Hall Johnson

Francis Hall Johnson was born on March 12, 1888, in Athens, Georgia, the fourth of six children of Alice Virginia Sansom and William Decker Johnson, a pastor in the AME Church who also served as president of Allen University. Johnson pursued an extensive formal education, attending the private, all-black Knox Institute in Athens before earning a degree from Allen University in Columbia, South Carolina. He subsequently studied at Atlanta University, the University of Pennsylvania, the Hahn School of Music, and the Juilliard School. As a child, Johnson received piano instruction from his older sister, and he taught himself violin after attending a recital by Joseph Henry Douglass, grandson of Frederick Douglass.

Johnson made his professional debut as a violinist in New York in 1910 and went on to perform violin and viola in a range of professional settings. He played in the orchestra that James Reese Europe led while accompanying Vernon and Irene Castle on tour, and in 1918 he performed with the New York Syncopated Orchestra under Will Marion Cook. He also played in the orchestra for the 1921 Broadway musical Shuffle Along. Over time his focus shifted toward choral music, and in 1925 he founded the Hall Johnson Negro Choir, the first of several choral ensembles he would lead. The group gave its first professional performance at the Pythian Temple in 1928.

The choir gained wide recognition through its involvement in the 1930 Broadway production of Marc Connelly's The Green Pastures, and Johnson and the ensemble continued their association with the work through national and international tours, radio broadcasts, the 1936 film adaptation, and Hallmark Hall of Fame television productions. Johnson also arranged music for and conducted his choir in more than thirty feature-length Hollywood films, along with short films and cartoons. In 1937 alone, the Hall Johnson Choir contributed to the soundtracks of Frank Capra's Lost Horizon, Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and Hal Roach's Zenobia. In 1941 the choir returned for Disney's Dumbo, providing vocals for the song "When I See An Elephant Fly," and Johnson himself voiced the Deacon Crow character in the film. The choir appeared again in Disney's Song of the South in 1946.

As a Broadway book writer, Johnson authored Run, Little Chillun, a folk opera that premiered on Broadway in 1933. The work was subsequently produced in Los Angeles between 1935 and 1937 under the Federal Theater Project, and a further production was mounted in San Francisco in 1939 as part of a Works Progress Administration exhibit at the Golden Gate International Exposition. Johnson also composed the Easter cantata Son of Man, which premiered at New York's City Center in 1946.

Beyond his compositional and choral work, Johnson was a respected vocal coach whose students included Marian Anderson, Charles Holland, Robert McFerrin, and Shirley Verrett. He was fluent in both German and French. In 1951, the United States Department of State selected the Hall Johnson Choir to represent the country at the International Festival of Fine Arts in Berlin, Germany. The Philadelphia Academy of Music awarded Johnson an honorary doctorate in 1934, and a bust sculpted by Minna Harkavy in 1931 was acquired by the Pushkin Museum in Moscow following an exhibition at the Moscow Museum of Western Art. A photograph of Johnson taken by Sidney Cowell in 1960 is held in the National Portrait Gallery of the United States.

Johnson died on April 30, 1970, at the age of 82, from burns sustained in a fire at his New York apartment. He was posthumously elected to the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame in 1975. In September 2020, the Athens Cultural Affairs Commission named Johnson among the first ten inductees of the Athens Music Walk of Fame, honoring his career with a sidewalk plaque and a mobile-app beacon installed downtown.