Undine Smith Moore

Undine Eliza Anna Smith was born on the twenty-fifth of August 1904 at Jarratt, Virginia, the youngest of three children of James William Smith, a brakeman for the Norfolk and Western Railroad, and Hardie Turnbull Smith. She was a granddaughter of the enslaved, and the singing and prayer she heard at Morningstar Baptist Church would echo through her life's work. When she was four the family moved to Petersburg, where her gifts at the keyboard emerged early.

She began piano at seven under Lillian Allen Darden, who guided her to Fisk University. There she studied piano, organ, and theory, and in 1924 she became the first Fisk student ever awarded a scholarship by the Juilliard School. She later earned a master's degree and professional diploma from Columbia University's Teachers College and studied composition at the Manhattan School of Music.

In 1927 she joined the faculty of Virginia State College in Petersburg, where for four decades she taught piano, organ, counterpoint, and theory, renowned as a teacher who called teaching itself an art. In 1969, with Altona Trent Johns, she co-founded and co-directed the college's Black Music Center. Her catalog, rooted in the spiritual and centered on the voice, culminated in the oratorio Scenes from the Life of a Martyr, drawn from the life of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and premiered in 1981; it was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.

Honored as music laureate of Virginia and called the Dean of Black Women Composers, she died in Petersburg on the sixth of February 1989. May the songs she taught and the melodies she gathered from her people continue to be lifted by voices for generations to come.