22. Letter, William Grant Still to Alain Locke, August 6, 1938, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.

23. "William Grant Still: Negro Serious Music," interview by R. Donald Brown, November 13 and December 4, 1967, Oral History Program, California State University, Fullerton.

24. Application to the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, "Plans for Study" (1934). Courtesy of the Guggenheim Foundation.

25. "Negro Serious Music," interview, 1967.

26. A condensed score and set of parts are in the Whiteman Collection at Williams College.

27. This may be the work that Forsythe invited Arvey to read for Still in 1930, the occasion of their first meeting. The poems are lacking in the Whiteman materials.

28. Neither the Whiteman materials, which do not include a full score, nor the pencil score is dated. The interpretation given here is confirmed by Arvey in a "Scribbling." Arvey reports that Whiteman had reserved the right of first performance but not exercised it. Still then composed Kaintuck' as a vehicle for her. In Fusion 2, 175, Carolyn L. Quin lists "The Black Man Dances" as a movement of A Deserted Plantation, another work composed for Whiteman; this is an error. The incipit listed in the same source in the composer's catalog as edited by Celeste Anne Headlee belongs to some other work.

Still experimented with his new music typewriter with The Black Man Dances . Although he prepared only part of a page of this score on the typewriter, he used the clumsy device regularly thereafter.

29. Letter, Grace Bundy Still to Countee Cullen, December 9, 1929, Countee Cullen Papers, Amistad Research Center, Tulane University. Cullen, a prominent poet of the Harlem Renaissance, was involved in an opera project with Bundy and Still under the title "Rashana" which did not come to fruition. At this point, Cullen was continuing to express interest in completing the project.

30. Efforts to bridge the cultural gap between elite U.S.-born white audiences and urban working-class audiences that included many European-born immigrants are documented in the early chapters of Claire R. Reis, Composers, Conductors and Critics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1955; reprint 1974); and Catherine Parsons Smith, "'Something of Good for the Future': The People's Orchestra of Los Angeles," Nineteenth-Century Music 16 (1992): 147-161. Michael W. Harris, The Rise of Gospel Blues (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), chap. 5, describes performances in black churches in the early 1920s of European and African American concert music. Still had participated in a similar tradition as a member of the Amsterdam Musical Association; see the introduction, n. 6.

31. See Mikel Garcia, "Adaptation Strategies of the Los Angeles Black Community, 1883-1919" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Irvine, 1985), for the coping strategies developed by L.A.'s relatively small African American population before World War I.

32. C. L. Bagley Collection, Regional History Center, University of Southern California, Box 4, includes copies of Bylaws for the Musicians' Association from 1925 and 1940, as well as a directory of the members from 1944. Local 767 was integrated into Local 47 in 1953.

33. Eileen Southern, The Music of Black Americans, 3d ed. (New York: Norton, 1997), 278. Sadie Cole Talbert toured in Europe after her New York debut and taught at Tuskegee, Fisk, and elsewhere before retiring to Los Angeles. Verna Arvey, IOL, reports her connection with Mrs. Shepperson. Florence Cole Talbert had graduated from Los Angeles High School, the only African American in her class, studied at the University of Southern California and later in Chicago, and retired to Los Angeles after an extensive career as a singer and voice teacher. I am grateful to Phyllis Panhorst for providing evidence of Sadie Cole Talbert's New York concerts from the weekly New York Age .

34. December 22, 1994, Smith interview with Harold Sumner Forsythe, who pointed out that in the early 1930s there were only two neighborhoods where blacks could live in Los Angeles, Central Avenue and the smaller area near Jefferson, where Lawrence, Still, and Forsythe all lived. Latinos, Asians, and African Americans lived in proximity to one another, since all three groups experienced discrimination in housing.

35. For more information on Still's Los Angeles, see Betty Yarbrough Cox, Central Avenue—Its Rise and Fall (1890-c.1955), Including the Musical Renaissance of Black Los Angeles (Los Angeles: BEEM Publications, 1996).

36. "Writing Music for Films," typescript prepared by Verna Arvey "from an address delivered at the John Gray Conservatory of Music on December 13, 1937," at WGSM, was probably for this occasion. (See below concerning Still on film music.) Clippings from the Still-Arvey Papers. Many African Americans in Los Angeles had their musical training from either the Wilkins Conservatory or the Gray Conservatory.

