William Grant Still

of his time. My grandfather, William gret Still, is commonly known as the Dean of African American composers. That's mostly because he has a very long list of firsts, like he was the first black man to conduct a major radio orchestra. That's Celeste Headley, a journalist, last month the Atlanta City Council, musician, author, radio personality. I'm Celest Hedley.

This is on second thought public speaker. According to Pew Research, about a third of American teenagers send more than a hundred texts a day, and among many other things, an old friend and colleague of mine, I like your hair that length and it looks healthy. I actually use like proper champoo now. I don't use like three in one. If two of that was because of me teasing you, then I'll take it as she spoiled for us just a minute ago. William Grant Still was her grandfather. He

was my favorite person. My father died when I was very young, like less than a year old, and so my grandfather stepped into that role for me. I didn't quite realize he was famous until he died. When celest and I worked together many years ago, her grandfather often came up as a topic of casual conversation, and both Celeste and I were trained classical musicians, so we spent a lot of time talking shop. But somehow, prior to meeting Celeste, I knew really next to nothing about William Grant.

Still never in my conservatory training did still music really come up, either for research or for performance purposes. As Celeste told me, that's sadly pretty common. Much to her dismay, Still all too often gets boxed in as a quote black composer. Therefore his works may only get played during Black History Month, and that's a big problem. We need to just stop treating it like black music. Stop only performing the Afromaeric con Symphony, stop only performing it during

Black History Month. Start playing the freaking music. It's available. You can get the art songs, you can get the chamber works. The piano pieces are amazing. Let's study the music itself. I went to school with Aaron Dworkin, who went on to found the Sphinx Competition. And Aaron and I were sitting there talking about one of grandfather symphonies and one of our friends, who's black and a trumpet player, was like, the reason they don't play still more is

because it's just not as good as Beethoven. Okay, let's be honest. And I was like, what what are you talking about? Nobody's Beethoven except Beethoven. So like, this is the sort of stereotypes and racism, which is it just embedded in our curriculum. We are going to have to intentionally get it out of there, you know. I remember the NPR Show performance today from a p M American Public Media. This is performance today. I'm Fred gild and they have their Essential Library where they add, you know,

one or two pieces each episode. I never knew about this piece of music written in ninet by American composer William Grant Still, and they did my Grandfather's piece for the Sweet for violin and piano. It was like minutes minutes into the radio piece before they even mentioned that he was black, Like almost the entire thing was just them talking about the music. And I cried, like I got so moved that they were talking about the music and not his color. It was a moment for me,

and that's really what he wanted. And he could get so irritated that people were always calling him a black composer because he was like, what do you call Copeland a Jewish composer? Every time you introduce him, Like, talk about the music. So that's what we're gonna do today. But of course it would still be impossible to talk about still without also understanding where he came from and

how race played a role in his career. But all of that is purely historical, and the Celest says all judgment of steels music should remain independent of his identity or life experience. I asked Celeste to start at the beginning. He became interested in music at a very young age. He took violin lessons with old Mr Price in Little Rock, Arkansas when he was still very very young child. He would make his own instruments. He would get, you know,

old cigar boxes and stuff and make little violins. He knew fairly early on that he wasn't a great performer. Later on in his life, we met one of the women who grew up near him in as a neighborhood in Little Rock, and she said, when Billy played the violin, it almost made you cry. And he said that wasn't a compliment. He then, after he left high school, went to college. He went to Wilberforce as a premed major. At that time, for black people, there was no respectable

job as a musician. That was the era of Scott Joplin and his mother. She didn't want him playing in brothels, so he would sneak the music in. He would put scores inside his books so it looked like he was studying, and he was actually reading scores. And he started musical ensembles there, and that's where he first began composing. And then he ended up at Oberlin University where he studied

for quite a while on a full scholarship. He then went to New York and he began playing popular music like he was the first person to make an arrangement of the st Louis Blues with W. C. Handy. He became very good friends. As W. C. Handy, he began recording things like more tim Panaley songs under pseudonyms. He worked at the Black Swan Recording Company, which was the

