Harry T. Burleigh

Henry Thacker Burleigh was born on the second of December 1866 at Erie, Pennsylvania, the son of Henry Thacker Burleigh Sr. — a Civil War veteran of the Union Army — and Elizabeth Waters Burleigh, a domestic worker and the daughter of Hamilton Waters, a formerly enslaved man of Maryland. He was raised hearing his grandfather Hamilton Waters sing the spirituals of the Maryland plantation in the Erie household.

He was placed at twenty-six in 1892 at the new National Conservatory of Music of America in New York on a working scholarship — the conservatory’s founder Jeannette Thurber had opened the institution to applicants regardless of race. He came at the start of his conservatory tenure under the supervision of the Czech composer Antonín Dvořák — who had arrived at New York in September 1892 as the conservatory’s director — and served as Dvořák’s informal assistant across the following two years.

He sang the spirituals of his grandfather to Dvořák through the winter of 1893 — the period during which Dvořák was composing the Symphony No. 9 in E minor From the New World — and the encounter became one of the principal sources of the Symphony’s thematic material. He was appointed in 1894 baritone soloist of Saint George’s Episcopal Church at Manhattan, a position he held for fifty-two years until 1946.

He published in 1916 his concert arrangement of Deep River — the first published concert art-song setting of an African American spiritual in the European art-song tradition. He composed across the following thirty years over two hundred art-song settings of spirituals — among them Wade in the Water, Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child, and Steal Away — which entered the standard concert repertoire of the inter-war American song recital.

He died at Stamford, Connecticut on the twelfth of September 1949, at eighty-two.

He is honored here as the principal converter of the spiritual into the concert art-song.