Chronology and Itinerary of the Career of Will Marion Cook: Materials for a Biography Peter M
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University of Nebraska - Lincoln DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln Faculty Publications: School of Music Music, School of 10-17-2017 Chronology and Itinerary of the Career of Will Marion Cook: Materials for a Biography Peter M. Lefferts University of Nebraska-Lincoln, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/musicfacpub Part of the African American Studies Commons, American Popular Culture Commons, and the Music Commons Lefferts, Peter M., "Chronology and Itinerary of the Career of Will Marion Cook: Materials for a Biography" (2017). Faculty Publications: School of Music. 66. http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/musicfacpub/66 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Music, School of at DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Publications: School of Music by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. 1 10/17/2017 Chronology and Itinerary of the Career of Will Marion Cook: Materials for a Biography Peter M. Lefferts University of Nebraska-Lincoln This document is one in a series---"Chronology and Itinerary of the Career of"---devoted to a small number of African American musicians active ca. 1900-1950. The documents are fallout from my work on a pair of essays, "US Army Black Regimental Bands and The Appointments of Their First Black Bandmasters" (2013) and "Black US Army Bands and Their Bandmasters in World War I" (2012; rev. version, 2016). In all cases I have put into some kind of order a number of biographical research notes, principally drawing upon newspaper and genealogy databases. None of them is any kind of finished, polished document; all represent work in progress, complete with repetitions, missing data, and the occasional typographical error. I invite Queries, amplifications, and corrections, which may be directed to [email protected]. The present document is a first draft of October 2017. A biography of Will Marion Cook by Marva Carter, Swing Along (2008) is an excellent place to start for anyone interested in Cook. Carter relied heavily on Cook’s unpublished typescript autobiography, and interviewed family members. Bill Reed’s book chapter on Cook in Hot In Harlem (2010) is the best recent treatment of him at that length. The present effort extends their work principally by trolling through available electronically searchable newspaper databases. The material in this chronology will be supplemented in due course by a short series of on-line documents about particular aspects of Cook’s career, including brief synopses of the careers of other family members, his involvement with the “tab show,” his involvement with La revue nègre, his involvement with education, his involvement with a repertory company at the Lafayette Theatre, his involvement with writing and representing on stage the history of African American music, and a chronology of his shows and songs. -------- COOK, WILL MARION (1869-1944) January 27, 1869 - July 19, 1944 Born in Washington, DC; died in NYC; buried in Washington, DC. Composer, conductor, arranger, orchestrator, producer, director, violinist, pianist, librettist and lyricist, author, educator. One of the foremost American musicians of his generation, and regarded by many in the African American community of his day as its leading composer. In contemporary eyes, an eccentric, irascible genius of great heart. 2 INTRODUCTION Lester A. Walton, in NY Age, May 7, 1908, p. 6: "Who is the foremost Negro composer in the United States?" . "There is but one correct answer." Will Marion Cook. And "he probably leads when it comes to eccentricity." Salem Tutt Whitney writes the following in his "Timely Topics" column, under the heading "Impressions of Musicians" (Chicago Defender, October 11, 1930, p. 5): "Will Marion Cooke [sic], musician and composer of some of our most popular songs and ensembles. Chorus director of high ability. Energetic, nervous, eccentric, sometimes brutally frank, nevertheless he's a friend of mine." P. L. [Percival Leroy] Prattis (1895-1980), a well known and influential figure, was a journalist who worked at the Chicago Defender, etc., and then was executive editor of the Pittsburgh Courier from 1936 to 1965. In his column "The Horizon," in the Pittsburgh Courier, November 4, 1944, p. 7 [Old Fulton Postcards; also cited in Carter thesis, p. 175], Prattis wrote: "I have heard Will Marion Cook lie until my head has swum. I liked the kind of lies he told. He was a gifted liar with no holds barred. But the lies he told hurt nobody. They helped him and they helped those who heard them, for he lied for beauty's sake. Grossness, ugliness, meanness all vanished under the spell of Cook's vivid imagination, his gift for coloring." Composer