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The Chicago World Columbian Exposition of 1893 (“The Fair”) celebrated America, its industry, and its people. It was among the first events of its kind to honor the achievements of women. Almost overnight, the Fair and Chicago became a gathering place for the nation's gifted and talented from every scientific and artistic discipline. There was a significant Negro presence at the Fair; Dahomey Village from Africa's Gold Coast, the Haitian Pavillion was a gathering place for black intelligentsia — hootchie cootchies doing the belly dance, piano professors exchanging licks and forms — these were soon were to emerge as the new national musical rage, ragtime. On Colored Person's Honor Day, Will Marion Cook, the future mentor of Duke Ellington, meets Dvorák. He is invited to attend the National Conservatory that fall; after that the Dvorák family returns to New York.

This chapter presents the detailed story of another historic recreation, this time on the stage of Carnegie Hall where in 1912 the Clef Club concert took place. New challenges were met: an unusual mix, the forming of a new Clef Club orchestra that included thirty strummers — ten each of mandolins, guitars and a rare harp guitar, and banjos — all of whom read complicated music very well; a boys' and men's choir; and a concert orchestra including eight pianists and various soloists. Will Marion Cook's dialect song, “Swing Along” for chorus and orchestra stopped the show as it did sixty seven years earlier.

This final chapter takes a walk through what once was Dvorák's New York neighborhood. It discusses the unsuccessful battle to save the Dvorák House where Dvorák lived from 1892-5. The heightened awareness he brought to the bountiful riches of African American music that helped inspire the Composer-Collector generation — James Weldon Johnson, James Rosamond Johnson, W. C. Handy, Ernest Hogan, and Will Marion Cook — are detailed. It discusses the search for and emergence of a “New African-American Orchestra”, Ford Dabney's theater “roof-top” bands, Hogan and Cook's “Memphis Students Band”, Europe's “Clef Club”, and Cook's “Southern Synchopaters” orchestra, preparing the way for Duke Ellington, “a world-class composer, who stands alone as the foremost American genius who remained loyal to the improvisational, tonal, and rhythmic endowments of African American music”. His universe was an “orchestra” of brilliant jazz artists, one he never found wanting. With a light but firm tether, he drew and followed them along a trail of discovery, leaving glorious artifacts in his path.

This chapter examines the American cultural revolution brought about by the ragtime operetta, Clorindy; or, The Origin of the Cakewalk, and how it initiated a reevaluation of Negro music and its place within a cultural market dominated by white ideologies and sensibilities. In their performance, Will Marion Cook and Ernest Hogan inaugurated new considerations of Negro music, by disrupting many of the rigid distinctions African American intellectuals held between folk/formal and high/low (and many others). Most significantly, the duo called attention to a historical process that turned the folk music of the American slave into the sound of modern America. In the first and second decades of the twentieth century, Negro music resounded as a rhythmic dance music representing not only African American modernity, but U.S. modernity more broadly.

This chapter focuses on Harry T. Burleigh's involvement in the creation of Antonín Dvořák's Symphony No. 9 in E Minor, “From the New World.” After attending the Chicago World's Fair and visiting Erie, Burleigh returned to New York City in late September 1893 to continue his studies at the National Conservatory of Music. He was joined this time by his friend Will Marion Cook, who was impressed by Jeannette Thurber's genuinely inclusive approach in recruiting students. The two men relished opportunities to enjoy the abundance of fine music the city had to offer, pondering how African American music should find its place in such settings. Burleigh continued to spend evenings with the Dvořák family through the fall. This chapter also considers the controversy stirred by Dvořák's Symphony No. 9 in E Minor and his advocacy of an American school of music based on Negro music.

This chapter examines Harry T. Burleigh's legacy in African American music. Burleigh retired in 1946 from his position as baritone soloist at St. George's Protestant Episcopal Church, marking the end of an exceptional public career. He died of cardiac failure on September 12, 1949. All too soon after the influx of laudatory obituaries, the press got wind of the conflict over Burleigh's estate. This chapter first considers the trial involving Burleigh's two wills, both of which were challenged by Louise Alston Burleigh and their son Alston because they suspected his longtime housekeeper, Thelma Hall—a recipient of the second will together with her son James—of exerting undue influence on Burleigh. It also looks at various tributes made in Burleigh's honor, including one from Will Marion Cook, and concludes with an emphasis on the importance of black music to the Harlem Renaissance, Burleigh's mastery in arranging African American spirituals, and the newfound respect for his art songs.

After the US Civil War, African American musicians and intellectuals had increasingly turned to European classical music as a tool of socioeconomic advancement while acknowledging the importance of antebellum vernacular music for defining racial identity. Violinist and composer Will Marion Cook (1869–1944) used the platform of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition to demonstrate Black achievement in the arts. Meanwhile, Jeannette Thurber and Antonín Dvořák had opened the National Conservatory to Black students free of charge, thus expanding educational opportunities for talented Black musicians. The premiere of the New World Symphony in December 1893 reignited a widespread and vicious public debate about the place of Black music and musicians in American national life.