William Levi Dawson ran away from home in 1912 to study music at the Tuskegee Institute. Working through school as a music librarian… and a laborer on the Agriculture Department farm… he was a member of the Institute’s band and orchestra, as well as composing and touring with the Tuskegee Singers. Finishing at Tuskegee, he moved north to the Chicago Musical College and the American Conservatory of Music, while playing first trombone for the Civic Orchestra of Chicago.
Dawson began a teaching career, first in Kansas City, but then returning to Tuskegee in 1931 where he organized and directed the School of Music. He also founded and conducted the Tuskegee Institute Choir, which traveled the world, singing for two Presidents and all three major radio networks.
As a composer, most of Dawson’s best-known works are arrangements of traditional spirituals, still frequently performed by school choirs across the nation. But chamber and orchestral music were also part of his language, most notably his Negro Folk Symphony of 1934.
Premiered by Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra, the well-received symphony put Dawson on the concert hall map. He would revise it in the 1950’s after a trip to West Africa, saying that his work was “symbolic of the link uniting Africa and her rich heritage with her descendants in America.”
After a brief flurry of performances, though, the symphony would suffer a common fate of many major works by black composers… it disappeared from concert programs, until a revival in the last two decades.
After a long career at Tuskegee and a longer retirement, Dawson died aged 90 in 1990.
William Levi Dawson… Classically Black.
