Samuel C. Taylor was a classical composer…

THE AFRICAN AMERICAN REGISTERY remind this August 8

*On this date we recall the birth of Samuel Coleridge Taylor in 1875. He was an African-English Composer, one of that country’s most celebrated composers at the beginning of the twentieth century.

The son of a doctor from

Sierra Leone

and a British mother, Samuel showed musical gifts at the age of five. His father, frustrated in his attempts to progress as a physician through apparent racial prejudice, deserted his family and returned to his native

West Africa

. At the age of five Samuel began playing the violin and joined the choir of a Presbyterian church in Croydon, where H. A. Walters guided his progress and arranged his admittance to the Royal College of Music in 1890. At the age of fifteen he entered the Royal

college

of

Music

in

London

.

His most famous symphonic performances were Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast (1898), The Death of Minnehaha (1899), and Hiawatha’s Departure (1900). Coleridge Taylor was very well received in the

United States

. James Weldon Johnson and Booker T. Washington were personal friends and he was President Theodore Roosevelt’s guest at the White House.

The Coleridge-Taylor Society was created in

1901 in

Washington D. C. specifically to study and perform his music. Samuel Coleridge Taylor died in 1912.

Reference:
Africana The Encyclopedia of the African and
African American Experience
Editors: Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates Jr.
Copyright 1999
ISBN 0-465-0071-1