Composer William Levi Dawson and his enduring connections to Chicago

Four years after William Grant Still’s Afro-American Symphony debuted in 1930, becoming the first work in the form written by a Black composer, conductor Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra premiered William L. Dawson’s Negro Folk Symphony. Dawson (1899-1990), an alumnus of the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, composed the work in Chicago.

The Philadelphia Orchestra went on to perform Dawson’s work six days later in New York’s Carnegie Hall, and the newly formed Birmingham (Alabama) Symphony Orchestra presented it in April 1935. But aside from a little-noticed recording by the American Symphony Orchestra in 1963, the piece receded from view, in part due to racial prejudice.

But starting with a recording by the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra in June 2020 and later performances by American orchestras such as the Seattle Symphony and Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Negro Folk Symphony is making a comeback.

That revival will continue Jan. 7-8 when Principal Conductor Ken-David Masur and the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s training orchestra, present the work as part of a program titled New World Perspectives, performed at the South Shore Cultural Center (Jan. 7) and Orchestra Hall (Jan. 8).

The performance will not only celebrate the 125th anniversary of Dawson’s birth in Anniston, Alabama, but it will also pay tribute to the composer’s stint with the Civic Orchestra as a trombonist in 1927-1930. He came to the Windy City to study at the Chicago Musical College (now a division of Roosevelt University) and the now-defunct American Conservatory of Music, where he earned his master’s degree. 

The Negro Folk Symphony will be coupled with Antonín Dvořák’s ever-popular Symphony No. 9 (From the New World). The pairing makes sense because during the Czech composer’s celebrated trip to the United States in 1892-95, he exhorted this country’s composers to find their distinctive voice by drawing on Black American and Native American folk melodies. Dawson took those words to heart when he set about writing his Dvořák-influenced symphony.

“He wanted the world to know that a Black man had composed a symphony,” said Mark Hugh Malone, author of William Levi Dawson: American Music Educator, a book published in March 2023 by the University Press of Mississippi. “If you look at it, it’s a lot in the structure of that Dvořákian type of influence in terms of writing an extended piece of music.

“He is quoted as saying, ‘I wanted the world to know that an African American, a Black man, had composed a symphony.’ So he included the word ‘Negro.’ In his day, he refused to say Black or African American, because he believed that ‘Negro’ was the word for his race in all the Romance languages, so he preferred ‘Negro.’ ”

From December 1952 through February 1953, Dawson traveled to Africa and made more than 140 recordings of African folk music, using a portable reel-to-reel tape recorder. According to Malone, he was so affected by what he heard that he revised some of the percussion parts of the Folk Symphony so that they “more significantly spoke of his missing link to Africa.”

As the subtitle of Malone’s book suggests, Dawson spent much of his life in music education, beginning his teaching career in the Kansas City (Missouri) public school system. In 1931, he became the first director of the newly established School of Music at Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University), where he had studied previously in a pre-college program. In his position, Dawson led the school’s long-existing choir and developed it into a national powerhouse that was invited to perform in 1933 as part of a monthlong series of festivities marking the opening of Radio City Music Hall in New York City. It also appeared at Carnegie Hall and the White House. Dawson remained at the Tuskegee Institute through 1955.

Malone, now an educational consultant based in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, began to study Dawson and his music in the late 1970s when he was looking for a subject for his doctoral dissertation while pursuing music education at Florida State University. He was an admirer of Dawson’s choral arrangements of spirituals, which are the composer’s best-known works. The composer began working on these arrangements when he was director of music at Kansas City’s Lincoln High School in 1922-1925, starting with King Jesus Is A-Listening and My Lord What a Mourning. After the Lincoln High School choir debuted them at a national music conference, Malone said, music publishers swarmed Dawson to get the rights.

The then-budding musicologist learned that Dawson was living in Tuskegee, Alabama, and he wrote to the composer, who consented to a series of five interviews over the subsequent two years. Those sessions became a key a component of Malone’s 1981 dissertation, which was the first extended text about the composer.

After more than 40 years of teaching and leading choirs at three universities in Mississippi, Malone returned to the subject of Dawson. Using his dissertation as a starting point, he conducted additional research at the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library at Emory University in Atlanta, which houses Dawson’s archives, and went on to produce his book. “What was good about waiting,” he said, “is that more comes to light.”

An excerpt from William Levi Dawson: American Music Educator, about the composer’s Negro Folk Symphony:

Dawson’s work was titled Negro Folk Symphony and was subtitled The Missing Link. Dawson, in interviews, explained his idea that “a link was taken out of a human chain when the first African was taken from the shores of his native land and sent into slavery.” Hence, the first movement is called “The Bond of Africa.” The missing link is represented by a motive played by the French horn, sounded in the introduction. This important musical idea recurs in the two successive movements and is the thread that unites the movements of the work. Of the two main themes in the opening movement, the first is original material, while the second is based on the Negro folk song “Oh, M’ Lit’l’ Soul Gwine-A Shine.”

The second movement, “Hope in the Night,” uses various techniques to accomplish programmatic effects. For example, the movement opens with three gong strokes, suggesting the Christian concept of the Holy Trinity — God the Father, Jesus the Son and the Holy Spirit — which guides man’s fate. A steady harmonic backdrop utilizing pizzicato strings depicts the wearisome life of slaves in bondage for over two centuries. Instrumental color and dynamics reflect the slaves’ desire for freedom yet reinforce the helplessness of their plight. Tolling bells bring a mood of grief and lament that is followed by the return of three gong strokes and the dying away of the drums that sound a monotonous cadence. Two other Negro folk songs form the subjects for movement three, which is titled “O Le’ Me Shine!” The settings of the melodies, “O Le’ Me Shine Lik’ a Mornin’ Star” and “Hallelujah, Lord, I Been Down Into the Sea” provide the delightful mirth that exudes from the finale.