It was quite a birthday present for Florence Price when one of her arrangements was heard by what was likely the largest audience she would ever enjoy in her lifetime.
On Easter Sunday, on this date in 1939, Marian Anderson, barred from performing at Constitution Hall by the Daughters of the American Revolution, because of her race, sang instead from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, to a diverse crowd of 75,000 people on the mall and a national radio audience estimated in the millions.
The program concluded with Price’s arrangement of the spiritual “My Soul’s Been Anchored in the Lord.” By coincidence, it also happened to be Price’s birthday.
Price, born in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1887, had become the first African-American woman to be recognized as a symphonic composer, when her Symphony in E minor was performed by the Chicago Symphony in 1933. Needless to say, in an era when White American males struggled to find acceptance on Eurocentric classical music programs, Price, as a Black American woman, faced even greater challenges.
The playing field has shifted in recent years, and interest in Price’s music has been on the rise. It’s hard to believe, for a composer of her accomplishments, that dozens of her manuscripts were rescued from her dilapidated summer home, on the outskirts of St. Anne, Illinois, only as recently as 2009.
Price died in 1953.
Who knows what other musical riches are out there, undervalued in their time, awaiting rediscovery?
Anderson sings “My Soul’s Been Anchored in the Lord”
Price’s Symphony No. 1 in E minor
Lincoln Memorial Concert
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