Samuel Coleridge-Taylor

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Hey, we didn't get
this title backwards, in case any of you had a
moment of like, that's not right if you were hoping

(00:22):
for Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the English romantic poet who wrote
Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan. Sorry out
of luck today, I really am wondering how many people
may respond to our social media posts about this episode,
similar to when we did Charles Chapin and a lot
of people thought it was going to be Charlie Chaplin
and got confused. Yeah, yeah, Samuel Coleridge Taylor. And because

(00:47):
we are talking about a British composer who was a
standout both for his talent and also because he was
a black artist who moved in almost entirely white circles
when that was pretty unheard of. That's the confusion there.
We'll tell you in the first part. He's named for
the poet. His music kind of fell out of favor
for a while in the mid twentieth century, but the

(01:08):
last several decades his work has had a bit of
a revival and he's a pretty interesting figure both as
a composer and as kind of an interesting study in
race in both England and the US, because he had
a lot of US connections and how that impacted this

(01:30):
person's life who was a celebrity but was also in
the middle of a lot of a lot of issues
that tend to get put to the wayside when you
think of someone who has privilege of celebrity, but they
were still present in his life. So that's who we're
talking about today. So Samuel Coleridge Taylor at that time
with no hyphen was born on August fifteenth, eighteen seventy

(01:53):
five in Holborn, London. Was named after Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
As we just said, apparently his mother a lot of
the time called him by his middle name Coleridge. As
a young adult, his last name was hyphenated basically by
accident in print. He just rolled with it. So his
last name morphed from Taylor to Coleridge Taylor. So sometimes

(02:16):
we'll be referring to him as Samuel, sometimes as Colorridge Taylor. Yeah,
that's the name his family took and his children took
so I never found out if there was an actual
legal moment of changing it or if he just adopted
it and everyone was like, yep, that's fine. Name shifts
aside right out of the gate. There are some other

(02:37):
discrepancies in his family records and the various biographies written
about him. So his mother, Alice Taylor, was a white
english woman. Her maiden name is recorded as Holman's on
the birth record. His father, who is listed on his
birth certificate as Daniel Hugh Taylor, was from Sierra Leone,
and although Alice's last name at the time of Samuel's

(03:00):
birth is given as Taylor, there is no record or
evidence of Alice and Daniel ever having married. To further
complicate things, Samuel's father left London months before Samuel was born.
He probably did not ever know that Alice was pregnant.
Daniel was a surgeon who had been studying at Taunton

(03:20):
in King's College, London, and once he either finished his
studies or he became frustrated at the lack of opportunities
available in England, he left. How that's told is a
little different from telling to telling. We're also going to
talk about him again a little bit later. So in
his early life Samuel was exposed to a lot of music.

(03:41):
When he was five or six, he started playing the violin.
He took lessons from a musician named Joseph Beckwith. In
an account given by Beckwith years later, he said he
had seen Samuel out the window of his home playing
marbles while holding his violin, and that he had asked
the boy to play for him. It became he had
been given some lessons at that point. Beckworth took him

(04:04):
on as a student and taught him for the next
seven years. Samuel also joined the church choir. This timeline
is also fuzzy. There I read one pretty intense breakdown
of it where people were trying to the writer was
trying to backdate. Okay, then when did Beckwith start teaching
him versus this claim that he had been playing since

(04:24):
he was five or six? Did beck With meet him
at that age or later? It's all a little unclear.
But Alice and Samuel moved from Holborn to Croydon when
he was still very young, and this, plus some support
that he received from people around him in his music
studies as a child, also offer some clues and mysteries.

