Cook, Will Marion

Cook, Will Marion (1869–1944) composer, conductor; born in Washington, D.C. Son of the first African-American lawyer in Washington, D.C., he studied composition and the violin in the classical tradition at Oberlin Conservatory of Music (Ohio) and under Josef Joachim and Anton Dvorak in Europe. Convinced that he would not be taken serious as a classical musician because of his race, he turned to composing works that drew on the idioms and themes of African-American folklore and music. Throughout the 1890s and 1900s, he composed for the stage shows of Bert Williams, the leading black comic and vaudevillian. In 1889 Cook produced and wrote the music for Clorindy, the Origin of the Cakewalk, the first musical comedy written, directed, and performed entirely by African-American artists; it enjoyed success on Broadway and in London. He went on to compose the music for a number of popular black musicals, including In Dahomey (1903) and Abyssinia (1906), but his reliance on ragtime left him behind the changing tastes. He led his Southern Syncopated Orchestra, a huge ragtime and concert ensemble, and composed "I'm Coming, Virginia" and "Mammy" in the 1910s. In 1919, on its last tour of Europe before disbanding, the orchestra and its saxophonist Sidney Bechet received enthusiastic reviews from Ernst Ansermet for an emerging jazz style. Cook free-lanced thereafter with New York music publishers and was an influence on Duke Ellington's early work as a composer. His wife, Abbie Mitchell Cook (1884–1960), was a soprano who had a career first in his shows and then in other productions. Their son, Mercer Cook (1903), was a noted scholar at Howard University and served as U.S. ambassador to Nigeria and Senegal.