COLERIDGE-TAYLOR, SAMUEL(15 August 1875–1 September 1912), distinguished Anglo-African composer and conductor, born in London to an English mother and a Krio father from Sierra Leone. Sometimes referred to as the “African Mahler” by White New York musicians, at the turn of the twentieth century Coleridge-Taylor was among the most popular and critically acclaimed English composers. His oeuvre includes choral works as well as compositions for orchestra, string quartet, and piano. He also produced a vast repertoire of songs for domestic audiences and amateur musicians. Yet because of his parentage, or the darkness of his skin, Coleridge-Taylor was never quite canonized as a major figure of the English musical tradition. Among his other pursuits, he also campaigned against racism, and in particular racism against African Americans. He was a great supporter of the Pan-African movement. His music was formed from African, North American, and European influences that demonstrated the construction of a Pan-African identity, and works like Toussaint L’Ouverture and the Twenty-Four Negro Melodies offered significant themes for an emerging Black Atlantic culture. His most famous work, the 1898–1900 cantata trilogy The Song of the Hiawatha, based on a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, was not only popular within British musical circles but became symbolically important for the American Civil Rights movement during its early years.
Coleridge-Taylor’s career included three American tours on the strength of the first cantata, Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast. On the first tour, in 1904, he was received by Theodore Roosevelt at the White House. Over the course of the subsequent tours, Coleridge-Taylor became increasingly invested in his paternal heritage. His father, Daniel Peter Hughes Taylor, who had studied medicine in London, was descended from Black Loyalists—African American slaves, freed by the British and evacuated from the colonies at the end of the Revolutionary War, who later moved to Sierra Leone from Nova Scotia. Coleridge-Taylor thus became the youngest participant and delegate of the first Pan-African Conference, held in 1900 in London, which included cultural figures like the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar as well as intellectuals and activists such as W.E.B. Du Bois.
Coleridge-Taylor died at the age of thirty-seven in London. His early death has been attributed to financial stress. In his final hours, battling pneumonia, he worried that he would be described as a Creole, a person of African and European descent. Although his obituaries certainly mentioned his African heritage, he was also remembered for his creations, successes, humanity, and musical skills and talents, even in the age of the late British Empire. However, when his daughter, the composer Avril Coleridge-Taylor, traveled to South Africa during the 1950s, she was, as a Black woman, refused a work permit and forced to return back to Britain on an Atlantic journey—perhaps similar to her forebears’—that exploded the myth of Britain and its colonies as fair and free societies.