James Weldon Johnson
(1871-1938)
James Weldon Johnson
James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938), teacher, writer, diplomat and secretary of the NAACP, made a lasting impression on the cultural and social life of the Black in America. He was the author of numerous books of both prose and verse. Some of his more notable works are “Fifty Years and Other Poems”; “God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse”; “The Book of American Negro Poetry"; “Black Manhattan”; “The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man,” which is a fictional biography published in 1912; and his own autobiography, “Along This Way”, in 1933.
His famous poem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing” (1900), which his brother J. Rosamond Johnson set to music, was adopted by many depressed African Americans of the 1930’s as their national anthem. His dramatic version of “The Creation” is still performed today, by dramatic readers, over television networks. One of his most notable poems praises the nameless authors of the Negro spirituals: “O Black and Unknown Bards of Long Ago.”
Johnson was a contributor to the “The Nation, Crisis” and several other national magazines, editor of the New York Age Newspaper and an extremely popular columnist for 10 years.
Johnson was born in Florida and was educated in Atlanta and New York City. He practiced law in Florida and taught school in his native state for a few years before joining his brother J. Rosamond Johnson in New York, to collaborate with him in writing musical comedies. He served as executive secretary of the NAACP and led the campaign for Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill of 1921. Previously, Johnson had served the United States government as consul in Nicaragua. He was professor of creative literature at Fisk University (Nashville, Tennessee) at the time of his death.
In his book “Negro Americans, What Now”, published in 1934, he helped to explain the African American’s cultural contributions and achievements in literature and music and gave his own philosophy and expectations for the future of the African American.
(From the International Library of Negro Life and History).
J. Rosamond Johnson
(1873-1954)
J. Rosamond Johnson
J. Rosamond Johnson (1873-1954), an exponent of distinctively African American music, was born in Jacksonville, Florida. He received a thorough musical education at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. Over the years, he pursued an interesting and unusual career as he used his formal training in music to develop a distinctive form of African American music. Reaching the age of maturity when ragtime was becoming popular in America, Johnson became a composer-producer of vaudeville shows. He rose rapidly from a partnership with the comedian Robert Cole to directing successful music comedies. For a short period he was director of music for the Music School Settlement of New York, but the lure of the theater caused him to return to the vaudeville stage.
His musical comedy “The Red Moon is remembered for one of its hit songs, “Wrap Me in Your Little Red Shawl.” Johnson collaborated with his brother James Weldon Johnson by setting his poetry to music: one of the most outstanding works of the two is “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” long considered the Black National Anthem. Songs written by Cole and Johnson for Klaw and Erlanger, producers of musical extravaganzas in New York City, were “Under the Bamboo Tree,” “The Congo Love Song,” “Nobody’s Looking But the Owl and the Moon” and “My Castle on the Nile.”
Johnson went abroad in 1913 to direct a musical comedy at the Hammerstein Opera House in London. He appeared also at the London Palladium in a new musical comedy.
(From the International Library of Negro Life and History).
Lift Every Voice and Sing, sung by Jeff Majors
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