BMC BLACK VOICES PROGRAMME BOOK - Book - Page 29
genre when the great composer was director of
the National Conservatory of Music in New York
City. Burleigh, who also possessed a ûine
singing voice, played the double bass and
timpani in the National Conservatory Orchestra,
making Leon Bosch’s arrangements doubly
authentic. Burleigh also travelled with Samuel
Coleridge-Taylor during the Englishman’s
American visits, introducing the Englishman to
many Spirituals, which caused Coleridge-Taylor
to claim that Burleigh was ‘the greatest singer
of my songs.’ Visiting England, Burleigh
performed a selection of his original songs and
arrangements of plantation and minstrel songs
for for King Edward VII; he also sang at the
Temple Emanu-El in New York City.
It is impossible to over-emphasise Burleigh’s
signiûicance in the history of Spirituals—as an
early ‘ethno-musicologist’ (before the term was
invented), a proselytiser of the genre, a
performer of such music as singer and doublebass player, teacher of both the great black
concert singers Marian Anderson and Paul
Robeson, and as a composer of immortal
melodies in various Spiritual styles. Burleigh
was, without question, both the keeper and
sword-bearer of the great Negro Spiritual
tradition. There can be little doubt that, had
Burleigh not existed, the great lineage of Negro
Spirituals would have withered on the vine of
history. f
It is thanks to Burleigh that, for example, we can
hear several of his arrangements of such