(04:44):
Regarding his family. Samuel's mother, Alice, as we said, did
not have the last name Taylor. She also did not
have the last name Holmans as appeared on his birth record.
The name that she used was Alice Hare Martin, and
this does a line Samuel's grandmother's last name. She was
Emily and Martin. So why was Holmans entered as Alice's

(05:07):
name on the birth record. There are people named Holmans
in Samuel's early life. Those are Benjamin and Sarah Holmans,
although sometimes they're called by Holman without the s, and
that blurs the details even more. While their exact familial
relationship with Alice and Samuel as fuzzy, and a lot

(05:27):
of accounts they were involved in his life, they were
specifically integral to his musical education. In a biography of
Coleridge Taylor written for the British Library Board, Mike Phelps writes, quote,
the confusion might well have been a deliberate strategy to
circumvent the stigma of illegitimacy. On the other hand, if

(05:48):
the Alice of the birth certificate was the same woman
as Alice Hare Martin, it's not clear how or why
she and her son shifted with such ease from the
worst slum in the city to the relative safety of
suburban Croydon and the warm bosom of a respectable working
class family. There's speculation that the confusing information related to

(06:11):
Samuel's father offered on birth records was deliberate. It really
wasn't possible to conceal that Samuel was multiracial, but his
mother could at least sidestep any scandal or disadvantage that
her child would have from having been born out of wedlock.
So there have been a variety of speculations about this

(06:34):
entire dynamic with Alice and the Holmans came to be.
But when it all shakes down, it appears that Benjamin
Holman or Holmans, was probably Alice's biological father. Alice's mother, Emily,
had also not been married when Alice was born. Census
records are not all in alignment regarding this. An eighteen
sixty one census of the Holman's household mentions four children

(06:57):
of Benjamin and Sarah, none of whom are Alice, But
then in eighteen seventy one and in eighteen eighty one
those census records include her as a daughter. Coleridge Taylor
did refer to Benjamin Holmans as his grandfather, so that
seems to be what the situation is here. In an
article for Black Music Research Journal from two thousand and one,

(07:19):
biographer Jeffrey Green, who wrote a whole book on him,
later that I was not able to get my hands
on Uh. Makes the case that some biographies have knowingly
fudged these details because of that stigma that we talked about,
and that has made it really tricky to unravel all
of it over the years. Samuel was Alice's first child,
but soon he had siblings. His mother married a railroad

(07:42):
worker named George Evans in eighteen eighty seven, and they
had three children together. The Hollmans paid for Samuel's music
lessons and gave him his first violin. We should note
that Samuel was not the only musician in the family.
His younger brother, Victor, also went on to have a
musical career, and their other siblings also learned music through

(08:02):
formal lessons. But Samuel, being the only multi racial child
in the family, faced a lot of racism that his
siblings did not. His classmates he later recounted, called him colely. Yeah.
There's also a side discussion to be had about the
musicality of this family, because, like the Holmans were not
especially musical. Benjamin Holman was I think a farrier, but

(08:26):
the kids all got music lessons and they tended to
be pretty good at it. The church choir that we
mentioned a moment ago also led to a mentorship of
Samuel by the choir master that was Colonel Herbert A. Walters.
Walters was a professional merchant, but he was also an
amateur musician who volunteered with the choir at Saint George's
Church of Croydon, and he saw so much promise in Samuel.

(08:51):
Walters later arranged for Samuel to meet with Charles Grove,
who was the head of the Royal College of Music,
and Grove was impressed enough that Coleridge Taylor, who at
this point was only fifteen, was given a scholarship and
he enrolled with the college that same year. Initially, Samuel
started at the Royal College of Music as a violin student,

(09:12):
but he also started taking composition classes. His professor in
composition was Sir Charles Villiers Stanford, an Anglo Irish composer
who's considered one of the most influential of the late
Romantic era. But Stanford was not the only impressive figure
in Taylor's life at the school. Composers like Gustav Holtz

(09:33):
and Ralph Vaughan Williams played concerts there. This is also
a place where, if the lore is true, he didn't
have to shoulder the racism alone, because the school's leadership
dealt with bigotry that was aimed at him head on.
In one instance, Sir Charles Villier Stanford overheard another student
make a racist remark and quickly and publicly informed this

(09:57):
person that his talent level was so far below that
of the young man that he had just insulted. Yeah,
it did seem like they stuck up for him. That
doesn't make it go away, obviously, sure, but he at
least had support of people older than him that were
in power. While he was still a student at the

(10:18):
Royal College of Music, Coleridge, Taylor had his first composition
published by Novello and Company. That was an anthem titled
in d Oh Lord. So in this case we're using
the word anthem in its meaning as a choral hymn
of praise. The following year Novello published several more of
his anthems, and this all happened before he started formally

(10:39):
taking composition classes, and it's actually during these early publications
that that hyphenation of his name happened. So this is
officially in the early eighteen nineties when he becomes Coleridge
Taylor instead of Taylor. In eighteen ninety three, having already
gained a reputation for the music he had published, Coleridge
Taylor was given a scholarship to study composition at the school.

