A man of many “firsts,” William Grant Still is hailed as “the Dean of African American Composers” for his laundry list of achievements. Still was born in the small town of Woodville, Mississippi, on the 11th of May, 1895, but his mother moved to Little Rock with her infant son shortly after the death of her husband in late 1895. Still and his mother lived with his grandmother, and his mother worked as a teacher. In 1904, Still’s mother married a railway postal clerk, Charles Benjamin Shepperson. William's interest in music was cultivated by his stepfather, who took him to operettas and bought him recordings of classical music. With Shepperson’s support, he studied violin in 1908 with American violinist William Price, who lived for a short time in Little Rock.
William grew up listening to his grandmother tell stories about her life as a slave on a plantation in Georgia. And he also grew up hearing her sing spirituals that she learned as a child. Later on, those stories and spirituals found their way into his music. Still attended M. W. Gibbs High School in Little Rock and graduated in 1911 as class valedictorian. In 1911, Still entered Wilberforce University in Ohio where he planned to study medicine to please his mother but was lured away by his love for music. There he was also greatly influenced by the Afro-English composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. Still became a member of Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity. At Wilberforce he played in the string quartet and conducted the university's band and started his first attempts at composition and orchestration.
He left Wilberforce University in 1915 without graduating, but completely set on a career in music, began to work as a freelance performer and arranger for many of the top bands in the Ohio region. In 1916, Still was in Memphis, Tennessee, where he met blues musician W. C. Handy, “the father of the Blues", who provided Still with the opportunity to arrange, publish and perform with his band. For a while he toured with the legendary bandleader, arranging some of Handy’s hits like “St. Louis Blues”. Still and Handy became lifelong friends. The next year when he reached 21, William Grant Still entered the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Ohio to pursue a formal education in music. In 1918, Still joined the U.S Navy to serve in World War I. He served as a mess hall attendant and violinist for officers’ meals. He returned to Oberlin after his discharge where he studied theory and counterpoint, but did not receive a degree.
In 1919, he moved to Harlem in New York City, where he worked for the Pace and Handy Music Publishing Company and started writing arrangements for bands and playing in pit orchestras on Broadway. During his time in Harlem, Still was involved with other important cultural figures of the Harlem Renaissance such as Langston Hughes, Alain Locke, Arna Bontemps, and Countee Cullen, and is considered to be part of that movement. He recorded with Fletcher Henderson's Dance Orchestra in 1921, and later played in the pit orchestra for Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake's musical, "Shuffle Along". He also played in other pit orchestras for Sophie Tucker, Artie Shaw, and Paul Whiteman. Under Henderson, he joined Pace Phonograph Company, known as Black Swan Records.
Later in the 1920s, Still served as the arranger of Yamekraw, a "Negro Rhapsody", composed by the Harlem stride pianist, James P. Johnson. Along the way, he studied music with George Whitefield Chadwick, director of the New England Conservatory of Music, and Edgard Varese, the French modernist. These diverse experiences provided Still with professional contacts and valuable insight to performing, arranging, orchestrating, and composing popular and symphonic music. Soon a flood of works ensued, his other noteworthy compositions include, "From the Black Belt" (1926), "From the Land of Dreams" (1924), "Darker America" (1924–1925), "From the Journal of a Wanderer" (1924), "La Guiablesse" (1926–1927), and "Levee Land" (1925).
Still’s concern with the position of African Americans in U.S. society is reflected in many of his works. Notably the "Afro-American Symphony", the ballets Sahdji (1930), set in Africa and composed after extensive study of African music, and Lenox Avenue (1937). He was the first African American to conduct a major American orchestra in a performance of his own works. Though a prolific composer of operas, ballets, symphonies, and other works, he was best known for his "Afro-American Symphony". Still indicated that his intent was to reflect untutored musical characteristics of Black “sons of the soil,” hence the blues and spiritual (but not jazz) elements that thoroughly inform the work. Each of the four movements is associated with excerpts from poems by the important Black poet, Paul Laurence Dunbar, cast in dialect. Dunbar's poetry reflected the powerful voice of that Black experience that Still was looking for.
"Afro-American Symphony", was premiered by the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra in 1931 under the direction of Howard Hanson. Since the 1931 premiere of the Afro-American Symphony, Still’s multifarious style has gone on to influence even non-classical music. It was also performed by the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall in 1935. "Afro-American Symphony" included a banjo in the orchestra and featured syncopated rhythms that tended to portray Blacks with traditional, simple lives. For the same reason, he kept harmonies simple and dissonance tightly in check. Since the premiere of the Afro-American Symphony, Still’s multifarious style has gone on to influence even non-classical music. By the end of World War II the piece had been performed in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Berlin, Paris, and London. Until 1950 the symphony was arguably the most popular of any composed by an American to that time.
