24 Negro Melodies, Op. 59/1

Composer: COLERIDGE-TAYLOR, Samuel
  • This is a set of 24 folk song arrangements for piano (see below for list of songs). The set was published in Boston in 1905.
  • Coleridge-Taylor took about half of the melodies from African folk songs, and about half from African-American spirituals.1
    • The score, which is available online, gives the source of each tune, and transcribes each tune in its original form before the composer’s piano arrangement. 
  • Coleridge-Taylor first heard spirituals in 1899, when the Fisk Jubilee Singers toured England. He began using melodies from spirituals in his compositions after this experience.2
  • Coleridge-Taylor had made his first visit to the United States in 1904 the year before he published this collection. He had been invited by the Coleridge-Taylor Choral Society, an African-American choir formed in 1901 in Washington, DC in the composer’s honor.
  • Note: Coleridge-Taylor’s Romance for Violin and Piano is also designated as his Op. 59. To distinguish the two works, the Negro Melodies are sometimes labeled Op. 59/1, and the Romance as Op. 59/2.3
  1. At the Dawn of Day
  2. The Stones are Very Hard
  3. Take Nabandji
  4. They Will Not Lend Me a Child
  5. Song of Conquest
  6. Warrior’s Song
  7. Oloba
  8. The Bamboula
  9. The Angels Changed My Name
  10. Deep River
  11. Didn’t My Lord Deliver Daniel?
  12. Don’t be Weary, Traveller
  13. Going Up
  14. I’m Troubled in Mind
  15. I was Way Down a-Yonder
  16. Let Us Cheer the Weary Traveller
  17. Many Thousand Gone
  18. My Lord Delivered Daniel
  19. Oh, He Raise a Poor Lazarus
  20. Pilgrim’s Song
  21. Run, Mary, Run
  22. Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child
  23. Steal Away
  24. Wade in the Water

Sources

  1. Stephen Banfield and Jeremy Dibble, and Anya Laurence, “Coleridge-Taylor, Samuel,” Grove Music Online (2003), accessed July 23, 2021,  https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-1002248993.
  2. “Samuel Coleridge-Taylor,” The Library of Congress, accessed July 23, 2021, https://www.loc.gov/item/ihas.200038837/.
  3. Banfield and Dibble, and Anya Laurence, “Coleridge-Taylor, Samuel,” Grove Music Online.

Cut IDs

21259 21259 23614 23768