Media Billie Holiday + Strange Fruit
Billie Holiday had a hit record with the song 鈥淪trange Fruit鈥 in the 1930s, bringing light to the horror of lynching in the American South.
William Grant Still Composer, Arranger, Conductor
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Born
May 11, 1895
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Died
December 3, 1978
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Country
United States of America
A man of many talents, William Grant Still left his medical studies to pursue a career in music. He taught himself to play every instrument in the orchestra, from violin to cello and from oboe to saxophone. The scale of his musical knowledge paved the way for Still to become a skilled and prolific composer.
In 1931, with the premiere performance of Still’s “Afro-American Symphony,” he became the first African American composer to write a symphony performed by an American orchestra.
Over the next 20 years, 38 orchestras in the United States and Europe would have the honor of playing “Afro-American Symphony.”
Symphony No. 1 “Afro-American Symphony”—William Grant Still. Performed by the Tampa Bay Symphony. Mark Sforzini, Music Director. Feb 5, 2023. Palladium Theater, St. Petersburg, Florida.
Still is best known as a composer, but he played a range of other roles in the music industry. In 1916, he served as an arranger for blues musician W. C. Handy. In New York, Still played alongside jazz greats Fletcher Henderson and James P. Johnson in the Harlem Symphony. He was later named music director of the Black Swan jazz label, a subsidiary of Harry Pace’s Phonograph Company, which billed itself as “The Only Genuine Colored Record.”
In the creative crossovers that typified the Harlem Renaissance, Still frequently collaborated with leading Black intellectuals from other disciplines. After Alain Locke suggested that Katharine Garrison Chapin’s wrenching poem about a lynching could and should be set to music, Still composed the cantata “And They Lynched Him on a Tree.” He also wrote the melody for poems by Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen. “Afro-American Symphony” included poems by Paul Laurence Dunbar.
On many of Still’s projects, a compatible music partner was conveniently close. In 1936, he composed the music for the ballet Lenox Avenue, which used dance to depict aspects of Harlem life. The script for the ballet was contributed by another accomplished musician, Verna Arvey—Still’s wife.
 I n t e r s e c t i o n s |
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He played in the orchestra for Shuffle Along. |
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Florence Mills sang “Levee Land,” a Still composition. |
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Langston Hughes wrote the libretto for Still’s opera Troubled Island. |
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He set Countee Cullen’s poem to music in Songs of Separation. |
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Alain Locke asked Still to write the choral ballet Sahdji (1931). |
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Video Bio
Video Bio
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