(11:01):
In eighteen ninety five, Coleridge Taylor won the Leslie Alexander
Composition Prize, and then he won it again the next year.
In eighteen ninety six. He also began a friendship that
led to a collaborative relationship. That friendship was with Paul
Lawrence Dunbar. Dunbar was three years older than Coleridge Taylor.

(11:21):
He was one of the first black poets from the
United States to really be recognized for his mastery in
the field. Dunbar was originally from Ohio and he was
visiting London in eighteen ninety six when the two of
them met. Coleridge Taylor had heard about Dunbar's arrival in
England and had sought him out. He went right to
where he was staying to tell Dunbar he wanted to

(11:42):
work with his poems. The two of them shared the
trait of having been drawn to their fields very early
in life. Just as Samuel was playing music from the
age of five, Dunbar had written his first poem at
the age of six. Both of them continued their life
paths from there. So listeners, if you're trying to place Dunbar,

(12:03):
you would recognize his poem Sympathy. That's his most famous
and it includes the line I know why the caged
bird sings. It comes up twice in the final stanza.
If you associate that more with Maya Angelo, it is
because she was inspired by this poem to use that
line as the title of her autobiography. In eighteen ninety seven,
Coleridge Taylor and Dunbar created their first project together that

(12:27):
was Seven African Romances. These were songs with lyrics by
Dunbar and music by Coleridge Taylor, and they quickly followed
that with an operatic romance titled Dream Lovers that was
about two Moroccan men, one of them a prince. They
fall in love with two sisters at the age of
twenty one, Samuel started conducting an amateur orchestra in Croydon

(12:50):
and would conduct music with various choirs and orchestras for
the rest of his life. Coming up, we're going to
talk about Coleridge Taylor finding love with another musician, but
first we will take a quick sponsor break. While he

(13:12):
was in school, Samuel met fellow Royal College of Music
student Jesse Sarah Fleetwood Walmsley. She was a singer and
a pianist and was six years older than Samuel. Their
initial connection happened because Jesse needed a violinist to help
with duets for piano and violin. That was eighteen ninety two,
when Samuel was just seventeen. Jesse completed her time at

(13:35):
the RCM in eighteen ninety three, so right about the
time that Coleridge Taylor was beginning his composition studies in Earnest.
By February eighteen ninety eight, Jesse was singing with the
choir of the Croydon Conservatory of Music, which gave a
concert including works by Coleridge Taylor. Exactly when their relationship

(13:55):
started is not clear, because it really seems like the
two of them kept thayings really quiet. Their instinct to
do that was valid. Once the news broke that they
were a couple, Jesse's family did not receive that news
well at all. The Walmisleys referred to Samuel using a
racist epithet, and when Samuel and Jesse announced their plans

(14:17):
to get married, the family was deeply opposed to the union.
They made some really gross and bigoted arguments to Jesse
about all the ways that marrying this man because of
his race would ruin her life. In the autumn of
eighteen ninety eight, Coleridge Taylor had success with his original
composition titled Ballade in a Minor that won acclaim at

(14:40):
the Gloucester Three Choirs Festival. This was a commission that
had originally been offered to composer Edward Elgar, but he
was unavailable and he recommended Coleridge Taylor instead, noting that
the young composer was incredibly clever. This is one of
many instances where Coleridge Taylor's career was really helped along
by pa with a lot of clout in musical circles

(15:02):
who recognized just how extraordinary his talent and skill were.
Later in eighteen ninety eight, Coloradge Taylor's composition Hiawatha's Wedding
Feast made its debut, and this piece, which was inspired
by the eighteen fifty five Longfellow poem Song of Hiawatha,
brought almost instant fame to this young composer. This piece

(15:25):
is a choral work that sets the language of the
poem to music. It was published by Novello and then
had its performance debut on November eleventh at the RCM,
with his mentor Stanford conducting. One review of that debut
performance read quote the production of mister Coleridge Taylor's cantata
Hiawatha's Wedding Feast on Friday evening at the Royal College

(15:46):
of Music marked another step forward in the career of
that promising young composer. The Hiawatha meter is, for musical purposes,
the most intractable in the world. There is no getting
away from its persistent lilt. One feels doubly grateful to
mister Coleridge Taylor for his musicianly treatment of a difficult subject.

