William Grant Still
Little Rock
1895 – 1978
William Grant Still spent his formative years in Little Rock, and the musical world he encountered there remained embedded in his work for the rest of his life. Classical recordings, theater, formal study, and the African American spirituals sung by his grandmother all became part of the foundation for a composer who would break barriers and create a distinctly American voice in classical music.
Still was born in 1895. After his father died when William was an infant, his mother brought him to Little Rock, where they lived with his grandmother. The household was intellectually and artistically rich. His mother taught English, painted, wrote fiction, played piano, and helped produce Shakespeare plays to raise money for Little Rock’s first library open to African Americans.
His stepfather, Charles B. Shepperson, added another layer to the young boy’s education. A railway postal clerk with a deep interest in music and theater, Shepperson took William to traveling shows and brought home RCA Victor Red Seal recordings of leading classical singers and musicians. He also encouraged Still to study violin.
By the time Still graduated as valedictorian of M. W. Gibbs High School in 1911 at age sixteen, he had developed extraordinary musical range. He could play clarinet, saxophone, oboe, double bass, cello, viola, and violin. At the same time, he had absorbed the spirituals his grandmother sang, giving him an early musical vocabulary that reached from European classical tradition to African American sacred music.
Still left Arkansas for college, first attending Wilberforce University in Ohio. Although his mother hoped he would study medicine, music pulled him in another direction. He played professionally, studied at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, and during time in Memphis worked with W. C. Handy, one of the central figures in the development and popularization of the blues.
After service in the U.S. Navy during World War I, Still moved into the musical world of Harlem. He performed, arranged, and studied with important composers, including George Chadwick and Edgard Varèse. These experiences expanded his technique, but Still increasingly sought a compositional voice that could speak from his own cultural experience.
The defining breakthrough came with his Afro-American Symphony, completed in 1930. Drawing on blues language within the structure of the European symphonic tradition, the work became the first symphony by a Black composer performed by a major American orchestra. Its success established Still as a major American composer and demonstrated that African American musical traditions belonged not at the margins of the concert hall, but at its center.
Still’s career continued to produce historic firsts. In 1936, he conducted the Los Angeles Philharmonic, becoming the first Black conductor to lead a major American orchestra. He received multiple Guggenheim Fellowships, wrote music for radio and film, composed operas and orchestral works, and created arrangements for prominent bandleader Paul Whiteman. His music moved across concert halls, broadcasting, theater, and Hollywood while retaining a voice that was recognizably his own.
Over the course of his career, Still became known as one of the most important Black composers in American classical music. Yet the roots of that achievement reach directly back to Little Rock. The city gave him family, education, instruments, spirituals, classical recordings, and the first environment in which his musical imagination could expand.
William Grant Still’s significance lies not only in the barriers he broke, but in the musical language he built. By bringing blues and African American traditions into dialogue with the symphonic world, he enlarged the possibilities of American classical music. The foundation for that work was laid during the formative years he spent in Arkansas.