first black owned recording company in America. He was a musical director there, and at that time, you can see pictures where there's like a big horn installed in the wall and all the musicians are sitting there playing and they're aiming their instruments at the horn in the wall so they can be recorded. He did all kinds of stuff. He played in the orchestra for Shuffle Along, which became

a very very pivotal musical. He was having to make his living doing some popular things, like he orchestrated things for Paul Whitman, the King of Jazz, this white dude, he's called himself the King of jazz. And this whole time he was studying classical music. He took lessons from George Chadwick at Boston Conservatory, he took private tutoring with Edgar Varez, and he was writing classical music the whole time. But it took him a while to actually be able

to support himself through classical music. As you can imagine. As Celest mentioned, there weren't a ton of opportunities for black composers at that time. William Grant still knew it would be an uphill battle, and in fact it ended up being a path riddled with barriers. He experienced difficulties all along the way, and some of them were over when he was he was touring with Hubie Blake. Sometimes there were no restaurants that they could eat while they

were on tour, or hotels to stay in. Those kind of stories that are awful but that were used to hearing, you know. When he was younger, he was really optimistic though, and he felt that his music might serve as a bridge between the races. That music is ideally suited for addressing racism because it transcends language, right. He had some really hot, big dreams and high ideals about his music when he was younger. Over the course of his life you can see doors shutting for him, and by the

time I came along, he was a little defeated. It had been a long life of constant, constant tribulations. Just an example, there was one point at which they had paid for the recording of music by American composers. He was the only black composer included. They sent the discs overseas so they could get impressed, right, you know, this isn't the age of digital files. And every single disc arrived safely except for his, which coincidentally, we're all smashed.

I mean throughout his entire life, you hear things like that. When he went to get his honorary doctorate from Oberlin, he decided to drive from l A to Ohio. He couldn't stay at the white hotels because he's black, he couldn't stay at the black hotels because his wife's Jewish. He drove straight from l A to Ohio without stopping, and you see him in the pictures and he's like, uh, and it's just this. I mean, it's like photographic evidence. I could go story after story after story, but it

was constant. So how was still able to push through and overcome these challenges well, at least in part with a little help from his friends. First of all, he had some very powerful champions. He was good friends with the post Takowski. The person who got his very first big concert performance was, of course, his mentor at that time, Edgar Varez. There were people who were fighting for him and speaking up for him all along the way, and frankly they were white, which think is informative as we

moved forward with racism. It's important to remember that the people who have the most power to bring about change are actually white people. My grandfather's life is a testament to that. Of course, there are still many other reasons why still became so highly regarded m I mean, there's also, of course the question the fact that the music is

just very good. It's extremely high quality. And the other thing that's very unique about his music is we have to remember he was writing melody at a time when that was not considered I don't want to say fashionable,

but that is not what people were writing. We're talking about the middle of the twentieth century when he was really denigrated for writing melody, and reviewers would call his music simplistic, or that he was trying to write pop music, or that he was appealing to the audience, and they said that like it was an criticism he was pandering to the audience by writing tunes. There was a lot

of stuff going on. For context, in the early twenty century, classical music was changing folks like Igor Stravinsky and Arnold Schoenberg were challenging the norms of things like melody and traditional song structure. Modernist composers like Edgard Varrez took this even further, adopting what seemed like completely randomized approaches to creating music. Vaez, perhaps strangely enough, was one of Still's mentors. It was a skilled composer, but I think he wrote

one piece for two airplane engines. This was a time when people really were questioning, I think, in a healthy way, what constitutes music. Does it have to have a melody to be music? No, But then what distinguishes music from

just a random collection of sounds? Right? These are the questions that were occupying people in the early twentieth century, and they also dug into this idea of sort of flouting expectations of going for a dissonant chord rather than what people would expect of really leaning into those tried to ones. And my grandfather has actually talked about what is quite a bit, and he expressed a lot of