(16:07):
Another review from the Birmingham Daily Gazette from November twenty
second read quote, Hiawatha's Wedding Feast a Cantata for tenor, solo,
chorus and orchestra words by Longfellow, music by s. Coleridge
Taylor is a very favorable example of this kind of
writing and amply sustains the reputation of the composer as

(16:29):
a musician of genius. It often happens that the reviewer,
and his fear of doing even the smallest injustice, pauses
to reconsider, and over and over again, reverts to the
music submitted to his judgment. But nothing of the kind
is needed here. From the first to the last, the
work runs on easily, spontaneously and in perfect accord with

(16:51):
the words. Some courage is needed to attack such a libretto.
People started referring to Coleridge Taylor as the Black Moler.
One of the most famous commentaries on this piece actually
came from composer Sir Arthur Sullivan of Gilbert and Sullivan fame, who,
despite not feeling great at this point in his life,

(17:12):
went to this performance because it had been advertised as
the latest thing of this up and coming genius, and
he wrote in his diary after seeing the premiere that
he had found the composition quote fresh and original, as
well as quote brilliant and full of color. He talks
about how lush it is. He's pretty poetic about it.
With the success of Hiawatha's Wedding Feast and the high

(17:35):
profile that came with it, Jesse's family grudgingly cooled in
their objection to the couple's relationship. Listen. This is not
as though they magically stopped being racist, but the fame
and the fortune that they thought would come with it
made them amenable enough to at least attend Jesse and
Samuel's wedding in eighteen ninety nine. He also produced sequels

(17:58):
to the very popular Hiawatha's Way Wedding Feast. The first
was Minnie Haha, which debuted in October eighteen ninety nine
at the North Staffordshire Music Festival. The next was Hiawatha's Departure,
which was published in the spring of nineteen hundred. These
three pieces of music were intended by Coleridge Taylor as

(18:18):
a trilogy, and was also performed and published in its
entirety under the same title as the poem that inspired it,
which was The Song of Hiawatha, But those second two
parts of the trilogy didn't garner the same level of
praise as the first performances of Hiawatha's Wedding Feast as
a standalone piece also continued, and Coloradge Taylor conducted most

(18:40):
of them in the years following its debut. In its
first five years, two hundred performances of it were staged
in England. Yeah, it was hugely, hugely popular. Jesse and
Samuel had their first child that same year that the
trilogy was completed, a son, and they named him Hiawatha.
Three years later they welcomed a daughter named Gwendolen of Reel.

(19:03):
As his family grew, Coleridge Taylor started taking a variety
of jobs. He took teaching jobs and also playing for recitals.
He started guest conducting, He started working with theater productions. Basically,
he took any paying job he could that involved music.
He was still composing, but he knew he needed to
generate regular income to support Jesse and the children, and thankfully,

(19:27):
because of his name recognition, he was able to find
quite a lot of opportunities. In addition to producing new
music and becoming a parent, Coleridge Taylor also started theatrical collaborations.
In nineteen hundred, he worked with Her Majesty's Theater, which
is now His Majesty's Theater, which was built in eighteen
ninety seven by actor manager Herbert beerbaum Tree. The first

(19:51):
project that Coleridge Taylor was brought in for was the
production of Ulysses in nineteen hundred. He also attended the
nineteen hundred Pan African Conference that took place in London
in Westminster Town Hall in July. This gathering was organized
by Henry Sylvester Williams, a Trinidadian barrister living in England

(20:11):
at the time, who founded the African Association in London
in eighteen ninety seven. This early effort of the Pan
African movement focused largely on issues facing the black populations
in the US and Imperial European nations and calling for
recognition of the rights of people of African descent. If
you have read the W. E. B. Du Bois line,

