(from The New York Times)
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, was 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.”
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