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WILLIAM LEVI DAWSON (1898-1990) (383 hits)

WILLIAM LEVI DAWSON (1898-1990)

FIRST AFRICAN AMERICAN REPRESENTATIVE TO CHAIR A COMMITTEE IN CONGRESS BORN
April 26, 1883 - November 9, 1970 (87)

William Levi Dawson was an African American composer, choir director, and professor specializing in black religious folk music. He was born on September 26, 1899, in Anniston, Alabama to Eliza Starkey and George Dawson, the first of their seven children. His father, a former slave, was an illiterate day laborer. In 1912, Dawson ran away from home to study music full-time as a pre-college student at the Tuskegee Institute (now University) under the tutelage of school president Booker T. Washington. Dawson paid his tuition by being a music librarian and manual laborer working in the school’s Agricultural Division. He also participated as a member of Tuskegee’s band and orchestra, composing and traveling extensively with the Tuskegee Singers for five years; he had learned to play most of the instruments by the time he graduated from the high school division in 1921.

Dawson’s next four years (1921-25) were spent earning his B.A. He enrolled in composition and orchestration at Washburn College in Topeka, and theory and counterpoint at the Horner Institute of Fine Arts in Kansas City, where in 1925 he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in music theory and in composition. While still an undergraduate student, he displayed his genius in chamber music compositions and at the same time supporting himself as the director of music at Kansas Vocational College in Topeka, Kansas, and at Lincoln High School in Kansas City, Missouri.

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