(20:34):
the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of
the color line, which appears in the forward to the
Souls of Black Folk, which he published three years later,
you would also recognize it in the Address to the
Nations of the World that was drafted at this conference.
Du Bois was in attendance at the conference. The address

(20:54):
calls for the end of mistreatment and sacrifice of African
people in pursuit of wealth, and also calls out the
use of alleged good intentions as a way to excuse
colonization and enslavement. That's in the passage quote, let not
the cloak of Christian missionary work be allowed in the future,
as so often has happened in the past, to hide

(21:15):
the ruthless exploitation and moral destruction of less developed nations
whose chief fault has been reliance on the plighted word
of the Christian Church. So the role of black identity
in Coleridge Taylor's life in some ways seems kind of fragmented.
It could definitely be interpreted as somewhat tragic. He never

(21:37):
knew his father, and though he was generally perceived as
black by people who met him or just saw him
on the street, he was raised in an entirely white household,
and he was at the time the only black person
in his school or among his professional peers and mentors.
To be clear, the Royal College of Music had had
another black student before him. There was not anyone, though

(21:59):
in his immediate circle, who really understood what his life
was like, and it's clear when you think about that
why he would have so eagerly welcomed the friendship and
collaboration that he had with Paul Lawrence Dunbar, and his
work seems to reflect this search for connection to other
people of color. His fascination with Longfellow's Hiawatha narrative is

(22:22):
invoked as an example of this, because Coloradge Taylor links
the two cultures musically. In the piece, there's an echo
of the spiritual Nobody Knows the trouble I've seen incorporated
in the Hiawatha overture. In the poem, Hiawatha looks for
his father who has left his family behind, and that's
led biographers to speculate about that being part of Coleridge

(22:45):
Taylor's personal connection to the written material. Additionally, when he
first heard the touring Fisk Jubilee Singers on a tour
of England in eighteen ninety nine, he was instantly intrigued
by Black American folk music and started to study it
and incorporate elements of it in his own work. One
of the things that becomes really apparent when looking at

(23:07):
Coleridge Taylor's life is that beyond anything else, he was
a very hard worker, and we're going to talk about
the many jobs and projects that he juggled that we
haven't even touched on yet when we come back from
a sponsor break. Even before his marriage and his theater work,

(23:33):
Samuel Coleridge Taylor had been the Croydon Symphony Orchestra's conductor.
We mentioned that, and he had remained in that role
until that group disbanded in nineteen oh three. He simultaneously
served as the resident conductor for other groups, including the
Rochester Choral Society in the Westmoreland Festival. As a lecturer,
he taught about music in his hometown in Croydon for

(23:55):
several years before becoming part of the Trinity College of
Music teaching faculty in nighteen oh three. Though it would
seem that he was already plenty busy at this point.
He also started developing concerts with musicians from the defunct
Croyden Symphony Orchestra, and he bankrolled two programs with them
himself under the name Coleridge Taylor Orchestral Concerts. Overlapping all

(24:19):
of that conducting work, he partnered with Her Majesty's Theater
again in nineteen oh two for a production of Herod.
He started conducting the Handel Society. That year he also
started his first tour of the United States. That was
not the United States first exposure to his work. Two
years before that, a Coleridge Taylor Society had been formed

(24:41):
in the US, and that group had really heavily promoted
his work and had staged performances of his compositions. They
invited him several years earlier, in nineteen oh one, and
he had turned the invitation down, presumably because he was
so busy in the immediate wake of the Hiawatha trilogy
being completed. It was in really hides a mand so

(25:01):
by the time he arrived in nineteen oh four, he
was already famous in the US, so much so that
he was introduced to President Theodore Roosevelt. He was asked
to conduct the US Marine Corps Band and the Coleridge
Taylor Society Chorus together. The audience for that performance was large,
about twenty seven hundred people. Two thirds of those attending

(25:23):
were black. That same year as that first US tour,
Coleridge Taylor's father, doctor Daniel Peter Hughes Taylor, died and
at that point it seems that people kind of knew
or had figured out that he was the composer's father,
because that fact appeared in the obituary that was published
in the British Medical Journal on October twenty second, nineteen

