Recently, a book was released and a forgotten opera was given a world premiere: Before Elvis, The African American Musicians Who Made The King by Preston Lauterbach (2025) and Morgaine by Edmond Dédé, considered the oldest known opera by an African American composer (1887). Musical contributions by Black Americans have influenced and enriched the cultural diaspora of American society from the early spirituals to contemporary classical, jazz artists and composers such as Jon Batiste, Wynton Marsalis, Jessie Montgomery and Carlos Simon.
Much has been written about the African American experience that began with enslaved people disembarking at the Carolinas in the mid-sixteenth century and in books that shed light and valuable information about the struggles and successes of Black Americans such as Florence Beatrice Price (1887-1953) in The Heart of a Woman (University of Illinois Press, 2020). What makes this read so refreshing is the way the late author Rae Linda Brown (a former faculty member of University of Michigan and University of California, Irvine) personalizes accounts of Prices’ life and correspondence within a backdrop of Reconstructionism, Jim Crow laws and merging glass ceiling recognition for talented women musicians like Amy Beach, Margaret Ruthven Lang (her work Dramatic Overture was performed by the Boston Symphony in 1893) and those of color.
Brown paints a picture of what it was like for Black Americans to live, work, thrive and deal with segregation in cities like Boston, Chicago and Little Rock, Arkansas where Price was born and raised in what was considered upper middle class comfort by a dentist father and pianist/teacher mother. She also outlines the importance of education as a way the Black community could achieve self-enrichment and advancement, from plantation life to Black founded colleges, and highlights composers like William Grant Still, William Dawson, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Henry Burleigh, Scott Joplin and his opera Treemonisha (1911).
In 1903, Price entered the New England Conservatory of Music with a double major as pianist and organist and after graduating began teaching at Black colleges in Arkansas. After her father passed away and her mother and brother left Little Rock, 23 year-old Price began a teaching stint as Head of the Music Department at Clark University in Atlanta until 1912, when she married a prominent lawyer. “It was now time to discover her own identity. Who was Florence Beatrice Smith and what did she want to do with her life? The answers to these questions would evolve, through her music, over the next twenty years,” comments Brown. And so the book unfolds.
Returning to her home turf, Price spent time in Little Rock raising a family of two daughters and a physically abusive husband, taught privately, studied summers at Chicago Musical College, but increased racial tension in the city necessitated a move to Chicago in 1928 – which proved musically advantageous. Brown explores this city’s vibrant entertainment scene with opportunities for Black musicians of various genres that included W.C. Handy, Jelly Roll Morton and Louis Armstrong. While there, Price continued to write, get divorced, briefly remarry, but continued making musical strides.
Her compositions were being published and performed including Piano Concerto in One Movement and Symphony in E Minor, which was premiered by the Chicago Symphony in 1933 - as evidenced in a Chicago Daily News review: “A symphony by Florence Price had its first performance on this occasion. It is a faultless work cast in something less than modernist mode and even reminiscent at times of other composers who have dealt with America in tone…Miss Price’s symphony is worthy of a place in the repertory.”
Brown explains that Black composers “…had as their primary goal the elevation of the Negro folk idiom, that is, spirituals, blues, and characteristic dance music, to symphonic form.” In expanding this thought, Price wrote of her Symphony No. 3, “In all of my works which I have been done in the sonata form with Negroid idiom, I have incorporated a juba as one of the several movements because it seems to me to be no more impossible to conceive of Negroid music devoid of the spiritualistic theme on the one hand than strongly syncopated rhythms of the juba on the other.” The juba is a rhythmic African American plantation dance performed by enslaved Blacks.
An oeuvre of Prices’ works include compositions discovered in 2009 at a summer home where she stayed. The find is kind of reminiscent of Schubert’s brother in Vienna giving Schumann a manuscript copy of his famous brother’s ninth symphony that would subsequently receive a premiere performance. Prices wrote, among others, four symphonies, two violin concertos, two string quartets, Mississippi River Suite, Songs of the Oak, Piano Sonata, arrangements of spirituals and songs, many of which were performed and recorded by Marian Anderson. Her music ultimately received recognition in Canada and Europe and there has been a resurgent interest, of which some piano or orchestral pieces are performed or have been recorded. The title of this book mirrors Prices’ namesake song, The Heart of A Woman. Her lifework remains an inspiration to all.