Margaret Bonds

Margaret Allison Bonds was born on the third of March 1913 at Chicago, Illinois, the daughter of Monroe Alpheus Majors — a physician and one of the principal Black medical authors of the late nineteenth century — and Estella Bonds, a piano teacher and the founding member of the National Association of Negro Musicians. The Bonds household at the Garfield Boulevard at Chicago was a salon for the Black musical Chicago of the inter-war period — Florence Price (placed in this archive), William Grant Still (placed in this archive), and Langston Hughes (placed in this archive) were frequent guests.

She was placed at five at the piano under her mother and at fifteen under Florence Price directly. She entered the Northwestern University at sixteen in 1929 — among the first Black students in the Northwestern music department — and completed the Bachelor of Music in 1933 and the Master of Music in 1934 under Florence Galajikian.

She appeared on the twelfth of June 1933 as the piano soloist in the John Alden Carpenter Concertino with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under Frederick Stock at the Auditorium Theatre — the same Century of Progress International Exposition concert that premiered the Price Symphony No. 1 in E minor.

She moved to New York in 1939 and entered the orbit of the Harlem Renaissance. She set across the following thirty years over forty Langston Hughes texts to music — among them the cycle Three Dream Portraits (1959), the cantata Ballad of the Brown King (1954) on a Christmas libretto by Hughes, and the cycle The Negro Speaks of Rivers (1942).

She completed in 1965 the orchestral arrangement of Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho, performed in 1966 by the New York Philharmonic under Leopold Stokowski on the Concert for the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. (placed in this archive) at the Riverside Church.

She moved to Los Angeles in 1967 to take charge of the music department of the Inner City Repertory Theatre.

She died at Los Angeles on the twenty-sixth of April 1972 of a heart attack, at fifty-nine.

She is honored here as the principal musical collaborator of Langston Hughes.