(25:43):
oh four. That obituary reads, quote, the death is reported
from the West coast of Africa of doctor Daniel Peter
Hughes Taylor, one of the earliest and most successful of
the West African native practitioners of British medicine. He received
his education at king College, London, where he graduated in
eighteen seventy four. He lived at Bathurst, the principal town

(26:06):
of the Gambia Protectorate. There he occupied the post of
coroner and was also a Justice of the Peace for
the colony. Doctor Taylor was, we believe, the father of
mister Samuel Coleridge Taylor, a writer of sacred music and
the author of Hiawatha. The gravestone that doctor Taylor has
in Gambia also allegedly notes that he is the father

(26:29):
of Samuel Coleridge Taylor. The next couple of years are
really filled with just an ongoing flurry of the kind
of work we've been talking about already, and nineteen oh
five Coleridge Taylor started teaching at the Crystal Palace School
of Art and Music. He published twenty four Negro Melodies
that year as well, writing in the introduction quote, what

(26:51):
Brahms has done for the Hungarian folk music, d Vorzach
for the Bohemian and Greek for the Norwegian, I have
tried to do for Negro melodies. The meaning here is
that he was trying to show the merit of music
that was associated with black culture, which was so often derided.
The Coleridge Taylor Orchestral Concerts that had been created from

(27:12):
the remnants of the Croydon Symphony Orchestra evolved once more
to become the String Players Club in nineteen oh six,
and Coleridge Taylor was their honorary leader. He was not
paying production costs out of pocket any longer. The production
of Nero that was staged by Herbert Bierbaum Tree that
year took up a lot of Coleridge's time. It had

(27:32):
a full score. He also traveled to the US once
again to tour, and this time he had an even
wider reach of cities included in the itinerary. His next project,
with Berbaum Tree was faust in nineteen oh eight. In
nineteen ten, he started teaching at Guildhall School of Music
as their composition professor. There was also a third US

(27:54):
tour that year, once again bigger than the previous one.
His fame had continued to grow, and North American audiences
were eager to hear the musical adaptation of Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow's epic poem. On that nineteen ten tour, Colorge Taylor
was invited to conduct not only for black orchestras, but
also for entirely white orchestras. After returning to London, Coloredge

(28:18):
Taylor worked on his final collaboration with Herbert Bierbon Tree,
which was Othello. That production debut in nineteen twelve. I saw,
but was not able to confirm that he was the
first black conductor invited or allowed to conduct an all
white orchestra. I don't know if that's true, but it

(28:38):
seems like it. There were several new compositions that he
made after that third US tour, Petit suis de concert
and a cantata titled A Tale of Old Japan, which
used the poem by Alfred Noyes as its inspiration were
both published in nineteen eleven. He sent the book for
a commission titled Violin Concerto Across the Atlantic to the

(29:01):
US for its premier in early nineteen twelve. That version
of the composition never made it and is lost because
he had shipped it aboard the Titanic. This was obviously
a man who stayed busy. If you're wondering why a
famous composer had to take so many jobs to make
ends meet, because that was not a job that made

(29:22):
most artists wealthy. In Colorridge Taylor's case, he, like a
lot of other composers, had accepted a flat fee for
the rights to publish his compositions. Hyawatha's Wedding Feast earned
him twenty five pounds fifteen pence, but Novella made a
lot more money than that from the many many editions
that the company published over the years. When the follow

(29:45):
up pieces of that trilogy were published, Colorridge Tailor made
a lot more for them, or reported two hundred and
fifty pounds, which was a lot, but again that was
a one time payment. One of the aspects of his
life which isn't really really in this significant list of
projects and accomplishments is just how deeply his life was

(30:06):
affected by racism. It was something that his daughter wrote
about in her book, The Heritage of Samuel Coleridge Taylor
that was published in nineteen seventy nine, and in that
book she shares memories of the way that her father
was treated when he was out in public as a
black man, particularly when he was with his wife Jesse.
He may have been celebrated as a composer, but just

