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Harry Lawrence Freeman (1869 -1954) preceded Scott Joplin, Shirley Graham, and William Grant Still in African-American grand opera composition. One of the earliest American composers to infuse his scores with jazz, blues, and spirituals, Freeman wrote libretti steeped in dialect and included non-traditional instruments like the saxophone and banjo in his operatic works. His seven decades as a piano accompanist, composer, librettist, and music director coincided with the national and international rise of black classical and popular music concertizers and opera performers, the latter years of minstrelsy, and the evolution of black vaudeville.
Outside of press coverage, only a dearth of primary contemporary sources exist on the vibrant black musical and theatrical culture of the pre-World War II period, particularly before the 1920s. Freeman's choices of the performing artists and stage works to memorialize in The Negro in Music and Drama provides unprecedented, first-hand perspectives of what an insider with extensive music training and theatre networking thought was important in African-American music and stage culture. His rare and never before published anthology offers a long-needed historiography of his profound influence both on the African-American stage and on music at large.
The volume includes La Vinia Delois Jennings's Introduction to The Negro in Music and Drama and H. Lawrence Freeman. Her extensive annotations throughout the anthology document the operatic composer's influence, from his birth and early years in Cleveland, Ohio, to his final decades as the resident classical music instructor and authority in Harlem at the height of its artistic renaissance.
