African-American Voices of Traditional Sacred Music in Twentieth-Century and Twenty-first Century Los Angeles

Abstract

��� Over a span of some 390 years, the African diaspora has developed a rich musical heritage within the United States, generating several important genres that have been nurtured throughout the country by numerous musicians who were introduced to the foundations of the music in the church and through school experiences of their childhood. This heritage, rooted originally in the southern United States, has been transported to California. A number of blacks who became the musicians (performers, teachers, composers, and scholars) of Los Angeles arrived in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries from states (e.g., Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Texas, Louisiana, Tennessee, Illinois, Michigan, Mississippi, and Maryland) that had strong African-American communities suffused with the musical culture of the African diaspora. Their migration transformed the spiritual, gospel music, blues, and jazz in California (see DjeDje and Meadows 1998) while concurrently cultivating an appreciation for and an expertise in the performance of traditional European classical music. A s new musicians visited and/or permanently settled, they began to nurture the talent of those who were native to the state. John A. Gray came from Norfolk, Virginia, and opened the Gray Conservatory of Music. William T. Wilkins came from Little Rock, Arkansas, and started the Wilkins Piano Academy (opened in 1912 as the first Interracial School of Music in the City of Los Angeles). As explained by Irma Jean Juniel Prescott, a Zion Hill Baptist Church musician from Shreveport, Louisiana, who became a Los Angeles–community piano teacher, “Those individuals who are quali