While living in New York, Still met Paul Whiteman, whom he had played in his pit orchestras, back in the early 1920's. Whiteman hired him to arrange music. When Whiteman took his orchestra to Hollywood, California, in May 1929, Still went, too. During the course of a year, Still completed more than 100 arrangements for Whiteman. Whiteman later commissioned Still to create original compositions, including "A Deserted Plantation" (1933), "Beyond Tomorrow" (1936), "Land of Superstition" (1933), "Ebon Chronicle" (1934), "Down Yonder" (1935), and "Blues from Lennox Avenue" (1937). In 1934, Still moved to Los Angeles, along the way defeating the racial stereotypes and straddling his two worlds. He composed music for films alongside his classical works, helping shape a style that other composers and arrangers used for scoring films and popular music. In was in Los Angeles, where he received his first Guggenheim Fellowship and started work on the first of his eight operas, Blue Steel.
The 1930s and 1940s proved to be quite successful for Still, as major orchestras increasingly performed his compositions. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra performed "La Guiablesse", written for the ballet, on June 16, 1933. On November 20, 1935, the New York Philharmonic performed Still’s "Afro-American Symphony" at Carnegie Hall. Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Symphony premiered his "Symphony in G Minor" on December 10, 1937. Still wrote the theme music for the 1939–1940 New York World’s Fair. Several of Still’s works of the 1940s were rooted in serious events of the day and gained wide renown. His 1940 choral cantata with narrator, And They Lynched Him on a Tree, evoked the violence directed at the Southern Black population. The New York Philharmonic first performed "And They Lynched Him on a Tree" on June 24, 1940, at Lewisohn Stadium.
His work in the world of commercial music lasted throughout his career including film scoring (largely uncredited) while living in Los Angeles during the 1930s. Still veered from classical music into the popular music of the era derived from Black culture, namely ragtime, jazz, and blues. During this time, Still also made history when, in 1936 he conducted the Los Angeles Philharmonic. He was the first African American to conduct a major American orchestra in a performance of his own works. William Grant Still contributed prolifically to American music, arranging pop and film music, and playing in pit bands and for recordings. These included "Pennies from Heaven" and "Lost Horizon". For "Lost Horizon", he arranged the music of Dimitri Tiomkin.
On February 6, 1939, he married his second wife, Verna Arvey in Mexico who was of Russian-Jewish decent. Still, was often compared to George Gershwin. Gershwin and Still were mutually respectful of each other, with Still's wife remembering the latter's attendance at a performance of her husband's orchestral suite "Levee Land" in 1925. He in turn was supportive of Gershwin's Porgy and Bess, although he later noted that "white imitations of Negro music will always be superficial." Still was also hired to arrange the music for the 1943 film Stormy Weather. The movie starred some of the leading Black performers of the day, including Bill “Bo Jangles” Robinson and Cab Calloway, but left the assignment because, quote "Twentieth-Century Fox degraded colored people".
He was awarded the Jubilee Prize of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra for the Best Overture, his “Festive Overture,” in 1944. His opera "Troubled Island" with libretto by Langston Hughes premiered at the New York City Opera in 1949. It was the first by an African American to be performed by a major opera company. Troubled Island’s opening night was a huge success, with ecstatic curtain calls over “a flood of applause.” Nevertheless, critics were surprisingly negative in their reception, which greatly upset Still. That same opera was the first by an African American to be nationally televised. In 1953, a Freedoms Foundation Award came to him for his "To You, America!" which honored West Points Sesquicentennial Celebration. In 1955 he conducted the New Orleans Philharmonic Orchestra. On that historic occasion he became the first African American to conduct a major orchestra in the Deep South. Still’s works were performed internationally by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, the London Symphony Orchestra, the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra, and the BBC Orchestra.
This musician, composer, and instrumentalist was blessed with more fame than any other African-American of his time. His works included five symphonies, four ballets, nine operas, over thirty choral works, plus art songs, chamber music and works for solo instruments. Together, they number almost 200 pieces. William Grant Still, a musical legend of the 1900’s, created a beat of his own in the music world. He received an honor for Outstanding Service to American Music from the National Association for American Composers and Conductors, and had a raft of honorary doctorates to his name. These institutions include, Wilberforce University in 1936; Howard University in 1941; Oberlin College in 1947; Bates College in 1954; and the University of Southern California in 1975.
He was inducted into the American Classical Music Hall of Fame in 1999. Still used unique African American styles in his compositions that distinguished his work. He preferred "simple, commercial harmonies and orchestration, executed with the highest professionalism and seriousness of purpose". During his stellar career, William Grant Still became not only a leading Black composer, but a leading American composer. He felt that music—his or anyone’s—should lift up people of all countries, colors, and races. He was once quoted "I don't know what people mean by 'Black music'. Are they saying that Negroes can only write music in a certain way?" Columbia Records released a new recording of Still's Afro-American Symphony in 1974. The next year, Still was honored on his 80th birthday at the University of Southern California with a program of his works. In 1977, Opera Ebony revived Still's two-act opera Highway 1 USA in New York. Still’s health began to decline in the mid 1970's and he spent his last years in a convalescent home and died in Los Angeles in December of 1978.
— first African-American to conduct a major American symphony orchestra
— first to have a symphony (his First Symphony) performed by a leading orchestra
— first to have a grand opera performed by a major opera company
— first to have an opera performed on national television
— first to conduct a major symphony orchestra, the New Orleans Philharmonic, in the Deep South