Will Marion Cook, born in 1869 to educated parents in Washington, D.C., played some mean violin. As was true of many musical geniuses, his technique was at first faulty. But his facility, as well as what we now call his soul, were always clear. After training at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, he was sent to Europe for further instruction, followed by study under Antonin Dvořák when that great composer was in New York City for a spell. Cook was a young man in 1893 when he performed at Carnegie Hall with such dazzling skill that, according to Duke Ellington, a reviewer declared him to be the world’s greatest Negro violinist. Outraged, Cook marched to the reviewer’s office. “I am not the world’s greatest Negro violinist,” Ellington quotes him as saying. “I am the greatest violinist in the world!” And with that, Cook smashed his violin to pieces. He almost never played the instrument again.
To the nation’s great fortune, he turned instead to show music. In the 1890s, Broadway music was a staid affair, alternating between antimacassar operetta, sentimental ballads, jigs and marches. Dvořák had taught that American music would have to turn away from its European forebears and find its own path. So Cook looked to the music of enslaved Black people and their descendants. He used what he found there — syncopation, rich Gospel-inspired choral arrangements and so-called blue notes — to infuse new life, and a new groove, into musical theater.
The kickoff was the musical “Clorindy, or the Origin of the Cakewalk” in 1898, with lyrics by the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar. The show was a smash. James Weldon Johnson, the Black Broadway lyricist who later led the N.A.A.C.P., reminisced that the “choruses and finales in ‘Clorindy,’ complete novelties as they were, sung by a lusty chorus, were simply breathtaking. Broadway had something entirely new.”
This was the beginning of a string of Black-created musicals in New York. Cook composed music for several of them, and led the thrilling all-Black Clef Club orchestra, whose most famous concert in 1912 included a 125-piece band. The Clef Club eventually grew to a 145-piece orchestra with 47 mandolins and bandores and 10 pianos. He toured extensively with the Southern Syncopated Orchestra and amassed a healthy portfolio of songs while mentoring both Ellington and the ragtime pianist Eubie Blake. In 1929 we find him as vocal director of a musical for which Harold Arlen, later the composer of hits like “Stormy Weather” and “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” was subbing in for the rehearsal pianist. Arlen kept noodling a catchy little passage and Cook told him he should expand it into a song. The result was the evergreen standard “Get Happy.”
Cook himself found happiness elusive. His first marriage, at 29, was to a 14-year-old. It didn’t go well. He was an unstable presence, reportedly saying he got deliriously “drunk” on mere water, after the victorious opening of “Clorindy,” while at other times languishing bedridden with what his wife called melancholia. Late in life, in a letter to a newspaper, he offered a devastating assessment of himself: “Too much praise and too easily earned money kept me for 35 years from becoming a master. Now it is too late. Your job as a lover of humanity, of the arts as a critic, is to see that my great genius race does not fail as has … WILL MARION COOK.”
I’ve been thinking about Cook because his name and his influence were woven through a fascinating symposium I recently attended at Susquehanna University on American music from the 1860s through the 1920s. Cook was a keystone figure, but if you want to learn about him, your main options are reading a 2008 biography that’s useful but preliminary, or scouring references in scholarly articles and liner notes. We need a biography that dives deep into the archival sources now so available on the internet, written by an author who is obsessed with the music of the period in general.
Cook’s music wasn’t the only part of the symposium crying out for broader attention. Another understudied opportunity was “Shuffle Along,” the first Broadway musical set to jazz.
The work of Blake and the lyricist Noble Sissle, it landed in 1921 like a jolt of electricity. Its goofy excuse for a plot is long forgotten, but songs such as “I’m Just Wild About Harry” and “I’m Simply Full of Jazz” shook the musical world and reverberate to this day.
In its wake, George Gershwin’s theater songs, once daintily pretty, took on the angular, bluesy flavor with which we now associate them. Other composers followed suit. After “Shuffle Along,” the music of what had once been known as Black Broadway became simply the music of Broadway.
You can hear why even in the overture, which is a joy forever. Because the show had a low budget, it had to be scored for just 13 instruments, but they combine to create a bright, tight soundscape that is at times crisp like a gin and tonic, at others the warm, smooth equivalent of the scent of honeysuckle.
The man who created the show’s sound was Will Vodery. In addition to inspiring Ellington’s rich and creative instrumental colorings, Vodery created the towering choral arrangements for the original production of “Show Boat,” which some consider the first modern American musical. His master work here was the lament “Mis’ry’s Comin’ Around,” with the Black chorus’s swelling minor-key plangency expressing the burden of collective oppression better than any spoken lines could. Sadly, this passage was cut from the show for time, but Vodery’s magnificent choral arrangement of “Ol’ Man River” remained, with the Black male chorus taking up the song in gorgeous harmony seasoned with blues chording.
It isn’t that “Shuffle Along” is forgotten. In 2016, the director George C. Wolfe presented “Shuffle Along, or, the Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All That Followed,” a Broadway show that refitted the original songs for modern commercial sensibilities. That was a welcome addition. But the music as originally performed was never recorded.
Rick Benjamin, the conductor of the Paragon Ragtime Orchestra, who spearheaded the symposium I was at, found the original orchestral parts in an archive. That’s how we have the sample I linked above, which he recorded in 2012. But he says no one seems interested in funding the rest of it.
American musical history — and the very many people who delight in it — need to hear the original “Shuffle Along,” just as badly as we need an obsessive, exhaustive study of Cook.
And something else occurred to me during the symposium. In my lifetime, Black people have often been told that we must reclaim our history because white people either don’t want it revealed, distort it for their own purposes or just aren’t interested. Looking around the room and noticing that — as always — most of the people unearthing this Black musical history were white men, I wished that more Black scholars would follow in the path of Caseen Gaines, whose book on “Shuffle Along” is key reading.
As the symposium went on and I listened to what these brilliant scholars had to say, however, I changed my mind. They weren’t consigning our history to the dustbin; they were rescuing it for all posterity. It’s a sign that the fear of erasure may be becoming obsolete. Our rich musical tradition deserves more of what they do.
John McWhorter (@JohnHMcWhorter) is an associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University. He is the author of “Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter: Then, Now and Forever” and, most recently, “Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America.” @JohnHMcWhorter
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