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473 34 Harry T. Burleigh Harry T. Burleigh was perhaps the most prominent figure in the world of black concert music in America during the early twentieth century. He is known today primarily for his arrangements of Negro spirituals, which are still used, but he was also a composer of art songs and, in his day, a baritone of considerable renown. He is also remembered for his contribution to one of the defining moments in American music. It was Burleigh who, as a student at the National Conservatory of Music in the 1890s, introduced the visiting Bohemian composer Antonin Dvořák to the spiritual , inspiring the composer to urge his American colleagues to look to African American music rather than to European models as the basis for a uniquely American music. This prescient call was the basis for much that was to transpire musically during the following century. Dvořák himself reflected spiritual themes in his own greatest work, the “New World” Symphony. It was long believed that the man who influenced Dvořák, and who shaped our modern conception of the spiritual, never recorded. His modern biographer, Anne Key Simpson, declared flatly, “Burleigh’s own voice was never recorded.”1 As we shall see, this is not the case. Henry Thacker Burleigh was born just after the close of the Civil War, on December 2, 1866, in Erie, Pennsylvania. His parents were free-born, but his grandfather, Hamilton Waters, who lived with them, was a former slave. Waters, who had been partially blinded as a young man, apparently when he attempted to learn to read, influenced young Harry greatly. It was from him that the lad heard stories of the Old South and learned the plantation melodies that would become such an important part of his life.2 Burleigh was musically inclined and as a youth sang in local choirs. His father (who died in 1873) had been a servant at the home of Elizabeth Russell, a wealthy white woman who sponsored recitals and arranged the visits of notable concert artists to Erie. She took young Harry under her wing and exposed him to fine music. By 1882, sixteen year-old Harry, an Episcopalian, was singing in three church choirs, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, the First Presbyterian Church, and the Reform Jewish Temple. In religion, at least, music knew no bounds. In 1887 he graduated from Erie High School and for the next few years worked as a stenographer, while pursuing music on the side. His musical endeavors, while they may not have paid much, did attract attention. The first known item about him in a national newspaper was in the Indianapolis Freeman in October 1891, which noted that he had been expected to join the Fisk Jubilee Singers, but that the First Presbyterian Church had raised his salary in order to retain him.3 Despite the efforts of the church to keep him, in his mid-twenties Burleigh realized that he would have to leave Erie to further his career. In January 1892 he set out for New York City and with some difficulty secured a scholarship at the National Conservatory of Music, a liberal institution founded in 1866 by Jeanette Thurber for Harry T. Burleigh 05.335-496_Broo 12/22/03, 1:44 PM 473 474 lost sounds the education of musically gifted students, whatever their social status. During the next few years he made many important acquaintances within New York’s large cultural community. His reputation as a baritone singer of exceptional skill grew. Perhaps his most historically significant meeting was with the world famous composer Antonin Dvořák, who arrived in the fall of 1892 to become the conservatory ’s new director. Dvořák was fascinated with folk musics of all types and had incorporated folk themes of his native Bohemia into his work. The young student from Erie introduced him to the black “folk music” of America, singing for him the songs he had learned as a child. Although Burleigh was not technically Dvořák’s student (the composer taught only the most advanced classes), the director invited Burleigh to his home to sing and discuss the songs. He listened intently, interrupting with questions such as, “Is that really the way the slaves sang it?” As Burleigh later recalled, Dvořák “saturated himself with the spirit of these old tunes” and asked hundreds of questions about Negro life, demonstrating the importance of knowing the cultural context...

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