Hall Johnson

Francis Hall Johnson was born on the twelfth of March 1888 at Athens, Georgia, the son of the Reverend William Decker Johnson — a presiding elder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church and the president of the Allen University at Columbia, South Carolina — and Alice Sansom Johnson. He was raised in the parsonage Christianity of the late-nineteenth-century Black South and absorbed the spirituals of the AME camp-meeting circuit in his father’s pastorates.

He was placed at twelve at the Allen University and at sixteen at the Atlanta University, completing study at the Hahn School of Music at Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania between 1908 and 1910 in violin and composition under Hugh Clarke. He moved to New York in 1914 and played viola in pit orchestras across the Tin Pan Alley and the early Broadway period.

He played in the original orchestra of Eubie Blake (placed in this archive) and Noble Sissle’s 1921 Broadway revue Shuffle Along — the first Black-written, Black-directed, Black-cast Broadway musical of the twentieth century.

He founded in September 1925 the Hall Johnson Negro Choir, an eight-voice ensemble dedicated to the concert performance of the spiritual in its unaccompanied authentic form. The choir made its first appearance at the Pythian Temple at Harlem in 1926 and was hired in 1930 for the original Broadway production of Marc Connelly’s The Green Pastures.

He directed the choir on the screen for the Warner Brothers 1936 film adaptation of The Green Pastures, the 1936 film Lost Horizon, and the 1943 MGM all-Black-cast musical Cabin in the Sky.

He composed in 1930 the folk drama Run, Little Chillun — staged at the Lyric Theatre, New York in 1933 — and across the following thirty years over fifty published concert arrangements of spirituals.

He died at New York on the thirtieth of April 1970 in a fire at his Harlem apartment, at eighty-two.

He is honored here as the principal arranger of the spiritual for the American stage.