1. Title page at WGSM. "The Rising Sun," a lengthy manuscript now at The Huntington Library, may have been intended as the prologue.

2. See " they, Verna and Billy," below, for the alterations and more on this triangle.

3. Forsythe's death certificate shows his parents to have been Sumner Forsyth and Elizabeth Smith of Georgia; that he had lived for sixty-two years in Los Angeles County; that his surviving spouse was Sara Turner; that he had worked for twenty-three years as a horticulturalist in a nursery; that he died February 2, 1976, of a brain tumor. His school records are not open; an obituary notice in the California Sentinel contains no biographical information. Harold S. Forsythe reports that Sumner Forsyth came to Los Angeles in 1912 and his family followed the next year. Sumner Forsyth was a Pullman porter; he later was divorced from Elizabeth and lived in San Gabriel, California, east of Los Angeles. Family letters among the Forsythe Papers show that Sumner Forsyth did not help his son financially during his New York sojourn. Forsythe added the "e" to the family name.

4. "Song composer gains laurels writing lyric . . . ," undated clipping in Arvey Scrapbook #49, Still-Arvey Papers. Except for some songs and piano music, none of the compositions listed here or later in this chapter has been located.

5. "Introducing a New Contributor," Hamitic Review (April 1935). Except for the clippings and one later issue, this journal is unlocated outside the Still-Arvey Papers. The California Eagle was a weekly African American newspaper published in Los Angeles. Flash was a weekly African American newsmagazine published in Los Angeles briefly, ca. 1930-1931. Several copies, none containing Forsythe's byline, are in the Forsythe Papers.

6. March 20, 1931, Baldwin Hall, 810 South Broadway. The program reads, "Mr. Charles E. Pemberton presents the original compositions of his pupil, Harold Bruce Forsythe." Performers included Arvey for the piano solos; Neyneen Farrell, soprano; Victor Boggis and Dewey Johnson, baritones; and Charles Lawrence, accompanist. The concert was favorably reviewed in the California Eagle and the Los Angeles Examiner .

7. For more on Thurman, see Phyllis I. Klotman, "Wallace Henry Thurman (1902-1934)," in Afro-American Writers from the Harlem Renaissance to 1940, ed. Trudier Harris, vol. 51 of Dictionary of Literary Biography (Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1987), 260-293; see also p. 13, n. 10.

8. Letter, Forsythe to Verna Arvey, March 15, 1934, Forsythe Papers.

9. Letter, Arna Bontemps to Verna Arvey, December 29, 1941, Still-Arvey Papers.

10. This information is taken from albums and scrapbooks containing theater programs and newspaper clippings in the L. E. Behymer Collection at The Huntington Library. See also Robert Stevenson, "Los Angeles," in Amerigrove, 3: 107-115.

11. Eileen Southern, The Music of Black Americans, 2d ed. (New York: Norton, 1983), 343.

12. See Jacqueline Cogdell Djedje, "Gospel Music in the Los Angeles Black Community: A Historical Overview," BMRJ 9, no. 1 (1989): 35-79; and "Los Angeles Composers of African American Gospel Music: The First Generations," AM 11, no. 4 (1993): 412-457.

13. This event is described in the pages of the Progressive weekly, the California Outlook, over several issues in the fall of 1912. A report in the Outlook after the fact remarks that the African American women sang "surprisingly well." Theodore Roosevelt campaigned actively for the votes of African American women and men in this campaign. Women got the vote in California in 1911, nine years before the Nineteenth Amendment was approved.

14. I am grateful to Josephine Blodgett Smith, who volunteered this information after I spoke at "The Musical Renaissance of Los Angeles, 1890-c. 1955," Los Angeles, February 17, 1995. She suggested that it was probably McCullough who sent Forsythe to study with Pemberton at USC.

15. I am grateful to Miriam Matthews for locating several sources on Wilkins and on the younger John S. Gray, both of whom operated private conservatories, primarily for African American students. Wilkins graduated from Polytechnical High School and studied at the pre-World War I Von Stein Academy in Los Angeles, which in those years offered excellent European-style conservatory training to as many as seven hundred (mainly white) students at a time.

