Will Marion Cook

Will Marion Cook, born William Mercer Cook on January 27, 1869, in Washington, D.C., was an African-American composer, pianist, violinist, orchestrator, lyricist, and choral director whose Broadway career spanned the early twentieth century. He died on July 19, 1944, at the age of 75, and is buried at Woodlawn Cemetery in Washington, D.C.

Cook was born to John Hartwell Cook and his wife Isabel. His father had been among the first graduating class of the Howard University School of Law in 1871 and became one of the first Black lawyers to practice in Washington, D.C., also serving as chief clerk of the Freedmen's Bureau from 1867 to 1872 and as professor and dean of the Howard University Law School from 1876 to 1878. Both parents were free people of color before the Civil War and placed strong emphasis on education. After John Cook died of tuberculosis in 1879, Isabel was left to raise three children alone and eventually sent them to live with other family members. Will, then ten years old, was sent to live with his maternal grandparents in Chattanooga, Tennessee, former slaves who had purchased their freedom before the war. During that year, he encountered what he later described as "real Negro melodies" and folk music, a period he would call his "soul period." His grandfather subsequently returned him to Washington, D.C., believing the South was not the right environment for the boy.

Cook began studying violin at Oberlin Conservatory in Ohio at age fourteen, working with Frederick G. Doolittle, Fenelon Rice, L. Celestia Wattles, and Calvin B. Cady. Benefit recitals sponsored by members of the African-American community helped fund his studies abroad. From 1887 to 1889, he studied at the Berlin Hochschule für Musik under violinist Heinrich Jacobson, who chaired the Orchestral Instruments Department and had trained under the Hungarian violinist Joseph Joachim. Cook made his professional debut as a soloist in Washington, D.C., in 1889, though his solo performance career proved short-lived. Encountering the stricter racial segregation of the classical music world, he redirected his ambitions toward musical theatre. During 1894 and 1895, he studied with Czech composer Antonín Dvořák and John White at the National Conservatory of Music while Dvořák was working in the United States.

In 1890, Cook became director of a chamber orchestra touring the East Coast and prepared a production of Scenes from the Opera of Uncle Tom's Cabin, which he intended to present at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. That performance was ultimately canceled. In 1898, he married the singer Abbie Mitchell, who was fourteen at the time. They had a daughter, Marion Abigail Cook, in 1900, and a son, Will Mercer Cook, in 1903. Marion later married dancer Louis Douglas, and Will Mercer Cook became a professor of history at Howard University before serving as United States Ambassador to Niger and Senegal.

Also in 1898, Cook gained a production of Clorindy: The Origin of the Cakewalk, a one-act musical comedy created in collaboration with poet Paul Laurence Dunbar. The production was staged on the Roof Garden of the Casino Theatre and was the first all-Black show to play at a prestigious Broadway house, though its status as a landmark is qualified by the fact that it was not staged inside the theatre itself and was not a full-length production. Following Clorindy, Cook served as composer-in-chief and musical director for the George Walker-Bert Williams Company, an African-American enterprise built around two leading vaudeville comedians who had been performing together for a decade.

His Broadway credits include the musicals In Dahomey, Bandanna Land, Abyssinia, The Casino Girl, and The Southerners, among other productions, with his active Broadway presence documented from 1900 to 1901. In Dahomey, which opened in 1903, is widely regarded as his landmark achievement. Theatre historian Gerald Bordman has described it as the first full-length musical written and performed by Black artists to be staged at a major Broadway house. The book was written by J. A. Shipp, with lyrics by Paul Laurence Dunbar, and the production starred Williams and Walker. After its Broadway opening, the show toured the United Kingdom, returned to New York in a revival in 1904, and subsequently toured the United States. The run lasted approximately four years in total across both countries.

Cook incorporated folk elements into his compositions in a distinctive manner, and many of his songs were first introduced through his stage productions, written for both solo singers and choral groups. A selection of these works appeared in A Collection of Negro Songs, published in 1912. Later in his career he organized choral societies in New York City and Washington, D.C., and produced concerts including "The New World" in 1917. He founded the New York Syncopated Orchestra, also known as the Southern Syncopated Orchestra, which toured the United States in 1918 and traveled to England in 1919 for a command performance before King George V. The ensemble, which aimed to bring jazz and ragtime to international audiences, included assistant director Will Tyers, jazz clarinetist Sidney Bechet, and Cook's wife Abbie Mitchell among its members. Cook also mentored younger musicians including Eubie Blake and Duke Ellington. One of his later works was Swing Along, written in 1929 with Will Vodery.

Cook was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 1944 and was transported to Harlem Hospital in June of that year. He died twenty-nine days later on July 19, 1944.