gratitude for ed Gard Fardez. He also said that although he rejected that idiom, that style of dissonance and a tonality It really freed him up as a composer into learning how to use dissonance. It's not like all of Grandfather's music is tonal. It's not. It's just that he learned to use dissonance in a really intentional way. He

learned to surprise people. If the audience was expecting you to resolve down to a four chord, he would surprise you and go the other way and and use that in a strategic way to create these pieces that had landscape and direction. I think that's one of the things I really like about Grandfather's music is that a it's not long winded, right, it's not Mahler. He says what he needs to say and he gets out, but it's always moving forward. It always has a place to go.

You could say maybe that's part of African American heritage, because obviously they're very much pardon the punt, driven by rhythm, but it's also just part of his personal style that motion. As we just heard, William Grant Still was largely dedicated

to melody, rhythm and motion. There's probably no better place to see this than what's Still's most famous p his first symphony, also called the Afro American symphony that was written in nineteen and he said about it that in that symphony he wasn't trying to portray like the upper class of African Americans. He was trying to portray the sons of the soil, he said, those who still had a strong connection to their ancestors in Africa and hadn't

completely assimilated. Every movement, and there are four movements. Has a quote from a Paul Lawrence Dunbar poem, why should the world be overwise and counting all our tears and size? Nay, let them only see us while we wear the mask. Paul Lawrence Dunbar, very very famous early twentieth century Black poet. So the first one is where you hear that first theme, which is like na da na naa, And then that

trumpets come in with their mutes. If you're a brass player, you have to have all your mutes if you're playing still, because he's gonna use all of them. And that original melody is played when you very first begins. It's just this solo English horn and it sounds awesome. And that at first poem is all night long, while the moon goes down, love and I set at her feet then for the long journey back from the town had but the dreams make it sweet, so it's like a bitter sweet. Right.

Then we get the adagio, which is the second movement. In some of his notebooks, he called that sorrow. And if you look at the structure, especially the chord progressions, it's really structured a little bit like a spiritual It's much more chromatic than the first one is there are fewer functional chord progressions. Then you get to the third movement, and the third movement is a huge change. So you heard the role in the timpanies Boom Dun Dun, dun, Dune,

dune Dune. That one's called an amato. He called it humor in his notebooks. So the story was when he was in the musical Shuffle along with Hubie Blake. The musicians played it so many times that they got sick of it, right, so they'd write little, you know, additions and improvisations that they'd play along with it. And the one that my grandfather wrote was the melody for I Got Rhythm. Gershwin came and saw the show. We know

that he saw it a bunch of times. Ubi Blake was mad about that for the rest of his his life. You can hear if you listen just not very long into the third movement, you'll hear the horns playing just a tiny little quote if I got rhythm, which, knowing my grandfather, that's his little wink, he was like, yeah, I know, that's how that goes. And then the last movement is lent o. It's almost to me like a march, and then it ends more upbeat. It's like hope, And

it's this beautiful poem by Paul Lawrence Dunbar. The poem was called od Ethiopia, be proud my race in mind and soul. Thy name is written on glory scrool, in characters of fire high mid the clouds of famous bright sky, Thy banners blazoned folds now fly, and truth shall lift them higher. And that movement is very much that sort of nobility and seriousness at the same time that there's

that hope. Though still was always most associated with the Afro American symphony, he always sought to prove his versatility and avoid being pigeonholed by his style. He tried not to right in a particularly African American style. For the very beginning of his composing career. His grandmother had been a flavor whole life until the end of the Civil War. He saw the spirituals, for example, as kind of low class.

He wanted a distance and self for them. So it sort of took him a little while to embrace what would be considered the folklore music of black Americans. When he did do that, and in his very very first symphony, that's the first symphony to include an original blues theme and a banjo and a vibraphone. By the way, when he did, he wrote original tunes. Like Copeland quoted a lot of folklore songs. As an example, here's Aaron Copeland's hold Out and here's the original tune Bonaparte's Retreat by

fiddler William Steppe. Totally fine. Win Right still just wrote them all new. He composed in a way that most composers do not. The vast majority of composers write out sort of the sketch of a piece, and then they'll write out a piano score, and they'll expand it for whatever size, whether it's band or chamber orchestra or whatever. They'll expand it in assigned parts. Grandfather didn't play the piano.

