Telling the Story of Will H. Dixon, 145 Years Later
If you’ve never heard of Will H. Dixon, you’re not alone. But that may soon change.
Today’s world is awash in proclamations of “rediscovery” – from long-marginalized musicians and artists, through bare-midriff fashion and obscure species and plants, to diplomatic and political tactics. But many of these “rediscoveries” are better described as belated increases of interest in things that have maintained a more-or-less steady, if also marginal, presence all along. They never really left, were never really lost or forgotten. They’re not really rediscoveries.
Not so the musical and theatrical polymath whose story is the subject of this post. His name was Will H. Dixon, and he was born 145 years ago tomorrow, on August 29, 1879, in Wheeling, West Virginia. He was an actor, comedian, conductor, pianist, playwright, and singer, as well as a composer of both popular and classical music. And he was an important figure on the front edge of the explosion of African American cultural activity that coalesced as what historian Ernest Julius Mitchell II, referring to the sundry geographically dispersed iterations of this movement that are popularly dubbed the “Harlem Renaissance,” “Black Chicago Renaissance,” and more, identifies as the great Black Renaissance of the twentieth century.
The remarkable story of Will Dixon’s life and work has been genuinely obscure for most of the period since his death in 1917. But as an important recent article in the Amsterdam News attests, it is – thanks to the stewardship of his daughter and New York-based Black history researcher and collector Lawrence H. Levens – being genuinely rediscovered today, at the 145th anniversary of his birth.
There’s no need for me to recapitulate all the information provided in the Amsterdam News article and the few other published articles about Dixon currently available, but let me offer a few bits of information to substantiate the claims made here about Dixon’s significance. After that, I’ll offer a couple of points of information about his music, and then I’ll close by sharing the means by which the current rediscovery of his story is happening – and what might come next.
William Henry Dixon’s career started modestly enough. He was born on August 29, 1879, the second of four children born to Mary Putnam of Barnsville, Ohio, and John H. Dixon of Baltimore, Maryland; his father played second alto in a recently formed all-African American brass band. Talent, intelligence, and ambition were abundant and obvious, but this was the era of Jim Crow, Black Codes, and white-on-Black racial violence committed with impunity, including lynchings, and chronic racial terror. In 1897 the family decided to claim its rightful future. They moved to Chicago – still a profoundly segregated city, but one that offered a deep sense of community and a thriving cultural life to African American migrants.
That environment suited Will Dixon. By 1900, at age twenty-one, he was listed in the Federal Census as a “Theatrical man” in the metropolis. The following year he left Chicago for New York with lyricist T. Alfred (“Alf”) Anderson (1868-1942). There they made their entry into New York’s thriving theatrical scene by playing roles in minstrel shows while also working on their own musical comedies and other projects for publication and performance. By 1902 he was working as an actor, composer, lyricist, and singer. His music was in demand for recording in the new technology of the phonograph, too: it appeared on labels including Columbia Records, Edison Recordings, and Victor Talking Machine Co. And it was published by firms including Joe Morris Publishing Co. (Philadelphia), Modern Music Publishing Co., (Chicago), Penn Music Co. (New York), G. Ricordi & Co. (New York/Paris/Milan), G. Schirmer (New York), and M. Witmark & Sons (New York); just in 1904 he was able to have no fewer than five of his songs published M. Whitmark & Sons (New York): Bessie, My Black-Eyed Baby; Fesia; Lucinda; My Twilight Dream of You; and None of It Goes for Mine.
Dixon’s theatrical breakthrough came in the summer of 1905, when he became the leading stage conductor of the Memphis Students Company, a chorus, orchestra, and variety troupe originally headed by Ernest Hogan and Abbie Mitchell, with music by Will Marion Cook.
That ensemble gave more than 100 performances in Hammerstein’s Victoria Theater and Paradise Roof Garden, near Broadway, during the summer and early fall of 1905; it was also the first to play jazz on a New York stage. That fall he also took advanced harmony lessons in New York, but in the meantime the Students’ success was so great that in November 1905 (now as the Tennessee Students Company) they traveled to Europe and performed in Berlin, Brussels, London, and Paris (the Folies-Bergère), among other places. Their shows began with music “on the classical order” and then shifted toward popular song and dance. The Students remained in Europe until May 1906.
By the time the Students returned to the U.S., Dixon was a well-established actor, composer, conductor, and stage manager. He worked in Chicago’s flourishing Pekin Theatre Stock Company in 1906 and Vaudeville’s 127th Street Theater, among other places. In the meantime, though, the comparatively great racial freedom Dixon had experienced in Europe and the concomitantly lesser exclusion from Classical music there stimulated his interest in Classical forms and styles – a situation that would facilitate the early twentieth-century “breakthrough” of Black composers into the realms of American classical music and eventually lead to the founding of the National Association of Negro Musicians in 1919. Becoming a member of Black Manhattan society that met in the Marshall Hotel in the Tenderloin district (today’s Midtown), he established his own publishing company, the William H. Dixon Music Publishing Co., in 1907, and in 1910 he became a founding member of James Reese Europe’s groundbreaking Clef Club in New York.
Dixon played piano in the Clef Club’s historic Carnegie Hall concert on May 2, 1912 – but in the meantime he had also started the process of adding another dimension to his legacy, marrying widowed Chicago milliner Maude Mae Seay (née Ruby) on February 1, 1912. Their union produced a daughter, Francesca (“Frankye”) Dixon, who was a musical prodigy and later went on to earn degrees at The Juilliard School, New York University, and Columbia Teachers College before becoming a tenured professor of music at Howard University.