(30:27):
as a person going about his business, he was often
met with racism. He was particularly wounded when passers by
would make insulting remarks about his wife or his children.
So his daughter, who at this point was using her
middle name of Avriel when she wrote this biography, described
him at one point as gripping her hand so tightly
that it hurt. When they were out in public and

(30:49):
he anticipated racist comments from other people on the street.
This is something that he didn't seem to talk about
a lot, but it obviously caused him considerable stress. The
story of sam Old Coleridge Taylor is sadly too short.
While waiting for a train at West Croydon Station on
August twenty eighth, nineteen twelve, he collapsed. He was taken

(31:09):
to his home and on September first, nineteen twelve, he died.
His cause of death was pneumonia that's believed to have
been exacerbated by overwork. He was buried at Bandon Hills Cemetery.
He was only thirty seven when he died, and his
death was front page news. Yeah, he had one of
those funerals that was just like attended by what seemed

(31:33):
to people there every human alive. It was huge. But
because he was still so young, his family was still
dependent on his income. When friends and colleagues realized that
his compositions didn't earn royalties, there was a whole lot
of effort to try to find ways to drum up
financial assistance so that they would be stable. There was
a memorial concert at Royal Albert Hall on November twenty second,

(31:57):
and the ticket sales, all of which went to Jesse
and the kids, to more than fourteen hundred pounds. There
were also college funds set up for Hiawatha and Gwendolen
of Real and a pension was arranged for Jesse. While
Color and Taylor's work fell out of favor for a
while and he was more or less forgotten. By the
middle of the twentieth century, there's been a huge effort

(32:18):
to get his work back onto music stands and performed.
And that's really wonderful because now there are lots of
recordings and videos of it available online, so you too
can listen to things like Hiawatha's Wedding Feast. I have
not listened to this, but Holly has, Oh I recommend it.
It's really beautiful. Some of it is so joyous and light.

(32:39):
Some of it has this great moodiness to it. It's very,
very pretty. I had heard it before, but in prepping
this episode, I listened to a lot of his music
just in the background, and I was constantly like, why
did anybody stop playing this live? Like I know, it
was not the popular style for a while, but it's
so good, so good. I have a fun email that

(33:03):
is again laughing at things because I need it. After that,
I'm so sad that, you know, who knows what he
could have composed had he lived longer. So it's a
bummer and we don't have more of his work. But
I have a fun email from our listener Katie titled
the Trousers have Wounded Us All and It made me

(33:27):
laugh because I made her laugh, and that makes me
laugh some more. Katie writes, Dear Tracy and Holly, I
may have never laughed harder while listening to a podcast,
and at the recent Friday episode where Holly read the
truly incredible letter by a fan of missus, Patrick Campbell,
where he bemoans her unflattering pants. I was writing on
my commuter train and I burst into cackling laughter, which

(33:48):
I cannot restrain until I had a stitch in my side.
So now her pants have wounded me too. I am
confident the other commuters were madly unsettled. Thank you for
this moment of hilarity and for the feeling off already
provided by hearing other women deal with this sort of nonsense.
Your podcast continues to be amazing, and I'm very grateful
for all your hard work, wisdom and laughter. I don't

(34:09):
have pets, but I did recently visit the DC Zoo
where one of the seals was sunbathing in the banana
pos which is apparently what seals do when they are happy.
I've attached a picture of this very happy seal living
its best life. Can I tell you the envy I
felt for this seal. When I opened this picture, like,
oh man, I want to sit in banana pos Katie,
thank you because them I laughed again and listen, laughter,

(34:32):
best medicine, et cetera. I'm a believer. Listen, those pants
still making me laugh. If you would like to write
to us about pants that hurt you by existing, or
anything else, you could do so at History Podcast at
iHeartRadio dot com. You can also find us on social
media as Missed in History, and if you have not
yet subscribed to the podcast, you can do that on

(34:54):
the iHeartRadio app or anywhere you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

All Episodes

Episode Transcript

Stuff You Missed in History Class News

Follow Us On

Hosts And Creators

Holly Frey

Tracy Wilson

Show Links

Popular Podcasts

Crime Junkie

24/7 News: The Latest

Stuff You Should Know

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Samuel Coleridge-Taylor