It was the only instrument in the orchestra. He had no idea how to play, although he married a concert pianist, my grandmother, so he went the other way. He would write the melodic framework, and then he went from the beginning to the end of each movement and wrote for every individual instrument. The reason that he learned to play all those instruments is he really wanted to capture the

fullness of each instrument, right. He wanted to see, what's the sweet spot, what does this particular instrument do best? And let me make sure I as sign that to the instrument that does this particular thing best. Obviously I'm biased, but also as a musician, probably one of the best arrangers and orchestrators of the twentieth century. There's no mistaking a still orchestration. It's so idiosyncratic for each instrument. And he would go sometimes at rehearsals and he'd ask the players,

do you like your part? Is there anything in there? I was an obi player, and an infamous piece for obi player. This is the Korean folk song that everybody plays right when you're in high school because it has a trill for the obos between a B and a B flat, which is your pinky at the bottom of the obo going U is impossible, and they've had to like create a little key that goes da dada just to allow you to play it. There's nothing like that.

There's nothing that's unplayable in a still score, whether conscious of it or not. By embracing his heritage, still revealed a unique talent, something that not even contemporaries like George Gershwin could hope to match. His ability to understand orchestration, that being how a variety of instruments all fit together, was unparalleled, and Gershwin knew that. So grandfather actually gave him at least a couple orchestration lessons. Gershwin said he

wanted to learn how to orchestrate. Remember Gershwin didn't orchestrate Rhapsody in Blue. Ferdy Grofe orchestrated it. Yea. Gershon wasn't particularly very patient. He was just known as somebody who just didn't follow through on a lot of stuff. I'm sure it's not surprising anybody that he was quite arrogant. There used to be a joke around those times of Gershwin walking around Harlem, where a stack of ones going, can you holn that again? That's how Gershwin was viewed

from the African American side of music. On the other hand, you can't deny he had great taste, had very great taste. There's no way of knowing what among his music was original and what he borrowed. But looking back, knowing that he was able to do that because the black musicians were absolutely disempowered and had no chance of getting copyrights or publications, they put sort of a darker spin on it. Also, like Ershwin still wrote a number of operas, Celeste is

a singer, so she had a lot to say about opera. Specifically, she named Minette Fontaine as her favorite. Still's opera written in n I Love a Contralto. I Love a real contralto. And there's a character in Minette Fontaine, Marie la Vaux, who does this voodoo ritual. The last time I saw it was in Louisiana, and she comes out and it was this tall statuesque African American contralto and she's like, oh,

huge spirits, and it's just so effective. The other reason I like that is because it's about a mixed race person. I'm a mixed race person. It's sort of about sort of the racial identities and how they get muddled. Celest is also a big fan of another still opera, Once You Wanted to make Sure We played for you Today. Troubled Island is the one that he wrote with Langston Hughes. The lyrics are not surprisingly, absolutely gorgeous. That is due for a revival for sure. It's it's outstanding. I mean,

it's so tightly, tightly written. There's just not a single note out of place in that opera. Most of the ideas and stories and stills operas are completely original. While some ideas originate from his family history in the South, others come from more unexpected places. He read a lot of novels, and he loved movies, and he had a Lazy Boy that he loved, and he and I would sit there and watch Bonanza, you know. So he liked all that storytelling and the drama that we associate with opera.

He just enjoyed that. In life like you have Costaso, which is one of his operas that was premiered in the nineteen fifties, and that's set in the American Southwest, but when it was under Spanish rule. That of course comes from living in l a which was not his native city, but which he fell in love with, and he loved that Latina heritage all around him. Still wasn't just a fan of TV and film. He also spent a not insignificant amount of time composing for TV and film.

