Born in 1899 in Anniston, Alabama, William Levi Dawson always wanted to be a musician. He ran away to the Tuskegee Institute at the age of 13, studying music full-time under the direction of Booker T. Washington and paying his way by working as a music librarian and doing manual labor in the school’s agricultural division. Dawson learned to play nearly every classical instrument before graduating in 1921, performing in Tuskegee’s choir, band, and orchestra and touring with the Tuskegee Singers. Dawson continued his studies at the Chicago Musical College and the American Conservatory of Music, eventually earning his master’s degree. He worked as a trombonist with several orchestras, including the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, from 1927-30 before returning to the Tuskegee Institute as a teacher from 1931-1956. 

On November 20, 1934, Leopold Stokowski led the Philadelphia Orchestra in a brand-new work by 35-year-old Dawson called the Negro Folk Symphony. Stokowski conducted four consecutive performances of the work, with a concurrent national broadcast on CBS Radio. The symphony was an instant success. One critic declared it “the most distinctive and promising American symphonic proclamation which has so far been achieved.” In The New York Times, Olin Downes noted, “This music has dramatic feeling, a racial sensuousness and directness of melodic speech.” Despite its enthusiastic reception, Dawson’s first and only symphony was largely forgotten, except for a 1993 recording by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. Thanks to the recent focus on music by composers of color, the Negro Folk Symphony is enjoying a well-deserved revival. 

As Dawson wrote in his program note for the Carnegie Hall premiere, his intent was not to imitate symphonists like Beethoven or Brahms but to make listeners realize the Negro Folk Symphony was “unmistakably not the work of a white man.” “The themes are taken from what are popularly known as Negro Spirituals,” Dawson explained. “In this composition, the composer has employed three themes taken from typical melodies over which he has brooded since childhood, having learned them at his mother’s knee.” Musicologist Gwynne Kuhner describes Dawson’s expert incorporation of musical quotes, noting, “The themes are handled with such virtuosic flexibility of rhythm and timbre that each movement seems to evolve organically.” The middle movement, “Hope in the Night,” is the heart of the three-part work. As Dawson wrote, he sought to create an “atmosphere of the humdrum life of a people whose bodies were baked by the sun and lashed with the whip for two hundred and fifty years; whose lives were proscribed before they were born.”