and pianist Margaret Bonds provides the often-quoted remark that "Even now, when I write something for choir and it's jazzy and bluesy and spiritual and Tchaikovsky all rolled up into one, I laugh to myself, "That is Will Marion Cook"." This anecdote reminds us that the most interesting Cook music was in his ensemble writing (not his songs), most of which is gone. Regarding the lost choral and ensemble idiom of Cook, there is also the much earlier comparison to Dvorak, in respect to one of the Cannibal King projects: According to the Evansville Courier and Press, August 25, 1901, p. 5, in an article signed Phil H. Brown, it says the book of one particular project was furnished by Harry B. Smith, gives much information and a scenario, 3 and pronounces: "Now the announcement comes that Cook has written a genuine negro opera called the "Cannibal King" . the music is of the kind that Dvorak laid down.” Not particularly a joiner, or not seen to be so, Cook was not, for example, a member of the Frogs and not a member of the Crescendo Club. But he was quite active in the Clef Club for over a decade, and he was an active participant in the 1914 Autumn Exposition, the 1934 Century of Progress pageant, etc. -------- HIS NAME Cook was baptized William Mercer Cook; William is his legal first name; he was named after his maternal grandfather; until early adulthood he is more often than not "Willie"; Mercer comes from his father's friend John Mercer Langston, also Oberlin-educated, the first Dean of the Law School at Howard; his middle name remains Mercer at least through the Oberlin years; he is William Mercer Cook in Oberlin registrations and William M. Cook on his 1887 passport. Acc. the Carter bio, Cook changes his name to Will Marion Cook ca. 1890 to honor his mother (Marion was his mother Belle's middle name); Cook says in his memoir that the change was made in DC between Chattanooga time and Oberlin, so he would have been a youngster around 13 and was made in rejection of "Mercer" in favor of Marion, in a complaint to his mother, when Langston annoyed him over something (Cook memoir in Carter thesis, p. 390-91, 403-404; the Aveni thesis also cites Cook memoir that he gave up "Mercer" when his namesake said some things he disagreed with); Riis 1989 says he changed his middle name during his college years, which presumably could stretch through National Conservatory years; Aveni thesis (Rutgers 2004) says that Abbie filled out an Oberlin alumni record for Cook after his death and that there she says that he used Marion "after returning from Berlin" (and a vague reference to this testimony is in Carter thesis, p. 18). In DC throughout the 1890s he is William M. Cook or Wm. M. Cook (and Will Marion Cook gets no hits in DC papers of that time); another combination to search is simply William Cook. 4 "Will Marion Cook" is mostly his preferred personal and professional name after 1900; only occasionally do newspapers later call him "William" instead of the near universal "Will." Cook uses “Will Marion” as a pseudonym for one or more Clorindy publications; thus, sometimes the newspapers, esp. ca. 1898-1899, call him "Will Marion" (e.g., Boston Herald, August 21, 1898, p. 14; LA Times Feb. 19, 1899, p. 12), and some references to band concerts with selections from Clorindy identify the composer, by the last name only, as Marion. Cook uses "Will Mercer" as a pseudonym in 1904 when working on Lederer/Smith productions. Sometimes the middle name is Marian with the second "a" and/or the last name is "Cooke" with final "e", so it important to check variant spellings in searches. He is not to be confused with Will A. Cooke, a separate individual, a contemporary who is an African American engaged in theatrical work, with whom Cook's career often intersects. --------- BIOGRAPHY EARLY YEARS 1869, in January: born in Washington DC on January 27 (Carter thesis, p. 2, notes that some sources give 28 or 29 January); his brother John is two years older; boyhood in DC; Cook apparently lived in DC continuously for ten years, until after the death of his father in March 1879; then, in rapid order, something like Denver, Kansas City, DC, Chattanooga, DC, Cleveland environs (Oberlin). There is some ambiguity around where he was living and for how long in the years 1879-1883, as unfolds below. c. 1874 begins violin at age 5 in DC (Chicago Defender, July 29, 1944, p. 2); begins school in DC; in the first published ASCAP biographical dictionary (1948), his entry says he was boy soprano; he was a prodigy on the violin, and eventually acquired professional-level piano skills. In 1906, the Washington Evening Star (April 22, 1906, p. 8) remembered Cook as "a product of the colored public schools," and 5 "the composer is remembered here as a boy with great native musical talent who afterward studied" at Oberlin, under Joachim, and under Dvorak.