R. Nathaniel Dett

Robert Nathaniel Dett was born on the eleventh of October 1882 at Drummondville, Ontario — a community settled in the 1820s and 1830s by African American fugitives from slavery on the American side of the Niagara River — the son of Robert Tue Dett, a porter on the Michigan Central Railroad, and Charlotte Johnson Dett, a teacher. The family crossed the river to Niagara Falls, New York in 1893.

He was placed at twenty in 1903 at the Oberlin Conservatory and completed in 1908 the Bachelor of Music — among the earliest Black graduates of an American conservatory. He took further study at Columbia University, Harvard University, the Eastman School of Music — completing the Master of Music at Eastman in 1932 under Howard Hanson — and the American Conservatory at Fontainebleau under Nadia Boulanger in the summer of 1929.

He was appointed in 1913 director of music at the Hampton Institute of Virginia — the historically Black institution founded in 1868 by General Samuel Chapman Armstrong — and held the position for eighteen years until 1931. He led the Hampton Institute Choir on a 1928 European tour that included a performance at the Royal Albert Hall and a private recital for the King and Queen of England at Buckingham Palace.

He composed across the Hampton period the principal choral works of the early-twentieth-century American Negro choral tradition — among them the oratorio The Chariot Jubilee (1919), the suite In the Bottoms for piano (1913, including the Juba Dance), and the oratorio The Ordering of Moses (1937), premiered by the Cincinnati May Festival on the seventh of May 1937 under Eugene Goossens.

He edited four influential volumes of Religious Folk-Songs of the Negro for Hampton Institute Press between 1927 and 1936 — concert arrangements that brought the spiritual into the American university choral curriculum.

He died at Battle Creek, Michigan on the second of October 1943 of a heart attack, at sixty.

He is honored here as the principal figure of the American Negro choral tradition.