16. Interview with Jack McVea, by Michael Bakan, reported by Bakan in "Way out West on Central: The African American Jazz Scene in Los Angeles, 1917-1929," paper read to the Society for Ethnomusicology, November 7, 1990. McVea was a saxophonist who began his career in the 1920s in Los Angeles.

17. Charles Mingus, Beneath the Underdog, ed. Mel King (New York: Knopf, 1971).

18. Listed in Fusion 2, 231, as "What Makes Me Believe You?" from the "early 1920s."

19. Alain Locke, The New Negro (New York: Albert & Charles Boni, 1925), 112-114. See Murchison's numerous references to Locke's The New Negro in "'Dean of Afro-American Composers' or 'Harlem Renaissance Man,' " above.

20. Interviews with Harry Hay, 1993-1994. Hay, a sometime musician, actor, and writer who became a Communist party member and later was a founder and activist in the Gay Rights movement, first called my attention to Forsythe. Hay was part of a circle that included Arvey, John Cage, and various dancers and theater people; he sang Forsythe's arrangements of spirituals on several occasions in the early 1930s. He describes a brief homosexual relationship with Forsythe in the same period. I am grateful to him for supplying information and answering my questions. For more on Hay, see Stuart Timmons, The Trouble with Harry Hay, Founder of the Modern Gay Movement (Boston: Alyson, 1990); and Harry Hay, Radically Gay: Gay Liberation in the Words of Its Founder, ed. Will Roscoe (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996).

21. Now in the Forsythe Papers.

22. Letter, Forsythe to Arvey, March 7, 1934, Forsythe Papers.

23. The members listed may be a key to identifying members of the New Negro movement in Los Angeles in the 1920s: Theodore Banks, Roy Johnson, William Middleton, Eardly Gauff, Forsythe, Haven Johnson, David Floyd, Lawrence Johnson, Ronald Jefferson, Clifford Gantt, Marvin Johnson, Lawrence Lassiter.

24. Harold Bruce Forsythe, "Frailest Leaves," undated typescript [ca. 1935], 442-445, Forsythe Papers. It is listed in the finding aid as "Masks."

25. Letter, Forsythe to Arvey, October 19, 1933, Forsythe Papers. In the quotations that follow, the present author's ellipses are bracketed to distinguish them from Forsythe's.

26. The letter from Pemberton is in Forsythe's Juilliard file; Forsythe's son reports Thurman's recommendation. The value of the fellowship is put in question by the letters from Forsythe's mother to Forsythe while he was in New York, and even one from her to Goldmark, promising to put together the money for her son's lessons.

27. Information from the Archives of The Juilliard School. The reason for his early departure is unknown.

28. Letter, Eardly Gauff to Forsythe, November 4, 1927, Forsythe Papers. This is the letter on "Iconoclast" letterhead.

29. Forsythe writes of making this offer to Still and Still's failure to acknowledge it in "A Study in Contradictions" (29). The following journal entry may relate to this issue: "Letter from Harold Forsyth. Grace angry because of it" (Still, Diary, July 23, 1930), Still-Arvey Papers.

30. Letter of application to the Guggenheim Foundation, stamped "received 6/12/1931." Courtesy of the Guggenheim Foundation, with permission from Judith Anne Still.

31. Wayne Barlow to Still, July 7, 1939; July 27, 1937; September 7, 1939. Barlow wrote in Howard Hanson's behalf; the letters are filed under Hanson, BOX 21, Still-Arvey Papers.

32. The piano score carries the notation "This ballet was later rejected" on the front cover. (Courtesy William Grant Still Music.) Arvey, IOL, 15, reports its role in Still's recycling of rejected works: " 'Dance of Love' (played over the radio many times) was put into the 'Sorcerer Ballet' which has itself been scrapped and its themes used in other compositions." One section of this ballet surfaces later as the "Orator" scene in Lenox Avenue .

