1866–1949 · United States · 20th century
Harry Burleigh (1866–1949) was an American composer, arranger and baritone from Erie, Pennsylvania. He arranged spirituals for voice and piano, which brought them into the repertoire of classically trained performers. Burleigh also wrote songs of his own. The site offers his sheet music for voice and piano.
Henry Thacker Burleigh, known as Harry, came into the world in 1866 in Erie, Pennsylvania. His parents were Elizabeth Burleigh and Henry Thacker. His mother's father, Hamilton Waters, gained his freedom from slavery in Maryland in 1832 by paying 55 dollars for himself and his mother, and in 1835 he was handed his freedom papers. Harry's mother, Elizabeth, finished her studies at Pittsburgh's Avery College in 1855. The Erie public schools would not take her as a teacher, yet for many years she taught at a school for Black children.
His father, Henry Thacker Burleigh Sr., was a Civil War navy veteran who in 1871 became the first Black man to serve as a juror in Erie County. He died in 1873, and in 1875 Elizabeth married again, to John Elmendorf, who had also served in the Union navy. Harry helped keep the family afloat: he lit gas street lamps, sold newspapers, worked as a printer's apprentice, drove a coach, and was a steward aboard steamboats on Lake Erie. While still at school he also trained as an accountant at Clark's Business College.
His grandfather had a lovely voice and taught Harry and his brother Reginald old spirituals and songs from the days of slavery. Harry also took singing lessons from George Brierly, a church musician from England. During his school years and afterwards he became one of the most accomplished classical singers in Erie: several city churches and the synagogue engaged him as soloist; he also sang at community and civic celebrations too.
Harry's mother did part-time work for Elizabeth Russell, who loved music and held recitals at her home. Harry stood outside the house in the snow to hear a recital by the Hungarian pianist Rafael Joseffy and fell ill afterwards. His mother then asked Russell to take him on as a doorman. That gave him the chance to hear famous musicians, among them the Venezuelan pianist Teresa Carreño and the Italian tenor Italo Campanini.
In January 1892 Burleigh won a scholarship to New York's National Conservatory of Music; two hundred people competed for it and only four were awarded one. Frances MacDowell, the mother of the composer Edward MacDowell, helped him. To make ends meet while studying, Burleigh did odd jobs for her around the house, and later he played double bass in the conservatory orchestra.
His composition teachers there were Max Spicker, Christian Fritsch, John White and Rubin Goldmark. He completed the course in 1896 and later taught at the conservatory himself.
The conservatory was run by the Czech composer Antonín Dvořák. The story goes that he noticed Burleigh when the young man sang spirituals while cleaning the corridors, and asked him to sing for him. Burleigh himself said that he often sang the songs of Black Americans to Dvořák. Dvořák believed that the music of Black Americans would form the foundation of an American classical music.
Dvořák took the pentatonic scale from Black American melodies and Native American music. The scale shows up here and there in the symphony From the New World, while each movement of his American String Quartet opens with it. In 1893 Burleigh helped Dvořák copy out the instrumental parts of the symphony. The next year he sang in Dvořák's arrangement of Stephen Foster's song Old Folks at Home.
Burleigh began his career as a singer as the baritone of a family quartet. He joined New York's St. George's Episcopal Church as a soloist in 1894. Some parishioners objected to hiring Burleigh because of his race: the church was for white worshippers only. The deciding vote in favour of hiring him was cast by J. P. Morgan, then a member of the church. Burleigh stayed there for 52 years and left in 1946. He played an important part in establishing the church's annual May service of spirituals, held from 1924 to 1955.
By the late 1890s Burleigh had made a name as a concert soloist, performing art songs, opera arias and African-American folk songs. In 1908 he sang in London for King Edward VII. From 1900 to 1925 he also sang in the choir of Temple Emanu-El in New York, its sole African American. Burleigh disliked making recordings: a recording from 1919 is known, while one made at St. George's in 1944 has never been found.
In the late 1890s Burleigh started issuing his own settings of art songs, and from about 1898 he wrote songs of his own. By the end of the 1910s he was among the best-known art-song composers in America. In the 1910s he also edited music for the New York office of the Italian publisher Ricordi.
