William Levi Dawson

William Levi Dawson was born on the twenty-sixth of September 1899 at Anniston, Alabama, the eldest of seven children of George W. Dawson — an unschooled labourer of the Calhoun County iron-foundry economy — and Eliza Starkey Dawson. He ran away from home at thirteen in 1912 and made his way the seventy miles south to the Tuskegee Institute in Macon County, Alabama, working a year of campus labour to earn the entrance fee.

He was placed at fourteen at the Tuskegee Institute under the choral director Carl Diton and the bandmaster Frank L. Drye, and completed the institute’s preparatory programme in 1921.

He took the Bachelor of Music at the Horner Institute of Fine Arts at Kansas City in 1925 — among the first Black graduates of the institute — and the Master of Music at the American Conservatory of Music at Chicago in 1927 under Felix Borowski and Adolf Weidig.

He was appointed in 1931 founding director of the Tuskegee Institute School of Music and the Tuskegee Institute Choir, the position he held for twenty-six years until 1956. He led the choir at the dedication concert for the Radio City Music Hall in New York on the twenty-eighth of December 1932 — the inaugural concert of the new hall — and on national radio broadcasts to estimated audiences of millions across the 1930s.

He completed in 1934 the Negro Folk Symphony in three movements, premiered by the Philadelphia Orchestra under Leopold Stokowski on the fourteenth of November 1934 at the Academy of Music — the second symphony by an African American performed by a major American orchestra, after Still’s.

He travelled to West Africa in 1952 to study Yoruba and Asante rhythms in their living context, and revised the Negro Folk Symphony in 1952 to integrate the West African rhythmic figures he had transcribed there.

He died at Montgomery, Alabama on the second of May 1990, at ninety.

He is honored here as the founder of the Tuskegee Institute School of Music.