His musical stamp can be found on treasures like The Three Stooges, Know Why, There's a Couple of Beautiful blond Oh Yeah, Lost, Horizon, China Great, The Perry Mason Show, and gun Smoke. I don't enough anger inside when he can be a killer, they good one day out of his life, we've been in a respectable cemetery. I actually really like the stuff he did for TV. Sometimes I'll watch an old Perry Mason episode or even Three Stooges, and you can tell when he did it, like you

can you're it. The difference between art music and most you know, more pop music is not in value, I don't think, or in seriousness or impact. But I think that art music composers, they have done all the studying right to try and get really in depth into things like core progressions and blah blah blah blah blah, and it makes a difference. That doesn't mean Aretha Franklin is a worse singer than you know Maria Callis. They're just

two different things. And Maria Callis was capable just in terms of range and dynamics of more because she did all that study and work. And it's the same thing that I listened to like the TV stuff, because there's all of a sudden, this like richness comes into the orchestration.

You can tell that, uh. Serious composer and art music composer wrote that, I think one of the things I like about that has had such a sense of humor when you look back his original scores, like there's this one PC wrote called The Black Man Dances, and not only did they not have digital finale or whatever, but

they also didn't have white out. So when he made a mistake at a score, he had to use an exact o knife to cut it out and then take a new little piece in there with the correction, and he would write a little note going on the composer screwed up again, And at the end of Black Men Dancers, it's all these little characters going he finished, He's done, that's finished. He had a really good sense of humor that I think really especially comes out in some of

his movie music. I asked Celeste to describe some other characteristics of Stills film and TV music. There's no such thing as the violin playing the melodies almost all the time, right, Like the melody will get tossed around and inner weaves and one voice will come out and another and they sort of merge back and forth with one another. But it almost hearkens back a little bit to French Imprussian Ism at sometimes, just the way that he'll play a chord and sort of let it ring and live with

it for a little while. William Grant still was slowly gaining voriety in the film industry, but there was a dark side to his success. After he became so highly regarded in Hollywood, his music was often used while he himself was entirely uncredited. He wrote for a lot of different celebrities and stars and programs during that time. None of that was credited, you know. He wrote for Ben Crosby and the Rhythm Boys. He did a ton of

work for Artie Shaw and that was never credited. Like, one of the most popular pieces Alretis Show ever wrote was Fantasy and it's so so still it's very very very much William Grant Stow. It's hard to mistake that still struggle to get credit for his work was just one of the many challenges he faced. One story from the ninety nine World's Fair highlights yet another tragic misstep in our country's history. The World's Fair was there as

having in New York. What they decided to do was have a contest to see who would write the theme music for the World's Fair. This was nine. They opened it up nationally so people would submit their compositions, and they was going to be anonymous. The organizers would know, but the judges would have a new idea who wrote what. And my grandfather sent in three pieces. The judges had two pieces. They couldn't decide between the two of them, and so they said, hey, well, here's what we'll do.

We'll ask both of the composers to come to New York and then we'll decide once we've met them and talk to them. And when they looked it up, they had both been written by William Grant. Still, when you look at the photos, you can see the expressions on these men's faces. They are not happy that it turned out to be a black dude. And you can imagine if it had been my grandfather and any white person, he would have lost. So he wrote the music. But you know, at that time, they didn't just let black

people on the fairgrounds. They could only go on Negro Day. And on Negro Day almost none of the restaurants opened because the restaurants were all owned by white people. So if he ever wanted to go on to the fairgrounds to hear his own music, he either had to go on Negro Day when he couldn't eat, or he had to be escorted by security to protect his safety. That was like almost nineteen forty. That's not that long ago. That was our grandparents and great grandparents time. I mean,

that was super recent. The efforts to diversify the classical music world are continually ongoing. According to the League of American Orchestras, between nineteen eight and two thousand fourteen, the percentage of non white orchestra musicians increased from three point four percent to just about four but without people like William Grant still leading the charge, that number might be significantly lower today. So did still consider himself a pioneer

