William Grant Still

William Grant Still

The First Hundred Years:
A Chronology of Cultural Connections
1900-1909


1900-1909

1900

The brothers J. Rosamond Johnson and James Weldon Johnson write "Lift Every Voice and Sing."

1901

The Johnson brothers sign a contract with Joseph W. Stern and Company, a Broadway music firm.

Third edition of Cabin and Plantation Songs As Sung by the Hampton Students (New York: G. P. Putnam's Songs, The Knickerbocker Press, 166 pp.) published.

1902

Chicago Local 208 incorporates with the American Federation of Musicians, the first black musicians' union to do so. The chapter is still identified with both "black" and "white" numbers as Local 10-208.

1903

First black-owned music publishing company, N. Clark Smith and J. Berni Barbour, established.

1904

Jazz organist/composer Thomas Wright ("Fats") Waller born in New York City.

1905

First black symphony orchestra in the north founded: the Philadelphia Concert Orchestra, with E. Gilbert Anderson (1874-1926) as the conductor.

1906

The Shoo-Fly Regiment, a musical comedy by the Johnson brothers and Robert ("Bob") Cole, is produced on Broadway with an all-black cast.

1907

W.E.B. DuBois (1868-1963) founds Horizon: A Journal of the Color Line, dedicated to racial equality.

1908

Appointment of first black bandmasters to the U. S. Army and U. S. Navy.

1909

W. C. Handy, the "Father of the Blues," composes "Mayor Crump Blues" for an election campaign in Tennessee.

Jazz saxophonist Lester ("Prez") Young born in Woodville, Mississippi (the birthplace of William Grant Still).

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A project of The Digital Scriptorium, Special Collections Library, Duke University. September 1995
http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/sgo/