Follow Me: The Life and Music of R. Nathaniel Dett.

Spencer, Jon Michael

Follow Me is a lengthy and substantive book on a man about whom only one monograph has been written previously, namely Vivian Flagg McBrier's R. Nathaniel Dett: His Life and Works 1882-1943 (Washington: Associated Publishers, 1977). The R. Nathaniel Dett Reader, a compilation of Dett's published and unpublished writings on black sacred music (a special issue in 1991 of Black Sacred Music: A Journal of Theomusicology), also included an introductory essay on Dett. Of these three volumes, Anne Key Simpson's book is the most comprehensive, containing a biographical history, musical excerpts from Dett's compositions and arrangements of spirituals, concert programs, photographs of Dett and his relatives, and lists of his musical works.

Simpson tells us nearly everything we might want to know about Dett. She tells us about his family, his early musical training, his undergraduate study at Oberlin Conservatory, and his intermittent academic study beyond Oberlin. Prior to his earning a master's degree from the Eastman School of Music in 1931, Dett had a long and distinguished teaching career. He taught at several historically black colleges where he served as director of music: Lane College in Tennessee (1908-11), Lincoln Institute in Missouri (1911-13), and Hampton Institute in Virginia (1913-32). After he earned his master's degree, he served as director of music at Bennett College in North Carolina (1937-42). At each of these schools Dett directed choirs that toured and sang many of his published arrangements of spirituals.

At Hampton Institute, in the post he held during his most productive years, Dett became the first black director of music. In 1919 he founded the Musical Arts Society, an organization that brought to the college and the Tidewater area such important black artists as Marian Anderson, Clarence Cameron White, Harry T. Burleigh, and Roland Hayes. In 1928 the music department developed to where it began offering a bachelor of science degree. The famous soprano Dorothy Maynor entered the department as a student the following September. Two years later, in the summer of 1930, she toured Europe with Dett's Hampton choir, which gave concerts in such cities as London, Antwerp, Brussels, The Hague, Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Paris, Hamburg, Berlin, Dresden, and Vienna. In each of these cities the choir sang spirituals arranged by Dett.

All of this information is clearly set before us by Simpson, but she leaves important questions about Dett's years at Hampton unanswered. The first has to do with the choir's tour of Europe. Simpson tells us that the tour was sponsored by the philanthropist and Hampton trustee George Foster Peabody, and she quotes an official Hampton document that says of the school: "Now an opportunity is presented to promote the interest of the Negroes of Africa through influential white people of Europe who are interested in Colonial and Native affairs". Simpson never expounds on this, yet in the Hampton University Archives, in which she did a good part of her research, there are letters exchanged between Peabody, Dett, members of the Hampton administration, and the manager of the European tour which expound on the tour's purpose. That purpose was to bring to the European countries with colonial "possessions" in Africa a better understanding and appreciation of "the Negro," and to demonstrate that the Negro's natural musical skills could be developed with the kind of opportunity whites in America were affording them at schools such as Hampton.

Then there is the mystery surrounding Dett's forced resignation from Hampton. Despite the triumph of the choir's European tour, as evidenced in the concert reviews Simpson shares with us, Dett's resignation was requested a year later by Hampton's president. Simpson says no reason was given and only presents the several speculations listed in The Norfolk Journal and Guide. Among the speculations was that Dett had a considerable disagreement with the manager of the European tour regarding the content of the concert programs. Of this disagreement Simpson says, "Despite the glowing news reports of the choir's performance abroad, a spate of letters in the Hampton University Archives indicate that information sent to Principal Phenix by George Ketcham, Field Agent for the trip, tended to malign Dett". But the answer to the mystery lay in those very letters and some others--letters between Dett, Peabody, Ketcham, the new principal Arthur Howe, the tour manager Albert Morini, and the Tuskegee Institute president Robert Russa Moton, to name the most important. A letter from Ketcham to Morini seemed to say it all with words that forecasted Dett's fate: "Dett is still with us. I am not free to say anything more except that the authorities at the school know the full story of the trip and this information was given not only by Don Davis and me but also by Miss Stewart and Mrs. Washington. The hand of fate often moves slowly" (unpublished letter, Hampton University Archives).

Dett had been slapped on the hand before for being so strongwilled in the face of the white administration of Hampton, but the hand of fate eventually swung around to slap him in the face. Compare William Pickens on John Work's mistreat-meat at Fisk University in his column for the New York Amsterdam News, on 23 September 1925:

John Work had served Fisk University for a generation before this little man was ever heard of at the institution. The influence and popularity of the brown man was evidently so great as to arouse the jealousy of the little white man who was brought into the institution as superior officer. We do not know what influence at first removed Work from leadership and membership in the "Fisk Singers," but we know it was a very evil influence that finally forced him out of the institution altogether. . . . After pursuing the "missionary ideals" for all of his sound life, he was kicked out by a newcomer--and like an old horse was allowed to find whatever pasturage he might find. ("The Missionary John Work," p. 16)

JON MICHAEL SPENCER University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill