Natalie Curtis Burlin: A Life in Native and African American Music

Introduction: Why Remember Natalie Curtis?

Why Remember Natalie Curtis? in a paris cemetery on all saints’ day in 1921, a small group of American and French artists and musicians joined the throngs of people marking the holiday to honor a recently deceased American woman they wanted to remember as saintly. The group met to honor Natalie Curtis, an amateur ethnomusicologist and writer on Native American and African American music who had died after being struck by an automobile after descending from a Paris streetcar. Her husband, the modernist painter Paul Burlin, described his sense of this gathering, a “strange indescribable feeling, hard to put into words.” As thousands “stood in reverence” in the cemetery, he recalled, “a sense of awe came over me, that we were following a saint!” Ideas of “sainthood” permeated the remainder of the memorial service. Alexandre Mercereau, a writer on art with an interest in “primitive” cultures, asked, “For in what does real saintliness consist if not in carrying without despair, throughout the long cavalry of life, the heavy cross of goodness, of perfection, of love.” Curtis had become a “permanent source of serenity amidst the terrible struggle of existence, of peace amidst the belligerent 2 instincts of man, of belief amidst hundred-headed fanaticisms”; she had been a “spiritual ray amidst the darkness of materialism, a perpetual torch of the ideal, of pure happiness amidst the base pleasures which satisfy the majority.” Mercereau admired her for her stance against prejudice and hypocrisy and for her willingness to question the very notion of “civilization.” Mercereau believed that in the United States “red men and black men” would venerate Curtis and concluded with the hope that “if there is a happiness more infinite than that of non-existence” that one could reach “by sublime personal virtues and by the ardent prayers of those who knew you on earth,” then the door to this happiness had already been opened for Curtis.1 Indeed, several groups of Americans met to honor and remember Curtis’s life, work, and spirit. In Santa Fe, her adopted Southwestern home, a group of women writers, including Carol Stanley, Alice Corbin Henderson, and Elsie (Elizabeth) Sergeant, met to celebrate her life. Stanley insisted, “Every one of us who loved her must feel keen personal joy over her part in our lives, but her influence was too intense for us to dream of mourning her passing.” Instead of grieving the women vowed to continue Curtis’s work and hoped to dedicate a new music room or even a building to her somewhere in Santa Fe. In fact, this group of women, in their writing and creative endeavors throughout the 1920s and 1930s, did indeed build upon and extend the work Curtis had begun two decades earlier.2 Stanley further observed that a Hopi man, upon hearing of Curtis’s death, replied: “But she cannot die. She is singing now—somewhere with her Hopi friends.” The man then softly sang songs Curtis had taught him. He remarked, “She sang like Indian, have to have spirit of Indian for white woman to sing that way.”3 In Curtis’s hometown of New York City yet another group met to honor her. In 1923 African American musicians held a service for her and for Henry Krehbiel, a music critic and scholar of Negro spirituals. The mostly black gathering (the only white faces belonged 3 to the deceased musicians’ families), held in the basement of a public library, praised Curtis’s and Krehbiel’s studies of African American music. The room contained a chair holding Krehbiel’s picture, two of his books underneath it, while another chair displayed a photograph of Curtis at the piano, as well as her books. Curtis’s brother Bridgham found that the “very simplicity of [the service] made it the more touching.” He was moved to witness a young girl place roses beneath his sister’s picture and to hear the kind words spoken by Columbus Kamba Simango, an African informant who had shared songs with Curtis, and by Harry T. Burleigh, an African American musician. The group concluded their service with calls for a more permanent memorial to Curtis’s life work.4 Yet another memorial to Curtis helped bring this group’s desires to fruition. Officials of Hampton Institute, a black industrial school, held a memorial for Curtis in conjunction with one of its most important annual celebrations, Founder’s Day, in January 1926. A...