And Will Dixon’s renown as a composer as well as a performing musician continued to grow: he collaborated with theater greats including Theo Bendix (1862-1935), Joe Jordan, Cecil Mack (1873-1944), George Walker (ca. 1872-1911), and Bert A. Williams (1874-1922). Around 1914 he became a member of the newly formed American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP), and around that same time he wrote the libretto and music for a three-act opera – unpublished and unperformed still today – titled The Maid of Chatteaulogne.
Dixon’s success, though, was short-lived: he began exhibiting signs of late-stage syphilis in 1916, and the following year he was forced to return to the care of his mother in Chicago. He died there on 14 May 1917. He was thirty-eight.
An obituary that appeared in the New York Age described Will Dixon as “gentlemanly in conduct and . . . possessed [of] many qualities that stamped him as a man with a good heart and kindly intentions toward all.” Those words attest to his character and personality – to his possession of attributes that are always to be prized. More indicative of his persona as a participant in the artistic cultures of the United States’ two largest cities are two passages in James Weldon Johnson’s classic cultural memoir Black Manhattan. The first of these mentions Dixon as a peer and equal of a parade of Black artistic and cultural luminaries, most of whom – let me be pointed about this – do not need to be rediscovered today because they, unlike Dixon, have not been marginalized to the brink of oblivion:
Even more than that passage, though, I personally love the following. As you read it, try to imagine the scene: a 25-piece orchestra in which the string players and percussionists (and possibly the winds and brass when they weren’t playing) sang in four-part harmony while also playing, as “trick” drum-set player Buddy Gilmore “manipulat[ed] a dozen noise-making devices aside from the drums” as the music called for effects – all led by Will Dixon, who led the ensemble (and the audience members’ experiences) by dancing out the character of the music in attitudes that ranged from a graceful shuffle to grotesque:
There’s much to love in this evocative account, but perhaps the most beautiful part for latter-day musicians and audiences is that Dixon’s conducting, despite its theatricality, was an essentially intimate gesture. It translated the sounds of the Memphis Students choreographically and visually, and thus enabled audience members who might be less musically educated to understand those sounds in ways that would have eluded them without Dixon’s musico-kinetic artistry.
That experience could never be recaptured in today’s arenas that seat 5,000+ people – but imagination can be a wonderfully, deliciously intimate thing. With that in mind, it’s easy to imagine the smaller, more intimate ballroom of the Marshall Hotel (capacity: 750), the 1,600-seat Proctor’s Theatre (on 23rd Street) or Oscar Hammerstein’s 1,200-seat Victoria Theatre, where the Memphis Students performed. And in that greater intimacy the effect of the musical and choreographic artistry of “the original dancing conductor” must have been a thing to behold.
Dixon’s capacity for engagement at once intimate and extroverted is evident in his output as a whole, and in his individual works. The ultimate examples of his more extroverted persona are of course the operas, which today survive only in manuscript and have not been heard in living memory (if at all; one major desideratum for Dixon research is to search for evidence of performance dates for the operas and musical comedies). But of the works currently available, my personal favorite examples of his more popular, extroverted style are Delicioso: Tango aristocratico as memorably recorded by the Paragon Ragtime Orchestra under the direction of Rick Benjamin (though I would dearly love to hear these also with the orchestra members singing along, as Johnson describes!), Brazilian Dreams, and the foxtrot The Chase. Listening to these shows that even though Dixon was quite conversant in the idioms of early twentieth-century popular song, he had a distinctive approach to phrase structure and musical periodicity – one that is, IMO, quite attractive:
That leaves Dixon’s more intimate works, which offer a substantially different sort of communication. His songs certainly fall into this category, but my favorite of these works is one that Dixon also orchestrated: the evocative waltz Les Belles de Lausanne (The Fair women of Lausanne), which was recently recorded by Professor Kevin Wayne Bumpers of Miami-Dade College. It begins with a slow, slightly mysterious introduction, then opens out into an infectiously tuneful slow waltz (vals lente):
Beautiful music, that – just one of more than a hundred compositions in various genres (vaudeville songs, instrumental foxtrots, marches, tangos, two operas, and six musical comedies) that Will H. Dixon penned during his all-too-brief career. Those works earned him a position of real distinction during the flowerings of African American culture that happened in the U.S.’s two largest cities in the first two decades of the twentieth century. His 35 most widely held works and published compositions in 47 publications are held in 98 academic libraries, and dozens more fascinating and beautiful pieces small and large are held in the Barnes/Dixon/Myers Historical Harlem Papers, Archives and Musical Manuscripts Collection that currently survives under the guardianship of Lawrence H. Levens in New York ( https://www.weremember.com/william-dixon/7s3l/memories ) – pieces, most them, that have been neither taught nor studied, neither performed nor heard, in living memory.
It is, in a word, music ripe for bona fide rediscovery, written by a composer likewise deserving of a serious rediscovery – a rediscovery that may well prove one of the most exciting of the post-World War II period.
I began this (very long; sorry!) post by saying that it was about the story of Will H. Dixon. Returning to that point, I’d like to solicit you to become a part of the leading edge of the story of the rediscovery of the extraordinary Will H. Dixon. After all, we tell stories not only to remember what has been, but also to remind ourselves of who we are and how we connect to that seemingly remote past, both individually and as a society. Now – at this 145th anniversary of his birth – is the time for us to unite the story of Will Dixon with our own. It may well be the first bona fide musical rediscovery of the twenty-first century.
It's our story to write.
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