‘Negro Spirituals’ sheet music by Harry T. Burleigh

Several years ago, while browsing in a cramped shop somewhere in Manhattan, I came across several pieces of sheet music featuring African American singers, including one with Ella Fitzgerald on the cover. Among them was a cover for Negro Spirituals arranged by H.T. Burleigh, whom I instantly recognized.

The cover listed about 50 songs arranged by Harry T. Burleigh, but it wasn’t clear which was inside the cover. Someone had penciled X’s near such songs as “Every time I Hear the Spirit,” “Didn’t My Lord Deliver Daniel” and “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child,” one of my favorites.

To my disappointment, the sheet music itself was missing. This was the cover only. Sigh.

I bought it anyway, figuring that I would certainly someday find the music. I have yet to find it, but at auction recently I came across another cover of sheet music arranged by Burleigh titled “Oh, Didn’t It Rain.”

This one, however, did have the sheet music inside. Someone had made chord notations in pencil above the staff, but otherwise, it was in good condition.

Both covers have an introduction by Burleigh, written in 1917, and were published by G. Ricordi & Co., which had begun a century earlier in Italy. Burleigh, an African American composer, was working as an editor at the venerable old music publishing house, which had offices in New York, at the time.

Burleigh was an arranger, composer, editor, teacher and soloist. He is best known (or little known, unfortunately) for turning camp and work tunes into a respected musical form just as comfortable on the concert stage as in the fields. Under him, the spirituals became art song.

He was born Henry “Harry” Thacker Burleigh in 1866 in Erie, PA, and learned those old plantation songs from his grandfather, the town lamplighter who sang them as he worked. Burleigh’s mother – who had been a teacher – worked as a maid for a woman who held musical performances in her home.

The woman hired Burleigh as a doorman at the performances, where he eagerly listened to some of the country’s noted singers. A baritone singer himself, he became a soloist at several churches and synagogues in his hometown. In 1892, he won a scholarship to the National Conservatory of Music in New York where he met the Czech composer Antonin Dvorak, who was the director.

Dvorak encouraged him to include in his compositions the songs he had learned from his grandfather, the “plantation songs” that Burleigh wrote about on the inside cover of the sheet music I bought:

“They were not ‘composed,’ but sprang into life, ready made, from the white heat of religious fervor during some protracted meeting in camp or church, as the simple, ecstatic utterance of wholly untutored minds, and are practically the only music in America which meets the scientific definition of Folk Song.”

Burleigh spent much time singing the spirituals to Dvorak, parts of whose “Symphony No. 9 in E minor” in the composition “From the New World” was seemingly inspired by the theme of those songs.

Burleigh wrote that parts of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” can be heard in the sound of the flute in the second theme, first movement of the piece. “Dvorak saturated himself with the spirit of these old tunes and then invented his own themes,” Burleigh was said to have written. “There is a subsidiary theme in G minor in the first movement with a flatted seventh (a characteristic passed on to jazz, known as a “blue note”) and I feel sure the composer caught this peculiarity of most of the slave songs from some that I sang to him; for he used to stop me and ask if that was the way the slaves sang.”

There appears to be some question about how much of the melody was used by Dvorak, who often urged the acceptance and adoption of these “Negro melodies” by composers while he was in this country in the early 1890s.

Burleigh continued his work as a soloist, first at St. George’s Episcopal Church of New York – whose members objected because he was black – and stayed there for more than 50 years. He also became the first African American soloist at the synagogue Temple Emanu-El in the city.

In 1911, he became an editor at G. Ricordi & Co., which published several of his compositions, including “Ethiopia Saluting the Colors” and the collection “Jubilee Songs of the USA.” He is mostly known for his arrangement of “Deep River” in 1917. His first three songs had been published in 1900 by another company.

Burleigh was an eclectic composer, a master at creating and arranging not only vocal songs but music for instruments, including the piano and violin. He was said to have composed more than 200 songs. His arrangements of spirituals became so popular that many soloists – including Marian Anderson – traditionally ended their programs with these songs.

He died in 1949 at age 82.