Upon Googling Myself . . .

Karen Parks’ “Nobody Knows” – A Tribute to Harry T. Burleigh (transcript)
Friday, February 08th, 2008

By Craig Havighurst

Soprano Karen Parks has released a new CD whose title, Nobody Knows, is intended as a double entendre. Half of the album consists of vital and well-known Negro spirituals. But Parks is also calling attention to the unknown composer and singer who brought those spirituals into the American mainstream more than 100 years ago. WPLN’s Craig Havighurst reports.

Audio for this feature is available here.

It’s likely that only students of American classical music and African-American culture will have heard of Harry T. Burleigh, even though the songs that Burleigh first arranged for concert performance are woven into our national DNA.

(SOUND: Nobody Knows The Trouble I’ve Seen)

Karen Parks sings Burleigh’s songs and his praises on her new album Nobody Knows, released this month through Nashville’s Thirty Tigers. She says Burleigh has been important to her since the very first time she was tapped for serious vocal training. She was growing up in Greenville South Carolina, a precocious freshman in high school intent on a career in corporate law. Then a teacher heard her voice and arranged to enroll her in a regional fine arts academy. Parks was 13.

PARKS: “And I am so fortunate for that. I was the only African American female at the fine arts center. I wanted to sing spirituals. They knew that, and they wanted me to of course, and my first book was The Spirituals of Harry T. Burleigh”.

Burleigh, who was born the year after the end of the Civil War, wanted to be a recital singer, and his home community of Erie, Pennsylvania raised funds to send him to New York’s National Conservatory of Music. There, he became a protégé of the conservatory’s new director, the era-shaping composer Antonin Dvorak.

SNYDER: “And the unusual thing for an African American musician at that time was that he did not forsake his heritage in the spirituals.”

Jean Snyder, assistant professor of music at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania is writing a biography of Burleigh.

SNYDER: “And it’s probable that Dvorak helped him fully understand that this repertoire was a repertoire that was universal. And in Dvorak’s own words, he said give those melodies to the world.”

(SOUND: My Lord What A Morning)

Burliegh did just that, embracing Dvorak’s radical view that folk songs were important art that should be integrated into classical music. Karen Parks says his arrangements brought subtle and uplifting instrumental accompaniment to what had been an entirely a capella form of singing.

PARKS: “The spiritual must be simple yet on the classical concert stage it must be interesting and intricate enough to have that title, and that shows the real genius of Burleigh.”

Burleigh’s race kept him from the recital career he longed for, but he did teach at the National Conservatory and became an editor at an important music publishing house. Parks recalls another long-term position that regularly put him on a stage in front of New York’s wealthiest elites.

PARKS: “I believe it was in 1894 that he applied to be the baritone soloist at St. George’s Episcopal Church. There were 60 applicants. And he was only African American, and there was only one position, and he was chosen. Of course there was some uproar but it didn’t matter. He had the talent and they could see beyond his color.”

Parks brings remarkable credentials of her own to the Burleigh recording project. After her post-graduate training at UC Santa Barbara, she earned a Fulbright scholarship which allowed her a year of private study at La Scala Opera House in Milan, perhaps the most prestigious such academy in the world. She trained to sing in 12 different languages, but on Nobody Knows, she sings a uniquely American strain of English, one that — like Dvorak’s work — is both vernacular and rarified.

(SOUND: Lovely Dark And Lonely One)

In “Lovely Dark and Lonely One,” Burleigh sets music to a poem by Langston Hughes.

PARKS: “There are some powerful words there, and you want to express that. The text determines they way that a song, any song, is sung in my opinion. The words must be expressed to their fullest extent.”

Karen Parks brings her interpretation of those words and Burleigh’s music to Vanderbilt’s Turner Hall this Saturday night at 8.

For Nashville Public Radio, I’m Craig Havighurst.