Another native son of Alabama, William Levi Dawson of Anniston, ran away from home to study music full-time at the Tuskegee Institute (now University) under Booker T. Washington. Dawson started writing his first symphony in Chicago in the late 1920s and was invited to return to Tuskegee as faculty in 1930. He finished this symphonic masterpiece at Tuskegee, where he stayed as Director of Music for over 20 years. Dawson’s most prolific contributions to the musical canon are choral octavos – widely performed in churches today – which he composed while at Tuskegee as part of his tenure portfolio.

Largely based on Black spirituals translated much in the way Tchaikovsky and Dvorak had transformed folk music in their symphonies, Dawson’s Negro Folk Symphony received instant acclaim. It premiered in November 1934 by the Philadelphia Orchestra and its star conductor Leopold Stokowski, with three performances in Philadelphia, one at Carnegie Hall, and a national radio broadcast. Audiences broke into spontaneous applause and gave each performance a standing ovation. In April 1935, the ASO (then the Birmingham Civic Symphony Orchestra) was the second orchestra to play the piece, and the first organization in the South to present this work to the public – a sensational success with Dawson himself in the audience. The newspaper reported that it was a “genuinely thrilling musical experience” for the “breathlessly attentive,” interracial audience of five thousand delighted listeners who gave the composer and orchestra an ovation.

The ASO has played the Negro Folk Symphony in recent years, and we are eager to bring Dawson’s music to the public again, highlight a historically and musically important composition, and make it part of our engaging recording.