37. Mary Carr Moore, "Los Angeles News," Music and Musicians, September 1935.

38. Such composers would have included Charles Wakefield Cadman, Fannie Charles Dillon, Homer Grunn, Mary Carr Moore, and Elinor Remick Warren. Many of them were women, who often had much less access to the lucrative commercial field and who were also marginalized and stereotyped, though collectively they formed an important part of the audience for the opera, the Philharmonic, and the touring virtuosi of the day. See Catherine Parsons Smith and C. S. Richardson, Mary Carr Moore, American Composer (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1987), especially the chapters "The First Los Angeles School" and "The Ultra-Moderns"; also Catherine Parsons Smith, "'A Distinguishing Virility': On Feminism and Modernism in American Concert Music," in Susan C. Cook and Judith Tsou, eds., Cecilia Reclaimed: Essays on Music and Gender (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994). Among the prominent émigrés were Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, Ernst Krenek, Ernst Toch, and Eric Zeisl.

39. See Catherine Parsons Smith, "Founding the Hollywood Bowl," AM 11 (1993): 206-242. A concert by several all-African American choruses was one of the earliest performances in the Bowl, probably in 1920, even before the Philharmonic began its regular summer series there. The Philharmonic began playing there in 1922. African Americans did not attend Bowl concerts in large numbers, however. The Bowl's sponsors wished its audiences to be integrated, but the community of Hollywood itself was not. See Isabel Morse Jones, Hollywood Bowl (New York: G. Schirmer, 1936), 24.

40. Program, Hollywood Bowl, Thursday, July 23, 1936. Courtesy of Lance Bowling. Later, when he was director of the Indianapolis Symphony, Sevitzky conducted Still's music.

41. Los Angeles Saturday Night 43, no. 45 (August 1, 1936): 10. William K. Purves, a substitute for the regular reviewer, Francis Kendig, wrote the review.

42. Harold Bruce Forsythe, "Johnson and Still," unpublished typescript, Forsythe Collection. The typescript was intended for California News, an unidentified periodical.

43. Paul Eduard Miller in Esquire magazine. Quoted in Adrian Michaelis, "Still Music on the Western Air," BPiM 3, no. 2 (May 1975): 177-195. Conductors included Werner Janssen, John Barnett, Paul Lemay, Henry Svedrofsky, Alfred Wallenstein, Pierre Monteux, William Steinberg, Maurice Abravanel, Vladimir Bakaleinikoff, Meredith Willson, Carmen Dragon, and Still. In fact, many of Still's arrangements, including some for Whiteman and others for the "Deep River Hour," attempted to treat jazz in a serious manner.

44. Dismal Swamp was composed in 1935 and published in 1937. The League of Composers, based in New York City, commissioned a work from Still in the late 1930s. Still offered Dismal Swamp, written in a style that retained traces of his "modernist" idiom and the more populist Kaintuck' . Claire Reis chose Kaintuck' as the piece to be dedicated to the league, which in fact did not perform either piece. Kaintuck', however, found performances in Cincinnati and elsewhere. See " they, Verna and Billy," below, for more on Kaintuck' .

45. See " they, Verna and Billy."

46. Pauline Alderman, We Build a School of Music: The Commissioned History of Music at the University of Southern California (Los Angeles: Alderman Book Committee, 1989), 198.

47. Interview, "William Grant Still: Negro Serious Music."

48. A few of these sketches are in the archives of Columbia Pictures. Judith Anne Still kindly allowed me to look at Still's ASCAP list of film and television cues.

49. William H. Rosar, " Lost Horizon —An Account of the Composition of the Score," Filmusic Notebook 4, no. 2 (1978): 42. The orchestrators, in addition to Still, were Robert Russell Bennett, Peter Brunelli, Hugo Friedhofer, Herman Hand, Hugo Kaun, Charles Maxwell, George Parrish, and Max Reese. Jester Hairston, who continued to collaborate with Tiomkin, made the arrangements used by the Hall Johnson Choir in the film. (The Hall Johnson Choir was hired at Still's suggestion.)

See also Tony Thomas, Film Score: The View from the Podium (South Brunswick: A. S. Barnes, 1979), 93. Tiomkin assembled the largest orchestra ever at Columbia (45-65 pieces).

50. Interview, "William Grant Still: Negro Serious Music."

51. "Music in Films, a Symposium of Composers," Films 1, no. 4 (Winter 1940): 5-18. See " they, Verna and Billy," below, for a discussion of how Still's response was produced. The 1937 typescript "Writing Music for Films" (see n. 3 6 above) explains the process and pitfalls of composing music for films; it serves as something of an introduction for the remarks quoted here.