for future musicians of color. I'm not sure he thought about black artists to come and tell his later life. But he was always aware of being a pioneer because he was always the only one in the room. There's this photo may have been the Hollywood Bowl. They gathered a whole bunch of famous composers together who happened to be in l A at the time, and they wanted to get this picture of all the famous composers. There's

like twelve or something. Stevinsky and somebody else were like, I do not want to be photographed with this black dude, and they stood in front of him because he's like five nine. At the last minute, the photographer goes, wait a second, there's a dude in the back, and in the picture you can sort of see my grandfather going trying to see up of overse jevinsky shoulder. He was always the only one, and he knew that he got criticized by black people. Went and Marsalis's dad called my

grandfather and uncle Tom. Because he was supposedly writing white men's music. He got criticized by white people because a they didn't want him in Carnegie Hall, but also he would be criticized the most when he wasn't writing music that sounded like black music. Right. If he was going to write classical music, it needed to be black. Here's your box, you're the black guy. So he was painfully aware of that. Despite this, still always managed to maintain

a healthy work life balance. Family was incredibly important to him, and he always made time for his grandchildren. He was just the best grandfather ever. He helped me learn to play piano. He would play inch worm with me, where I'd play one hand and he'd play the other one. He used to make honest to goodness toast which had like molasses and weak germ. He created. He did a lot of the carpentry in the house. He would make toys.

He collected model trains. He loved dogs, even he had a dog, a beloved dog named Shep that he wrote a piece four called quit Debt fool Nih. He just had such a good sense of humor, and he would read me the Uncle Rema stories and correct all the grammar. He always had a puzzle book by his bedside. He did all kinds of puzzles. He was freaking genius at them, and he had beautiful handwriting. He was just the best grandfather ever. You know, he doated on his grandchildren. He

thought we were the greatest thing in the world. I have a bunch of pictures of me with my grandfather. I'm always attached to him, like I'm always wrapped around him because I just loved him to death. By the time I came around, of course, I was born in sixty nine, but like the last day of nineteen sixty nine. By that time he was born in he was seventy five years old, so he wasn't, you know, running around playing ball with me or anything. But he had this

huge record collection. He had a whole closet full of real, the real tapes of performances, and he would sometimes get out his player for the reel the reels and conduct with them. He was really awesome. When her grandfather passed away on December third night, Celeste was just eight years old. You can imagine Celeste never expected to lose her grandfather so soon, but she also didn't predict how impactful his

loss would be on the rest of the world. It was surprising to me that other people cared that he had passed. There were all these headlines about his passing, and I was like, what is going on. By that point in his life, he really was not getting a lot of performances. He was pretty forgotten. I remember there was one headline and I still remember it because it said a great musician has passed in this generation. Never

knew him, and that was very true. My mother actually put in a ton of work trying to get the performances going again, and she's been very successful of that. And of course that has coincided with a rising realization that we've silenced black voices for hundreds of years, and so there's been more interests that way as well. But at the time, he just wasn't very well known. They

were certainly weren't teaching him in schools. When I got to University of Michigan, for God's sake, in the master's program, the American Music class didn't cover William Grant. Still. I mean, imagine, we're talking about a transformative figure. I forgot the fact that he's my grandfather. And when I think about the number of people who were influenced by his music, I mean, that's crazy. And it's the University of Michigan when we

say forgotten. He died thinking he had failed. It was really after Troubled Island the opera, which was the first opera performed by the New York City Center and the first by a black man to be performed by a major company, and the critics panned it, and it got twenty two curtain calls on opening night, and yet it closed within a week because the critics were like, oh, these little black guys they tried. After that happened, it was almost as though there was this consensus. I'm not

talking about a conspiracy theory. I'm just saying there appears to have been this feeling among people in the positions of power and classical music that he'd gone far enough, that's enough. Doors just started closing. He couldn't get symphonies performed, so he would write for chamber orchestras. He couldn't get

