preview

William Grant Still Research Paper

Decent Essays

William Grant Still was born in Woodville, Mississippi on May the eleventh 1895. Although he was born in Mississippi he grew up in Little Rock, Arkansas. Still was born to two teachers, his mother, Carrie Lena Fambro Still , who was born in 1872 near Milledgeville Georgia and died in 1927, and William Grant Still Sr, who was born in 1871 and died in 1895. Stills dad was an accomplice in a supermarket and executed as a neighborhood bandleader. He also passed on when his newborn son was three months old. Still and his mom moved to Little Rock, Arkansas, where she taught English at a local high school for more than 30 years. She met and wedded Charles B. Shepperson, who supported his stepson William's musical advantages by taking him to operettas and purchasing Red Seal recordings of traditional music, which Still significantly enjoyed. The two went to various exhibitions by artists on visit. Still also listened to his maternal grandma sing African-American spirituals to him. Still started to learn how to play the violin at the age of fifteen. He taught himself to play a bunch of instruments including the clarinet, saxophone, double bass, cello oboe, and the viola. Then at the age of 16 he graduated from M.W. Gibbs High School in Little …show more content…

In 1936, Still led the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra; he was the main African American to direct a noteworthy American symphony. In 1934, Still, for his first time got a Guggenheim Fellowship; he began to start working on his first of his eight musical dramas, Blue Steel. In 1949 his musical show Troubled Island, initially finished in 1939, about Jean Jacques Dessalines and Haiti, was performed by the New York City Opera. It was the primary musical drama by an African American to be performed by a noteworthy

Get Access