Black History: The Composer Did Not Get a Call Back

2/4/2016

Florence Beatrice Price (1887-1953)

It is Black History Month, which means I always learn something.

This Black History Month has caused me to re-think my position on the first woman, or women, who should be on an American bill. But first:

Three years ago, Terrance McKnight of WQXR-FM did a documentary on a composer I had never heard of, Florence B. Price.

The other night, PBS ran a visual documentary on Price, and by now her music was more familiar to me, ranging from traditional classical to black gospel.

One of the experts (mostly black, via Arkansas Public Television) compared her to one of my favorites, Antonin Dvorak, who used folk music (in the deepest sense of the phrase) of two worlds, Bohemia and America.

Artists generally have it hard, but black artists have it harder. The PBS documentary showed how Price was inspired by classical music but segregation and economics held her back. She always had to be double good. (Sound familiar?)

In one pathetic episode, already accomplished, Price wrote a letter to Serge Koussevitzky, the legendary director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, asking to compose for him, and she felt the need to call attention to being “Colored.” He never wrote back.

Yet she had her triumphs. Mainstream conductors and critics and performers took her seriously, notably in her adopted home town of Chicago.

In one of the great moments in American history, Marian Anderson performed at the Mall in front of the Lincoln Memorial, April 9, 1939, after Eleanor Roosevelt had forced the issue. Anderson sang a hymn by Florence B. Price, her friend.

In the Arkansas documentary, an elderly black woman recalls, half a century later, being young and seeing a black woman singing to 75,000 people. The old lady daubs her eyes with a handkerchief. I bet you will, too.

How hard it was, how hard it is, to be black in America. Just look at the dignity of people who have been poisoned in Flint, Mich., because of the incompetent and heartless regime of a latter-day plantation massa, Gov. Rick Snyder.

But there are triumphs. Look at the lovely front-page photo of President Obama, speaking at a mosque in Baltimore, calling for a cessation of prejudice, as children smile in awe. We have seen those smiles on black service members when Obama visits the troops and on black citizens when Obama goes out in public. So there is that.

But Black History Month reminds us how hard America has been on any black who aspired. That is why I am wavering in my position that Eleanor Roosevelt should be on a bill. I think she may be the greatest woman yet produced by the U.S.A., but her greatness may have been in her advocacy of the underprivileged, for people of all colors.

Now I think the next bill (lose Andrew Jackson off the 20, not Alexander Hamilton off the 10) should be a tribute to the great women of color in America.

Who? How many? I leave that to historians. But when that glorious bill arrives, somebody should play the classical music of Florence B. Price.

Below: The multitalented Terrance McKnight accompanies Erin Flannery in “To My Little Son,” by Florence B. Price:

Peter Kennedy link

2/4/2016 06:20:09 pm

Thanks, George, for this informative piece on Florence B. Price, and for your related comments on the black experience in America. (The NYT photos from the archives are amazing...) And then there's the opera great (Mary Violet) Leontyne Price. No relation, I assume, but interesting name connection.

George Vecsey

2/5/2016 09:22:32 am

Peter: Thanks, nice to hear from you.
Quick puttering on the web reveals no family link between the Prices.
But L. Price did sing some of F. Price's songs:

http://www.biography.com/people/florence-beatrice-price-21120681

Thanks for caring, GV

Kathleen McElroy

2/7/2016 05:17:53 pm

Highly informative. Sadly, I didn't know much about her. What is made invisible is very hard to remember. Heavy sigh. But now I'll look for her music.

George Vecsey

2/8/2016 08:10:37 am

Dear Kathleen: The one-hour program by Terrance McKnight would be a great primer.

http://www.wqxr.org/#!/story/271521-musical-biography-florence-beatrice-price/

Thanks for caring, and representing the ground-breaking McElroy Family so well.
G&M

Alan Rubin link

2/11/2016 05:18:11 pm

MCLA, Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, in North Adams, MA is celebrating Black History Month with an exhibition called “Black Lives Matter. It was initiated by their art department and will run for a month in MCLA’s store front gallery on Main Street.

Each art student involved in the project had to team up with someone of color for their projects. There were 33 participating artists from 17 states.

http://www.mcla.edu/About_MCLA/news_events/pressrelease/2016January/press-annoucnes-black-lives-matter

Mark Anthony Neal came up from Florida to attend the opening. He spoke very movingly of the importance of black art, the influence of prior art on today’s Afro-American community and how today’s art will affect those twenty years in the future.

He has an interesting web site New Black Man (in exile)

http://www.newblackmaninexile.net/

I was not aware of Florence B. Price, but that will quickly change. I was interesting that her music ranged from traditional classical to black gospel.

I was introduced to black gospel music by a gentle giant of a man who occasionally cleaned and waxed our apartment’s floors. I was about two and was fascinated by his deep booming voice. Although my taste in music over the next 80 years expanded to include all kinds, except rap, classical and folk music have always share equal billing.

Now, black gospel is accompanied by spirituals and music from the Mississippi Delta. A young woman interviewed and recorded many aging singers from the Mississippi Delta in order to preserve their culture. One old-timer commented, “If you have not lived it, you cannot sing it.”

I worked weekends and summers in my father’s retail appliance store in Manhattan while I was in high school. My responsibilities included selling in the store and helping on outside deliveries. I was positively influenced by several African-American workers that I worked with, both in the store and deliveries and service calls.

In addition to gaining retail work experience, I absorbed the cultural work ethic of rural North Carolina from them which has remained with me to this day. Years later I became an owner of the business my father started in 1934. Although I became their boss, I continued to learn from them through the eyes of an adult.

