Justin Holland

Justin Holland was born on the twenty-sixth of July 1819 at a small free-Black farm at Norfolk County, Virginia, the son of Exum Holland and Quascilla Holland — free Black landowners of the Virginia tidewater. He left Virginia at fourteen in 1833 for Chelsea, Massachusetts, where the free-Black community of greater Boston offered the schooling that Virginia did not.

He was placed at fifteen at the household of the Spanish émigré guitarist Mariano Pérez in Boston, who gave him his first sustained guitar instruction. He took the bachelor’s at Oberlin College in 1845 — among the earliest Black bachelor’s graduates in the United States — having completed simultaneous study of Spanish, French and music theory at the Oberlin preparatory department.

He settled at Cleveland, Ohio in 1845 and opened a guitar studio there. He composed and arranged across the following forty years over three hundred pieces for solo guitar — predominantly transcriptions of operatic arias and theme-and-variations sets — published by the Boston firm of Oliver Ditson and the New York firm of S. T. Gordon.

He published in 1874 Holland’s Comprehensive Method for the Guitar — the first comprehensive American guitar method, structured in the European pedagogical tradition of Fernando Sor and Dionisio Aguado — and in 1876 Holland’s Modern Method for the Guitar. Both works remained in print and in active pedagogical use for over half a century after his death.

He served additionally as a station-master on the Ohio Underground Railroad in the years before the Civil War, and as a delegate to the National Convention of Colored Men in 1869.

He died at Cleveland on the twenty-fourth of March 1887, at sixty-seven.

He is honored here as the author of the first comprehensive American guitar method.