FAMILY MEMBERS of Will Marion Cook: Biographical Materials for immediate family members

This document is a supplement to Chronology and Itinerary of the Career of Will Marion Cook, a 2017 document which is mounted on-line at http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/musicfacpub/66/. It presupposes some familiarity with the Chronology and Itinerary, and puts into some kind of order a number of additional research notes, principally drawing upon newspaper and genealogy databases, that amplify the earlier work in certain respects regarding the public lives of his immediate family members. This is not a finished, polished effort; it represents work in progress, complete with repetitions, missing data, and the occasional typographical error. I invite queries, amplifications, and corrections, which may be directed to [email protected]. The present document is a first draft of November 2018

Chronology and Itinerary of the Career of Will Vodery: Materials for a Biography

WILL VODERY (October 8, 1884 to November 18, 1951) Arranger and orchestrator, composer, conductor; club owner. Celebrated most as a legendary orchestrator and arranger (including a credit as the first black arranger in Hollywood), then next as a bandleader and trainer of choirs, and then as a composer. (Tellingly, he was not a member of ASCAP.) Vodery mostly worked in musical theatre, but he was also a conductor, composer, and arranger of instrumental dance music. Worked with everyone. A protege of Will Marion Cook and Bert Williams. Cook and Vodery were mentors to Ellington. Vodery was mentor to Gershwin and William Grant Still. Tucker rightly calls him a preeminent African-American musician of his generation (cit. Tucker dict. art.) Salem Tutt Whitney writes the following in his Timely Topics column, under the heading Impressions of Musicians (Chicago Defender, October 11, 1930, p. 5): Will Vodery heads the list of arrangers. Composer of many beautiful songs and a jolly good fellow. Knows what he knows and is getting $35,000 a year for knowing it. Close friends and associates included Oscar Hammerstein, Noble Sissle, Flo Ziegfeld, George Gershwin, Duke Ellington, Florence Mills, Jerome Kern, Don Voorhees, Billy Rose, Fannie Brice, etc. (Pittsburgh Courier, December 1, 1951, p. 5

A Chronology and Itinerary of the Career of Bob Cole: Materials for a Biography

Bob Cole (1868-1911) Lyricist, librettist, composer, actor, singer, dancer, comedian; active in musical comedy and vaudeville; a contemporary of Ernest Hogan, Will Marion Cook, and the Johnson brothers. His career has been well covered, especially through the scholarly contributions of Thomas Riis (see Bibliography). As a creative figure, he worked most closely with Billy Johnson (1858-1916), and James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938), and John Rosamond Johnson (1873-1954)

England [Medieval Music]

English musical life in the Middle Ages is often treated in standard textbook surveys as peripheral to that of France and Italy. This approach has several causes, but is rooted especially in musicology\u27s preoccupation over the past 150 years of scholarship with medieval France. Noteworthy also in this negligence is the pairing of France and Italy late in the era in the emergence of polyphonic refrain songs as the chief new artefacts of secular high music culture in the 1300s, an attractive trend with no contemporary English-language counterpart. Musicology\u27s paradigmatic narrative of English entrance onto the international stage, through its sacred polyphonic music, once began the story only in the second quarter of the fifteenth century. What emerges, however, from more extended examination of medieval musical life is that modern political, geographic, linguistic and cultural boundaries are not relevant - for high culture, anyway - in the musical affairs of those parts of northwestern Europe we nowadays identify as France and England. And until this essentially homogeneous Anglo-French cultural sphere began to develop some marked regional differentiations in the thirteenth century, the elite and hermetic worlds both of courtly troubadour and trouvere song, and of the chant and polyphony of the church, spanned the English Channel effortlessly. The English were not latecomers to a game already being played elsewhere

A Chronology and Itinerary of the Career of Eugene Mikell: Materials for a Biography

Francis Eugene ( Gene ) Mikell (1880-1932) Instrumentalist and recitalist (violinist, cornettist, saxophonist), conductor, composer, educator (including instruction in voice, piano, violin, guitar, mandolin, banjo, cornet, saxophone, clarinet; school and community bands and chorusses). Compositions for band, orchestra, voice. Arrangements of popular songs and tunes for band. And a photograph exists of Mikell with a curious string instrument he invented---a kind of soap box cello. Mikell attended Avery, Tuskegee, the New York Conservatory, and Orangeburg, so he probably came from a relatively educated and successful family background. This supposition is only reinforced by his subsequent career in education. He taught at: Tuskegee in 1894 Orangeburg SC State College Jenkins Orphanage, Charleston, SC Cookman Institute, Jacksonville Florida Baptist Academy, Jacksonville Bordentown School, Bordentown, NJ New York Music School Settlement, NYC Martin-Smith School of Music, NYC (acc. Southern) Lincoln House Settlement, NJ Lincoln House Settlement, NY

Compositional trajectories [Medieval music]