33. A copy of the libretto, heavily annotated by Still, is in the Library of Congress. A copy of a contract among Moss, Still (both of New York), and Forsythe (of Los Angeles) to collaborate on Blue Steel is dated June 19, 1933. Still-Arvey Papers.

34. A typescript of Forsythe's libretto, with additions in Forsythe's hand and extensive annotations in Still's, is in the Library of Congress. A second copy, also annotated, is in the Forsythe Papers.

35. 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 reports that Alain Locke proposed an opera under the title "Atlantis," mistakenly identifying Bruce Forsythe as the librettist. Nothing seems to have come of this project.

36. No other such contracts between Still and librettists are in the Still-Arvey Papers. On the same day that Forsythe signed the contracts for The Sorcerer and Central Avenue, he witnessed a contract drawn up between Still and Ruby Berkely Goodwin of Fullerton, California, in which Still agreed to provide arrangements for voice and piano of the following spirituals, to appear as part of a book, Great Day, already written, a collection of stories built around these spirituals: "Great Day"; "Lis'en to de Lam's"; "Camp Meetin' Peter, Go Ring Dem Bells, Mah Lawde Says He's Goin' to Rain Down Fishes"; "Good News"; "Didn't Mah Lawd Deliver Daniel"; "Ah Got a Home In-a Dat Rock"; "All God's Chillun Got Wings"; "Keep Me F'om Sinkin' Down"; "Gwinter Sing all Along De Way"; "Lawd, Ah Wants to be a Christian." See n. 37, below, for more on Central Avenue .

37. In a paper on Lenox Avenue given to the American Musicological Society in 1996, Gayle Murchison mentions a contract with Columbia Pictures for Central Avenue . Although the film was not made, the movie studios were protective of their copyrights; the Stills may have feared claims of copyright infringement from the studio. Wayne D. Shirley compared the two scores in " Central Avenue and Lenox Avenue, " in a paper presented at A Multicultural Celebration of Diversity in Music: A Tribute to William Grant Still, Flagstaff, Ariz., June 26, 1998.

38. Verna Arvey to Carl Van Vechten, August 6, 1934, autograph letter on Arvey's stationery. Carl Van Vechten Papers, JWJ.

39. Letter, Bruce Forsythe to Mr. Carl Van Vechten, postmark August 24, 1934, JWJ.

40. Letter, Bruce Forsythe to R. Jean Toomer, August 29, 1934, Jean Toomer Papers, JWJ.

41. Undated typed letter, Forsythe to "Dear Verna," Still-Arvey Papers. The concert in question was given on November 4, 1934.

42. Letter, Harold Bruce Forsythe to Mr. Carl Van Vechten, December 13, 1934, JWJ.

43. Letter, Forsythe to Van Vechten, January 15, 1935, JWJ.

44. JWJ. There are no pre-1940 letters from Van Vechten to Arvey or Still in the Still-Arvey Papers.

45. In IOL, Arvey reports "Quit Dat Fool'nish" as dedicated to Still's dog Shep. Arvey suggested the alternative story in her 1985 interview with Smith.

46. Verna Arvey, "Scribblings," undated entry from notebook at WGSM. In a postcard to Van Vechten dated March 6, 1944, she wrote more succinctly: "No, Bruce Forsythe is not related to Cecil Forsyth and we do not see him anymore. He is still in Los Angeles, and not overly popular with hosts or hostesses." Arvey to Van Vechten, JWJ.

47. Arvey's "Scribblings" reports a series of such incidents. The poverty is confirmed by his mother's letters while he was in New York as well as Harold Sumner Forsythe's account of his own youth.

48. The C. L. Bagley Collection, Western History Center, University of Southern California, includes a run of directories for Local 47, the white union, and only a few for Local 767, the black musicians' union. (The two locals merged in the 1953.) Forsythe's name does not appear in any of these.

49. Arvey, "Scribblings": "He was in love with me, he said, and I was on a high pedestal in his home. . . . His jealousy when I was writing to Still flamed out in disagreeable remarks."