that performed, so he'd write for band. Couldn't get that performed, so he'd write for quartet, and then he'd write for choir, and then, you know, towards the end of his life, Leopostakowski got him a job writing for elementary school textbooks, and at one point the publisher called up Stakowski and said, how do we get Ahold Wayne Grant? Still? We need his number because we need him to change something. Leoposti lost his mind and I was like, you don't ask

we a gret still to change a note? Are you crazy? Throughout his life, still amassed a huge collection of manuscripts, notes, and other musical ephemera. I asked celest what happened to all of those materials. He left all of his papers to the University of Arkansas, which is in Faittteville. Almost everything else my mother has, and she has them in a giant barn in Arizona with no climate control and

no protection at all. I don't know what will happen when she passes, and I don't know what state those things will be in. I hope that they will be salvageable. I think she has long had a dream of opening a museum, and maybe that's why she's held onto them. But opening a museum is quite expensive. I don't think that's gonna probably happened in her lifetime. So yeah, I don't know. I don't know if they're still extant. I have one of his batons. I have one of the

tables that he made with his own hands. I probably his wing tips shoes. I associate his wing tips shoes with my grandfather. He was so you know, he would get up every day, and he would dress in a three piece suit with vest and wing tips, shoes and a tie to go into his own back room and make music and write music. It wasn't about what he

thought about himself. He was trying to show respect to the craft that it would have felt disrespectful for him to do that, to write music and you know, sweats or whatever the mid twentieth century version of sweats was. He also had a music type writer that had music notes instead of letters that I thought was really really cool. He had he used onion, this onion skin paper. Celeste maybe didn't get as much time with her grandfather as she likely wanted, but his influence on her was undeniable.

Celest would follow in his footsteps, going on to be a successful musician. But I didn't ever want to be in classical music. But I had music around me my whole life, and I loved it. I wanted to be Annie'll Come Out Tomorrow as a young child, I wanted to do Broadway. I don't think I'm ever gonna love a too analty and dissonance, and I'm sure that a big part of that is from his influence and a love for melody. My work as a musician is so

different from my work talking about grandfather's music. I performed his music quite a bit, although I refused to perform it in February. So that's part of my I think, obligation. It's my joy as well, but an also an obligation to keep performing this music. But also I do have the sort of responsibility to history. You know, if we could talk to Mozart's granddaughter, wouldn't you kind of want to talk to her and hear what she had to say.

And I feel like I'm the youngest of the four grandchildren, so I'm the last one that knew him in person, and so there is this duty. I have a duty to keep that story alive and to pass on what I know of this composer, who, in the end is so pivotal not just in our musical history as a nation, but in our racial history, our history as a society.

And he was an activist in his own way. So yeah, I do feel that the musical performance of his works is connected to this responsibility that I feel the mantill I have kind of taken on. Celeste have done an amazing job performing the works of her grandfather at least

in my humble opinion. So today we're going to go out listening to Still's composition Levy land Here, performed by Celest Headley with the Northern Arizona University WIN Symphony, treating that was thee Lest Hedley singing the music of her grandfather, William Grant Still. Find more music by Still online at William Grant still music dot com, and be sure to call your local classical radio station and request that they play more of Still's music, not just during Black History Month.

This episode of Ephemeral was written by Trevor Young and produced with Max and Alex Williams and Matt Frederick. Learn more at Ephemeral Dutch show Next Time on Ephemeral. I believe that the Okay Laughing Record is the greatest record ever made. It's a side of a record where people laugh for three minutes. I've listened to it hundreds and hundreds of times. Crazy thing is it was a huge, runaway, monster hit. Everybody had one, and it stayed in print

for like thirty years. The question becomes not just what is it and how did it becomes such a big hit, but why do we know so little about it? Support Ephemeral by recommending an episode, leaving a review, or dropping this a line at ephemeral Show. The more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows and learn more at ephemeral dot show