Justin Holland

Justin Holland was born on the twenty-sixth of July 1819 in Norfolk County, Virginia, the son of free Black parents of the Virginia tidewater. His father, Exum Holland, worked the land as a farmer at a time when free Black families in the South held their liberty and their acres against a hostile order. Holland showed an early gift for music, and after the loss of his parents he set out northward, arriving in Boston in the mid-1830s to make his own way.

In Boston he took up the guitar in earnest, studying under skilled teachers and immersing himself in the European classical tradition — flute and piano among his studies as well. Seeking the education so rarely open to men of his people, he entered the Oberlin Collegiate Institute in Ohio in 1841, one of the few institutions of its day to welcome African American students. Around 1845 he settled in Cleveland, where he built his life's work as a teacher, performer, and arranger of the guitar.

Holland became the foremost American guitarist of the nineteenth century. He is credited with dozens of original works and hundreds of published arrangements, and above all with his celebrated pedagogical volumes — the Comprehensive Method for the Guitar (1874) and a companion Modern Method — hailed by critics as the finest instruction of their kind produced in America. Through them, generations of players learned the instrument in a rigorous classical hand.

He was equally a man of conscience. He aided the Underground Railroad, served as secretary of the Colored Americans of Cleveland, took part in the National and State Negro Conventions between 1848 and 1854 alongside Frederick Douglass, and labored to win international recognition for Prince Hall Masonry when American lodges refused it. He died at his son's home in New Orleans on the twenty-fourth of March 1887. We honor Justin Holland — a master who taught a nation to play, and a free man who never ceased to labor for the freedom of others.