Harry Burleigh
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Harry Thacker Burleigh (December 2, 1866–December 12, 1949), a baritone, was an African American classical composer, and a professional singer. Burleigh was born in Erie, Pennsylvania. He attended Jeannette Thurber's National Conservatory of Music, where he assisted the Czech composer Antonín Dvořák. Most of the work that Burleigh did for Dvořák was copy work. That is, Burleigh was the man who took the manuscript copy of Dvořák's 9th symphony, and copied out the parts for various instruments. Burleigh had been trained as a stenographer while still in Erie. However, Burleigh's role in introducing Dvořák to African American folk music was substantial.
Burleigh's most stable occupation, throughout his life, was as a soloist for St. George's Episcopal church in New York City. Significantly, this church was attended by white people, and in the 1890s, when they hired Burleigh, other New York Episcopal churches for whites had forbidden black people to worship in the church. St. George's was a wealthy congregation attended by many elite New Yorkers. During his long tenure as a soloist there, Burleigh became close to many of the members, most notably J. P. Morgan, who cast the deciding vote to hire Burleigh.
In the late 1890s, Burleigh gained a reputation as a concert soloist, singing art songs, opera selections, as well as African American folk songs. He also began to publish his own versions of art songs. By the late 1910s, Burleigh was one of America's best-known composers of art songs. Beginning around 1910, Burleigh began to be a music editor for G. Ricordi, an Italian music publisher that had offices in New York. Although, after publishing several versions of "Deep River" in 1916 and 1917, Burleigh became known for his arrangements of the spiritual for voice and piano.
Burleigh's best-known compositions are his arrangements of these spirituals, as art songs. They were so popular during the late 1910s and 1920s, that almost no vocal recitalist gave a concert in a major city without occasionally singing them. In many ways, the popularity of Burleigh's settings contributed to an explosion of popularity for the genre during the 1920s.
During an interview in 1924, Burleigh said:
- . . . In Negro spirituals my race has pure gold, and they should be taken as the Negro's contribution to artistic possessions. In them we show a spiritual security as old as the ages.
Through the 1920s and 1930s, Burleigh continued to promote the spirituals through publications, lectures, and arrangements. His life-long advocacy for the spiritual eclipsed his singing career, and his arrangements of art songs. With the success of Roland Hayes, Marian Anderson, and Paul Robeson, among others, his seminal role in carving out a place on America's recitals had been eclipsed. His many popular art songs from the early twentieth century have often been out of print since the composer's death. Nevertheless, Burleigh's position as one of America's most important composers from the early twentieth century remains.