Although most of who I am today is a reflection of my family upbringing, there is a very strong rural African-American component to my ethics and how I view things.

Raymond Harding, who was the one I was most close to, exposed me to the psychology of dealing with people.

In the early days of TV when Manhattanites had difficulty getting Channel 5 from the Empire State Building and Channel 13 from Newark, NJ with rabbit ears, many customers opted for the expense of a a rood antenna.

Ray and I went on a service call for a man who was upset that he could not receive both Channel 5 and Channel 13 clearly with his new roof antenna. On the roof, Ray instructed me to sit and listen through the coax cable phone that was lowered down, and no matter what he said—I should not touch anything.

After fifteen minutes of being instructed to move the antenna right, left, back up a little more, etc.—ok tighten it up and come down, I was completely puzzled.

Later, Ray explained that all he did was gradually make the focus worse and then return it to its initial position. He explained that the man would never have been satisfied if he was told that nothing could be done, so he happily accepted the best reception that he could get.

It was one of Rays many lessons on human nature that resonated on a fifteen year old. Years later, as an older and possibly wiser adult, I’ve often wondered if the customer accepted what was happening and was pleased that someone tried to help.

Another time on a service call in NJ we were given a tip of a box of thick black artist’s pencils which had the string you pulled to peel off some of the wrapping. Ray later said that it was not the value of the tip but the thought that counts. I was disappointed years later when I used up the last of the pencils.

Once Ray surprised me by telling a customer to keep her penny change for a tip by telling her, “You need it more than we do”. He was right as no tip would have been better.

Ray’s views on racial relations were also enlightening. As a teenager, he was stopped while driving at night without a license by the local police chief, a very powerful person in the community. The next morning he was surprised that the chief helped him obtain his license.

Ray’s take on racism was that he had more personal freedom in the north, but he knew where he stood in the south. To him, racism in the north was more subtle and not always visible.

In today’s climate of economic inequality, an alarming indifference to needs and wellbeing of minorities, much of it the product of racism, I am dismaye

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Comments are closed.

QUOTES

Measuring Covid Deaths, by David Leonhardt. July 17, 2023. NYT online.
The United States has reached a milestone in the long struggle against Covid: The total number of Americans dying each day — from any cause — is no longer historically abnormal….

After three horrific years, in which Covid has killed more than one million Americans and transformed parts of daily life, the virus has turned into an ordinary illness.

The progress stems mostly from three factors:
First, about three-quarters of U.S. adults have received at least one vaccine shot.
Second, more than three-quarters of Americans have been infected with Covid, providing natural immunity from future symptoms. (About 97 percent of adults fall into at least one of those first two categories.)
Third, post-infection treatments like Paxlovid, which can reduce the severity of symptoms, became widely available last year.
“Nearly every death is preventable,” Dr. Ashish Jha, who was until recently President Biden’s top Covid adviser, told me. “We are at a point where almost everybody who’s up to date on their vaccines and gets treated if they have Covid, they rarely end up in the hospital, they almost never die.”

That is also true for most high-risk people, Jha pointed out, including older adults — like his parents, who are in their 80s — and people whose immune systems are compromised. “Even for most — not all but most —immuno-compromised people, vaccines are actually still quite effective at preventing against serious illness,” he said. “There has been a lot of bad information out there that somehow if you’re immuno-compromised that vaccines don’t work.”

That excess deaths have fallen close to zero helps make this point: If Covid were still a dire threat to large numbers of people, that would show up in the data.

One point of confusion, I think, has been the way that many Americans — including we in the media — have talked about the immuno-compromised. They are a more diverse group than casual discussion often imagines.

Most immuno-compromised people are at little additional risk from Covid — even people with serious conditions, such as multiple sclerosis or a history of many cancers. A much smaller group, such as people who have received kidney transplants or are undergoing active chemotherapy, face higher risks.

Covid’s toll, to be clear, has not fallen to zero. The C.D.C.’s main Covid webpage estimates that about 80 people per day have been dying from the virus in recent weeks, which is equal to about 1 percent of overall daily deaths.

The official number is probably an exaggeration because it includes some people who had virus when they died even though it was not the underlying cause of death. Other C.D.C. data suggests that almost one-third of official recent Covid deaths have fallen into this category. A study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases came to similar conclusions.

Dr. Shira Doron, the chief infection control officer at Tufts Medicine in Massachusetts, told me that “age is clearly the most substantial risk factor.” Covid’s victims are both older and disproportionately unvaccinated. Given the politics of vaccination, the recent victims are also disproportionately
Republican and white.

Each of these deaths is a tragedy. The deaths that were preventable — because somebody had not received available vaccines and treatments — seem particularly tragic. (Here’s a Times guide to help you think about when to get your next booster shot.)
***

From the great Maureen Dowd:

As I write this, I’m in a deserted newsroom in The Times’s D.C. office. After working at home for two years during Covid, I was elated to get back, so I could wander around and pick up the latest scoop.
But in the last year, there has been only a smattering of people whenever I’m here, with row upon row of empty desks. Sometimes a larger group gets lured in for a meeting with a platter of bagels."

--- Dowd writes about the lost world of journalists clustered in newsrooms at all hours, smoking, drinking, gossipping, making phone calls, typing, editing.
***
"Putting out the paper," we called it.
Much more than nostalgia.
---https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/29/opinion/journalism-newsroom.html

Black History: The Composer Did Not Get a Call Back

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