Several versions of the spiritual "Deep River" came out under his name in 1916 and 1917, and he soon became famous for spiritual arrangements for voice and piano. Thanks to them, spirituals became a popular genre among concert singers. His arrangements and sentimental songs were sung so often that hardly any vocal recital in a large city went by without one of them now and then. The tenor John McCormack performed several of Burleigh's songs, among them "Little Mother of Mine" (1917). Besides songs, Burleigh set poems by Walt Whitman and published pieces for piano and violin.
By estimates, he wrote between 200 and 300 songs of his own. In 1914 he was among the founders of ASCAP, the American society for composers, authors and publishers, and in 1941 he joined its board.
In the 1920s and 1930s Burleigh kept promoting spirituals, through published arrangements and lectures. In the end this work overshadowed both his singing career and his art-song arrangements. In 1946 illness forced him to leave his church post, and his son took him off Long Island to a care home in Stamford, Connecticut. There he died of heart failure on 12 September 1949, aged 82. More than two thousand people attended the funeral at St. George's Church, and he was buried in Erie.
In 1917 Burleigh was awarded the Spingarn Medal, which the NAACP gives each year to African Americans for outstanding achievement. Howard University and Atlanta University also gave him honorary degrees. In 1928 Cheyney State Teachers College in Pennsylvania (now Cheyney University) built a men's dormitory named Harry T. Burleigh Hall; it was later renovated and now houses offices.
On 12 September 2021, at the south-east corner of East 16th Street and Third Avenue, Manhattan, a ceremony took place marking a second name for a street: Harry T. Burleigh Place.
Burleigh's spiritual arrangements for voice and piano made these songs available to classically trained singers. He was the first Black composer to play a major role in the growth of a characteristically American music. Besides his spiritual arrangements he wrote art songs, and he also published works for violin and piano, among them Six Plantation Melodies of 1901. The popularity of his settings contributed to a surge of interest in the genre in the 1920s. In the late 1910s and the 1920s his arrangements and sentimental songs were heard so often that vocal recitalists in big cities seldom left them out of their programmes.
Among his songs are settings of poems by Frank Lebby Stanton, Martha Dickinson Bianchi, Robert Burns, James Weldon Johnson, Walt Whitman, Laurence Hope and Langston Hughes. Examples include "Just Awearyin’ for You" (1894), "Waiting" (1904), "I Love My Jean" (1914), "The Young Warrior" (1916), "Ethiopia Saluting the Colors" (1916), "Five Songs" (1919) and "Lovely Dark and Lonely One" (1935). Estimates put his original songs at 200 to 300.
The tenor John McCormack put several Burleigh songs into his concert repertoire: "In the Great Somewhere" (1919), "Little Mother of Mine" (1917), "Under a Blazing Star" (1918) and "Dear Old Pal of Mine" (1918). As Roland Hayes, Marian Anderson and Paul Robeson rose to fame, many of them his pupils, Burleigh's own part in bringing African-American soloists to recital platforms across the country seemed to fade. When Karen Parks released an album of his works in 2008, titled "Nobody Knows: Songs of Harry T. Burleigh", it entered Billboard's chart for traditional classical albums at number two.
His arrangements entered church life as well: one of them, the hymn tune "McKee", sung to the words "In Christ There Is No East or West", is part of the Episcopal Church's 1982 Hymnal, and other arrangements of his can be found in alternative hymnals such as "Lift Every Voice and Sing". Many of his early twentieth-century songs have frequently gone unreprinted since his death, yet he is still among the most important American composers of his time.
The site presents eight of Burleigh's pieces for voice and piano. Four are marked at the "Intermediate+" level: "Kashmiri Song", "Till I Wake", "Go down, Moses" and "Nobody Knows de Trouble I’ve Seen". These are the best place to start. The other four, "The Jungle Flower", "Among the Fuchsias", "Ethiopia Saluting the Colors" and "Worth While", are at the "Advanced" level and suit a later stage.