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292 lost sounds All about the Murder of Jim Europe!”: “The man who had just come through the baptism of war’s fire and steel without a mark had been stabbed by one of his own musicians during a band performance in Boston. No wonder I couldn’t sleep. No wonder the rumble of the empty subway had been a ghostly sound without music. I felt that I could at last put my finger on the strange restlessness that had troubled me. . . . The sun was in the sky. The new day promised peace. But all suns had gone down for Jim Europe, and Harlem didn’t seem the same.”71 21 Will Marion Cook and the Afro-American Folk Song Singers Will Marion Cook was one of the most respected black composers of the early 1900s. His career extended from the beginnings of the black musical theater at the turn of the century to the spread of jazz in the 1920s, and he was a key figure in both. His name is frequently cited in histories of black music in America. As with a number of icons of black musical history, though, it is not generally known that he recorded some of his own best-known works. Will Marion Cook was born on January 27, 1869, in Washington, D.C., to Dr. John H. Cook, a law professor at Howard University.1 Displaying musical talent as a child, he was sent to the Oberlin Conservatory of Music at age fifteen. He studied under the great German violinist Josef Joachim in Berlin from1887 to 1889 and made his debut as a concert violinist in Washington, D.C., in December 1889. His reputation as a violinist grew rapidly during the early 1890s, and from 1894 to 1895 he studied with Antonin Dvořák at the National Conservatory of Music in New York. Cook’s prickly nature was already beginning to evidence itself. A perfectionist, and somewhat rigid in his ideas, he squabbled with the great composer, who he thought favored young baritone Harry T. Burleigh over himself. Shortly thereafter Cook abruptly gave up his concert career when he found himself being referred to as “the greatest Negro violinist”—he wanted to be considered the greatest violinist, period. In the late 1890s Cook concentrated on conducting and composing. He began to mix with the New York theatrical crowd, where he engaged in heated debates with another young composer, Bob Cole, over the direction black theater should take. Cole believed that blacks should strive for excellence by competing directly with whites, producing shows that would prove that blacks were the equal of whites in every aspect of stagecraft. Cook argued that “Negroes should eschew white patterns” and produce shows that reflected their own distinctive heritage. The two argued so violently that friends had to keep them apart.2 Each went his own way, and separately they developed two shows that revolutionized the theater. Cole’s show,A Trip to Coontown, was patterned after the mainstream theatrical hit of the early 1890s, A Trip to Chinatown. Opening off-Broadway on April 4, 1898, it became a substantial hit. Cook’s show, Clorindy; or, The Origin of the Cakewalk, was really more of a musical sketch, written in collaboration with young poet/lyricist Paul Laurence Dunbar. 04.235-334_Broo 12/17/03, 1:46 PM 292 293 It opened on July 5 on Broadway, or, to be precise, on the roof garden of the Casino Theatre, above Broadway, following the main presentation in the big theater below. It too became a success, producing such hit songs as “Who Dat Say Chicken in Dis Crowd?,” “Hottest Coon in Dixie,” and “Darktown Is Out Tonight.” Together, these two 1898 shows are credited with giving birth to black musical comedy. In 1899 Cook married Abbie Mitchell (1884–1960), a beautiful teenaged actress who had appeared in Clorindy. They had two children, Marion in 1900 and Will Mercer in 1903. After their divorce around 1906, they continued to appear together professionally. On the heels of their initial success, Cook and Dunbar collaborated on additional productions, including A Senegambian Carnival(1898) and A Lucky Coon (1899), both starring rising young comedians Bert Williams and George Walker. During the following two years Cook was musical director for Williams and Walker’s Policy Players company (1899), contributed to the white musical The Casino Girl (1900), and with Dunbar composed Jes Lak White Folks (1900) and the sketch Uncle Eph’s Christmas (1900...

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