Here, to illuminate a small set of issues in respect to style and compositional practice, we will approach the medieval composer via specific repertory, namely, some sacred chants and some two-voice polyphony. A persistent conviction of many relative newcomers to medieval music is that all chant sounds the same - melodically vague, un differentiable, hypnotic and slightly \u27New Age\u27 - and that it is governed by a universal, monolithic, standard medieval \u27theory of the modes\u27. Neither of these points is true, but one needs to gain a broad familiarity with some very large bodies of melodies, and the histories of their genres, to be able to come to grips with chant\u27s diversity in all its dimensions, and it is equally important to learn some individual melodies very well. The plainchant of the medieval Western church was, in fact, highly varied in musical language. There were different dialects, including Roman, Gallican, Mozarabic, Beneventan and Ambrosian, before and after the hegemonic rise of Gregorian chant circa 800. There are strong generic or functional fault lines within the Gregorian core itself (distinguishing prayer and reading tones, antiphonal psalmody, responsorial psalmody), and variant idioms emerged within the later Gregorian universe (e.g. the German chant tradition). On top of that, many different stylistic strands developed in all the newly composed, later medieval plainsong from the ninth century forward - melodies which over time far outdistanced the Gregorian core in sheer numbers

Will Marion Cook: Threads and Themes

This document is a supplement to Chronology and Itinerary of the Career of Will Marion Cook, a 2017 document which is mounted on-line at http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/musicfacpub/66/. It draws out of that resource some material on five themes or threads that are constant elements over Cook\u27s career, concerning the history of African American music and dance, and the promotion of schools and professional troupes for African American musicians and actors. Occasionally there is more information below than in the 2017 document, but readers are cautioned that more often, the older document will have additional detail not simply cut and pasted here. This re-assembling by theme or thread is not a finished, polished effort; it represents work in progress, complete with repetitions, missing data, and the occasional typographical error. I invite queries, amplifications, and corrections, which may be directed to [email protected]. The present document is a first draft of November 2018

Will Marion Cook and the Tab Show, with particular emphasis on Hotsy Totsy and La revue nègre (1925)

This document is a supplement to Chronology and Itinerary of the Career of Will Marion Cook, a 2017 document which is mounted on-line at http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/musicfacpub/66/. It puts into some kind of order a number of research notes, principally drawing upon newspaper and genealogy databases, that amplify the earlier work in certain respects. This is not a finished, polished effort; it represents work in progress, complete with repetitions, missing data, and the occasional typographical error. I invite queries, amplifications, and corrections, which may be directed to [email protected]. The present document is a first draft of November 2018

NATIVE AMERICAN BOARDING SCHOOL BANDS AND THEIR BANDMASTERS. Project File 4: BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES OF IMPORTANT BANDMASTERS

This is the fourth of five on-line text files in which I assemble my research notes about boys’ bands and their bandmasters at the US government’s Native American off-reservation inter-tribal boarding schools. It is material that covers a span of about fifty years from the 1880s to the 1930s. I principally have put into some kind of order a mass of data that draws upon online digital newspapers and genealogy databases. What follows here is not a finished, polished document. Everything on offer is still work in progress, inconsistent in formatting and with missing data and the occasional typographical error. I invite queries, amplifications, and corrections, which may be directed to [email protected]. The present document is a first draft of December 2022. This document presents brief biographical sketches of some of the most important European-American and Native-American bandmasters at the federal government’s major Native American off-reservation inter-tribal boarding schools. They worked at the schools with the biggest and liveliest extra-curricular band programs. The time span here is from the origins of each school’s program into the 1930s or 1940s. The concentration in every case is on the individual bandmaster’s public career. Band histories for eight major schools are provided in a separate document (Project File 3), and some of the bandmasters who are not individually sketched here receive attention there. Repetition between band history and bandmaster biographies is inevitable, as the leading bandmasters mostly circulated between the leading schools; theirs are inextricably intertwined stories. Exceptions are made here to add brief biographical surveys of Samuel McCowan, not a bandmaster but a major figure in band history who was the superintendent at Albuquerque, Phoenix, and Chilocco; Harold A. Loring, not a bandmaster but the Supervisor of Native Music for the Office of Indian Affairs in 1905-1906 who pushed for the introduction of indigenous music into the boarding schools; William Winneshiek, a Carlisle-trained musician who ran a professional band in the 1930s and whose career intersected with that of James Riley Wheelock; and Lem Wiley, who took over the St. Louis Exposition band

Chronology and Itinerary of the Career of Ernest Hogan: Materials for a Biography

Hogan, The Unbleached American in the moniker he adopted, was a comedian, singer, dancer, actor, composer, lyricist, and author. Hogan is right up at the top among the greatest figures in African American musical theater of his generation, including Billy Johnson (1858-1916), Billy McClain (1866-1950), Bob Cole (1868-1911), George Walker (1872-1911), and Bert Williams (1874-1922). In his lifetime, he was called the father of ragtime or the father of ragtime music, and recognized as the originator of this kind of music. He was the \u27king\u27 of negro comedians (Indianapolis Freeman, August 31, 1901, p. 5). He was the greatest comedy star actor of his race acc. Sylvester Russell\u27s obit. Biggest solo act to emerge before Dudley and Harrison Stewart. The first major African American stage performer to carry a big show by himself, rather than as part of a comedy team; he nonetheless often played as one of a team in partnership with prominent comedians such as Billy McClain, John Ruckers, etc. but it was important to him that he realized one of his pet ambitions---to be the only colored star in a big musical comedy in Rufus Rastus and Oyster Man (Walton obit.)