52. The hypothesis of a "Laredo Suite" incorporating these elements was offered in informal conversations between Clifford McCarty, author of several books on film music, and Lance Bowling of Cambria Records and Archives, July 1994.

53. Letter, George Fischer to Still, September 22, 1936, Still-Arvey Papers.

54. The Forsythe Papers contain a one-page outline for "Central Avenue," undated. Forsythe's unpublished novel, "Frailest Leaves," uses Central Avenue as a metaphor for the African American community in Los Angeles.

55. The others were Aaron Copland, Louis Gruenberg, Howard Hanson, Roy Harris, and Walter Piston.

56. Lenox Avenue was broadcast over CBS radio on May 23, 1937. Still wrote to Schwerké that it was a new work. Wayne Shirley has ascertained that it is a revision of Central Avenue in which the second half is essentially recomposed (" Central Avenue and Lenox Avenue, " paper presented at "A Tribute to William Grant Still," Flagstaff, Arizona, June 26, 1998). There were also changes in scoring between the radio and ballet versions. For more on Central Avenue/Lenox Avenue, see "An Unknown 'New Negro,'" this volume.

57. Donald Dorr, "Chosen Image: The Afro-American Vision in the Operas of William Grant Still," Opera Quarterly 4, no. 2 (Summer 1986): 1-23. Dorr is wrong in identifying Forsythe as a potential librettist for "Atlantis" on the basis of a 1931 letter from Alain Locke to Still; in accordance with his practice of using last names (for example, "Dear Still" rather than "Dear William" or "Dear Billy"), Locke referred not to Bruce Forsythe but to Richard Bruce (Nugent).

58. Still, application to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. This application was initiated in June 1931, but the "Plans for Study" is dated 1932. A second application filed in June 1933 was successful; this time, Blue Steel was to be the primary project. Still's Guggenheim was renewed for six months in 1935; another application for Troubled Island was funded in 1938.

59. Still refers to "A NEGRO ETUDE, text by Mr. Trask." Mr. Trask is not further identified. He might be Sherwood Trask (b. 1890), author of The Interweaving Poetry of American History: New Frontiers (New York: Pageant Press, 1967), a volume of poetry; or more likely Willard Ropes Trask (b. 1900), editor of Classic Black African Poems (New York: Eakins Press, 1971) and The Unwritten Song: Poetry of the Primitive and Traditional Peoples of the World (New York: Macmillan, 1966). For more on The Sorcerer, see "An Unknown 'New Negro,'" below.

60. Moss attempted to return the favor during World War II, when he was working for the Office of War Information and was involved in making the film The Negro Soldier . Although Still was hired to compose the music, presumably at Moss's behest, his score was not used. Moss (1909-1997) was an important African American figure in early radio, the Federal Theatre Project, and film. See obiturary, Los Angeles Times, August 15, 1997.

61. Forsythe Papers. A copy of the libretto, with Still's musical annotations, is in the Library of Congress along with a draft piano-vocal score. WGSM has both the full score and the finished piano-vocal score. Still and Bundy had prepared a similar scenario for Countee Cullen to work from for their proposed "Rashana," but the scenario is unlocated.

Copyright materials at the Library of Congress consist of a piano-vocal score in which Act I is copied on transparent sheets for duplication using a blueprint process; the remaining two acts are incompletely sketched in pencil. These suggest that Still abandoned this opera before he completed a fair copy. However, William Grant Still Music has his hand-copied full score and a version of the piano-vocal score done on Still's music typewriter, acquired in 1935. From this it is clear that he abandoned the hand-copied transparent sheets (a) to make further revisions and (b) to produce the piano-vocal score on the music typewriter, a more technologically advanced but still very laborious method. Thus he had no intention of discarding the opera at this time.

62. Much later, Mota, with a libretto by Arvey, had an African setting unrelated to The Sorcerer .

63. See Arvey's "William Grant Still," below, for her enthusiastic discussion of Blue Steel .

64. Katherine Garrison Chapin, who supplied several choral texts, was the exception.

65. Carlton Moss, interview with the author and Lance Bowling, February 21, 1993.

66. Forsythe, "W. G. Still: A Study in Contrasts," undated two-page typescript in the Forsythe Papers.

67. Benjamin Griffith Edwards, "The Life of William Grant Still" (Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1987), 242.