Born in Anniston, Alabama, Dawson ran away from home at the age of 13 to study music as a pre-college student at the Tuskegee Institute. By the time of his graduation in 1921 he had learned to play most of the instruments of the orchestra. He then enrolled at Washburn College in Topeka, and later at the Horner Institute of Fine Arts in Kansas City. In 1925 he graduated with a bachelor’s
degree in music theory and in composition. The next year he moved to Chicago to study at the Chicago Musical College and then at the American Conservatory of Music, where he received his master’s degree. 

In 1930, Dawson was invited to direct the music department at the Tuskegee Institute. During his tenure, Tuskegee’s 100-voice choir performed at the grand opening of the Radio City Music Hall in New York, at the White House for President Herbert Hoover, and at Hyde Park, New York, for future president Franklin D. Roosevelt. In 1946, the choir broke the race barrier at Washington D.C.’s Constitution Hall. 

Dawson’s Negro Folk Symphony was first performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra, conducted by Leopold Stokowski, on November 20, 1934 at Carnegie Hall in New York. It was a sensation. One critic called it “the most distinctive and promising American symphonic proclamation which has so far been achieved.” 

In his program note for the premiere Dawson said he wanted his audience to know that the Symphony was “unmistakably not the work of a white man.” He was clearly not trying to imitate Beethoven or Brahms. “The themes,” he wrote, “are taken from what are popularly known as Negro Spirituals. 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.”

~ Program notes by Charley Samson, copyright 2023