Florence Beatrice Smith Price (1887-1953)

January 10, 2013 
/ Contributed By: Linda W. Reese

|Florence Beatrice Smith Price|

Florence B. Price

Courtesy Thomas Yenser

Florence Beatrice Smith, the first black woman composer to garner an international reputation, was born in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1887, to James H. Smith, a dentist, and Florence Gulliver Smith, a former school teacher and private lesson piano teacher who also managed several local businesses. Under her mother’s musical tutelage, Smith was quickly recognized as a prodigy. While attending Capitol Hill School in Little Rock, she published her first composition when she was eleven.  At fourteen, she studied music at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, Massachusetts, graduating in 1907 with a Bachelor of Music degree. Smith taught at the Cotton Plant-Arkadelphia Academy and at Shorter College until 1910 when she accepted a position as Chair of the Music Department at Clark University in Atlanta, Georgia. At the time she was 23.

In 1912 Smith returned to Arkansas where she wed Thomas Jewell Price, a well-known Little Rock, Arkansas attorney. The couple had three children, a son, who died in infancy, and two daughters.  Price started a music school and continued to compose piano pieces, but she was denied membership in the Arkansas State Music Teachers Association because of her race.  When serious racial unrest erupted in Little Rock, the family moved to Chicago, Illinois in 1927. It was here that Price was able to reach her full musical potential, but unfortunately, it came with the end of her marriage in 1935.

Price studied at the American Conservatory of Music and the Chicago Musical College. Her compositions combined the melody and rhythms of black culture, black religious spirituality, and European romantic mood and techniques. In 1928 G. Schirmer, a major publishing house, accepted her work At the Cotton Gin.  She composed Fantasie Negre in 1929 for piano.  In 1932 she won multiple prizes from the Wanamaker Foundation for Piano Sonata in E Minor and her most famous work, Symphony in E Minor. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra performed Symphony in E Minor at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1933, followed quickly by orchestras in Michigan and Pennsylvania.  Eventually European orchestras also performed her works.  Price was the first black female classical composer to achieve this level of recognition in the United States and Europe.

Throughout the rest of the 1930s Price taught music lessons, continued to compose for piano and organ, and worked as an orchestrator for WGN radio and as an organist for silent films. Under the name Vee Jay she also wrote a number of popular tunes such as Songs to the Dark Virgin and Hold Fast to Dreams.  Marian Anderson chose Price’s arrangement of My Soul’s Been Anchored in de Lord when she gave her historic concert at the Lincoln Memorial in 1939.  In 1940 the WPA Symphony in Michigan performed her new composition, Symphony No. 3 in C Minor. Price died in Chicago in 1953 leaving a vast legacy of orchestral, choral, vocal, chamber, spirituals, piano, and organ work.

About the Author

Author Profile

Dr. Linda Reese is a former Assistant Professor of United States History, Women’s History, and Oklahoma History at East Central University (Oklahoma). Her research focuses on women of color in the American West and the struggle for racial, economic, and gender equality in 20th century America. She is the author of Women of Oklahoma, 1890-1920 (University of Oklahoma Press, 1997) as well as journal and encyclopedia articles. Since the publication of “Cherokee Freedwomen in Indian Territory, 1863-1890,” in Western Historical Quarterly (Autumn 2002), she has been at work on a book examining the Freedwomen of the Five Civilized Tribes in Oklahoma. She is the winner of the 2003 Coordinating Council for Women in History Catherine Prelinger Award.

CITE THIS ENTRY IN APA FORMAT:

Reese, L. (2013, January 10). Florence Beatrice Smith Price (1887-1953). BlackPast.org. https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/price-florence-beatrice-smith-1887-1953/

Source of the Author's Information:

Florence Beatrice Smith Price Papers, Special Collections, University of
Arkansas Libraries, Fayetteville, Arkansas;
http://www.encyclopediaofarkansas.net/encyclopedia/entry-detail.aspx?entryID=1742;
http://chevalierdesaintgeorges.homestead.com/price.html

Further Reading