Dr. Jean Snyder is the author of the book Harry T. Burleigh: From the Spiritual to the Harlem Renaissance.
Below is our interview with her about Harry T. Burleigh and how she came to study the Erie native’s history.
Can you explain for people who don’t know him already, who was Harry Burleigh?
Dr. Jean Snyder
Burleigh was famous as a fine baritone, first in Erie, where he was born and spent his first 25 years. In the several years before he left for New York City, he was known as one of the best singers in Erie. When he went to New York City to study at the National Conservatory of Music, he was immediately welcomed in the black music community as “the celebrated Western baritone.” He was the first African American composer to publish a significant catalog of secular art songs; many famous American and European opera and recital singers such as Irish tenor John McCormack sang his songs. McCormack performed at last 27 of his songs, and was a good friend. Burleigh was a music editor at the New York office of the Ricordi Music Publishing Company based in Milan, Italy. As an editor there, he had extraordinary access to the publication of his art songs. He was a pioneer in arranging spirituals for concert use, and many of the singers who had been singing his art songs immediately added his spiritual arrangements to their repertoire. He was also a mentor to younger singers and composer who are better known today, such as tenor Roland Hayes, contralto Marian Anderson, and bass-baritone Paul Robeson, as well as composers William Grant Still, Jester Hairston, Florence Price, and others.
Can you talk about his journey to New York and his relationship with Dvorak?
Burleigh took the train to New York City in January of 1892 to audition for a scholarship for the Artist’s Course at the National Conservatory of Music. There were 200 applicants for the four scholarships, and Burleigh was awarded one of them. Antonin Dvorak came to be the director of the conservatory in September of 1892, as Burleigh was beginning his second semester. When Dvorak heard him sing, he invited him to come to the apartment where he lived with his family to sing the songs he’d learned from his grandfather, who’d been a slave. Burleigh described how he’d sit down at the piano (loaned to Dvorak by William Steinway) and accompany himself while he sang. Dvorak would stop him and demand, “Is that really the way the slaves sang it?” He listened so carefully that he was able to write a melody for his New World Symphony, the Largo theme of the second movement that was so much like a spiritual that many people think he copied a spiritual. But it was his own melody. Twenty minutes after he’d written it, he played it for one of his composition students, saying, “Is it not beautiful music? It is for my symphony--but it is not symphonic music.” Burleigh played double bass and timpani in the orchestra under Dvorak’s direction and was orchestra librarian. He often accompanied Dvorak on his walks through the city, and his beautiful penmanship and music manuscript writing made him an ideal assistant; he helped prepare the parts for the first performance of the New World Symphony, as it had not yet been published.
Watch Dr. Snyder and baritone Eddie Pleasant discuss the legacy of Harry Burleigh on Facebook LIVE on Tuesday, November 17 @ 7pm!
What’s your favorite Burleigh piece?
That’s a difficult question: there are so many lovely songs. One of his last art songs, “Lovely Dark and Lonely One,” is a setting of a Langston Hughes poem; I also love his second song cycle, the Five Songs of Laurence Hope, as well as “The Trees Have Grown So,” “Have You Been to Lons?” and others. There are some lovely sacred choral pieces that are not well known, such as “Christ Be With Me (St. Patrick’s Breastplate),” and a beautiful setting of the Lord’s Prayer, which has only recently been published. There are some wonderful choral arrangements of spirituals: “I’ve Been in the Storm So Long,” “You Hear the Lambs A-Cryin’,” “There Is a Balm in Gilead,” “Wade in the Water.” Then there’s the delightful “Mister Banjo.” I could go on. Many people know his spiritual arrangements, but there are a couple that aren’t in the anthology that many singers know, such as his arrangement of “Dry Bones,” which he wrote for Paul Robeson. I’m pleased that many singers are discovering his art songs, and you can find more and more of them on YouTube as well as on fine recordings.
Did Burleigh ever return to Erie?
Burleigh returned to Erie quite often to sing, especially in the early years. I’m still working on documenting every return to Erie, but he spent time in Erie in 1893, and he came numerous times to sing in the early 1900s—at least seven times between 1900 and 1909 (1900, 1903, 1904, 1905, 1906, 1908, 1909); then in 1914, twice in the 1920s, once in the 1930s, and in 1944 and in 1946. From the 19-teens on he was very busy with his work in New York City; he was much in demand as a soloist, singing recitals, singing at St. George’s Episcopal Church and Temple Emanu-El, composing his art songs, working as music editor at Ricordi. When he began publishing his spiritual arrangements in the 1916-1917 recital season, he started giving lecture-recitals on the spirituals, and he sang spirituals and spoke about them on the radio.
How did you begin studying his life and how did you first hear of him?
I taught in Kenya from 1966 to 1969, and I sang in the choir at the Nairobi Baptist Church with Catherine MBathi, who was a fine contralto. Several years later when I took my mother to see her first grandchild in Zambia, where my brother and his wife were teaching, I asked Catherine what I should bring her. She said, “I need some spirituals. I don’t care what they are, just so they are arranged by H. T. Burleigh.” I thought, “Who’s H. T. Burleigh? I’m a singer, I should know who he is.” So when I went up to the opera in Chicago, I went to one of the music stores on Wabash Avenue, and I found a small anthology of Burleigh spirituals. I bought one for Catherine and one for myself, gave Catherine hers and forgot about it. When I taught in at a Teacher’s Training College in Zambia, I discovered ethnomusicology. I came to the University of Pittsburgh to do my doctorate in ethnomusicology, and one of my first seminars was in African American Music with Dr. Nathan Davis. Burleigh’s name was on the list of composers we could study, so I chose him for my project. I found so much in the Carnegie Library, including two 78 rpm recordings of his music: Nellie Melba singing “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” and an English soprano, Maggie Teyte, singing “Just You,” one of his art songs. I was delighted to discover that he had written many lovely art songs as well as spiritual arrangements, and I was hooked!
Burleigh’s grandson, Dr. Harry T. Burleigh II, was a veterinarian in Clarksburg, West Virginia, but I knew no one had gotten help from the family. Rollo Turner, one of my mentors in the Black Studies Department, said, “That doesn’t mean you can’t!” So I wrote to Dr. Burleigh. One Sunday afternoon the phone rang, and a voice said, “This is Harry Burleigh!” Dr. Burleigh and his wife were very helpful to me, and that made a big difference. I also had a great deal of help from Burleigh’s niece, Grace Blackwell, who lived in East Orange, New Jersey. She was very close to him in the last years of his life, and she told me wonderful stories that helped make him more human, not just the famous man, the public figure.
Since writing your book, have you discovered anything new about him or his music?
There’s always more to learn. I didn’t know that Burleigh write orchestrations of any of his songs, though some orchestrations of his art songs and spiritual arrangements were written by others. But in fact, he wrote orchestrations of several of his spiritual arrangements, and Lynne Foote, the co-founder and president of the Harry T. Burleigh Society in New York City, who is working on her doctorate at Oxford University in England, has just discovered an unfinished orchestration of “Oh, Didn’t It Rain” that we knew nothing about. We had a great Zooming time on Sunday talking about this and what else we might discover.
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