1978

Born in Woodville, Mississippi, William Grant Still (1895-1978) studied at Wilberforce University, Oberlin Conservatory of Music, and the New England Conservatory of Music.  Still worked in a great variety of musical settings, from playing in dance and theater orchestras, to supplying arrangements of popular music for African American show people, and was a prolific composer in the art-music tradition.  In 1936, Still was the first African American to conduct a major symphony orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and became the first African American to have an opera performed by a major opera company in 1949, when New York City Opera put on Troubled Island.