Background

Will Marion Cook was born on January 27, 1869 in Washington, D. C. , United States. He was the second of three sons of John Hartwell Cook and Marion Isabel (Lewis) Cook. Both parents came from free Negro families. John Cook, born in Richmond, Virginia, had grown up in Detroit, Michigan; his wife, in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Both were graduates of Oberlin College. Soon after their marriage they settled in Washington, D. C.

Education

Cook graduated from the law department of Howard University in 1871.

In 1884, at fifteen, he entered the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, where he remained for four years and became a proficient violinist. He spent the next three years in Berlin, studying violin under Josef Joachim and music theory at the Hochschule. In 1894-95 he attended the National Conservatory of Music in New York.

Career

He taught law at Howard and served as both trustee and dean. Young Cook was christened Will Mercer, in honor of a close family friend, John Mercer Langston. The elder Cook died when Will was ten, but his mother taught sewing at Howard University and kept the family a step above genteel poverty. Will early showed talent for music.

Cook soon realized that race prejudice severely limited his chances for success as a classical composer, and he began to think of using his musical training to write in the Negro idiom for a popular audience. In the mid-1890's the minstrel show with its plantation stereotypes was giving way in popular favor to ragtime music and "coon songs. " Blacks portrayed in coon songs were no less stereotyped, but they appeared in a contemporary setting which allowed some subtly realistic expression of black pathos and philosophy. Cook believed that he could adapt these musical forms successfully to Broadway in an all-Negro show. In New York he had met the team of Bert Williams and George Walker, black entertainers then just breaking into big-time vaudeville, who had made the cakewalk a national craze. Inspired by their act, he went home to Washington, and there, enlisting the help of Paul Laurence Dunbar on the libretto, he composed the music and lyrics for a short musical comedy, Clorindy: The Origin of the Cake-Walk. In an autobiographical fragment Cook records that when his mother heard the words to one of his songs, "Who Dat Say Chicken in Dis Crowd?" she exclaimed, "Oh, Will! Will! I've sent you all over the world to study and become a great musician, and you return such a nigger!" He adds the comment that she wanted him to write like a white man.

Back in New York, Cook persuaded the comedian Ernest Hogan and twenty-five other black singers and dancers to rehearse Clorindy. He finally won an audition with the manager of the Casino Theater Roof Garden and was booked. At the close of the first performance, conducted by Cook on a summer night in 1898, the audience stood and cheered for ten minutes.

Considered by James Weldon Johnson "the first demonstration of the possibilities of syncopated Negro music, " Clorindy ran for several months. From it came Cook's first published song, "Dark Town Is Out To-night, " which appeared under the pseudonym "Will Marion" in 1899; he subsequently used the name Will Marion Cook.

Over the next ten years Cook created much of the music for a series of black musicals featuring Williams and Walker. In Dahomey (1903), with lyrics by Dunbar, made Negro theatrical history by opening at the New York Theater in Times Square, the center of theaterdom. The show traveled to Europe in 1903, gave a command performance at Buckingham Palace, and made the cakewalk a fad in England and France. Other hits for Williams and Walker followed, such as Abyssinia (1906) and Bandana Land (1908).

In 1906 Cook helped organize a ragtime band, the Memphis Students, with which he toured both Europe and America. After about 1909, Cook's career as a Broadway composer languished. George Walker died, and Bert Williams joined Ziegfeld's Follies. Ragtime gave way to the blues and jazz. Cook's perfectionism and his acerbic, frequently volatile personality made him a difficult man to get along with, and he had little patience with the "Uncle-Tomming" often needed to succeed on white-dominated Broadway. He composed fragments of an opera, "St. Louis Woman, " based on the Afro-American past, but never completed it, for financial necessity kept him working on popular songs and musicals. For a time he organized and conducted the New York Syncopated Orchestra, which he took to Europe in 1919, thus helping to introduce American jazz to European audiences. A number of Cook's musicians stayed on in Europe, the most famous being the jazz clarinetist and saxophonist Sidney Bechet. Despite his lack of outward success, Cook continued to offer a helping hand to younger musicians, including Luckey Roberts, James P. Johnson, Ethel Waters, Harold Arlen, and Duke Ellington. He gave Ellington a course in music so concentrated that Ellington, who had never received formal musical training, called Cook his private conservatory and acknowledged his "brief, but strong influence" in the 1920's.

Cook died of cancer in New York City at the age of seventy-five and was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery, Washington, D. C.

Achievements

• Cook was the first African American to practice law in Washington. He is remembered for many popular songs, such as "Mandy Lou, " "Swing Along Children, " "The Rain Song, " "Red, Red Rose, " "That's How the Cake-Walk's Done, " and "A Little Bit of Heaven Called Home, " and for his best-known choral work, "Exhortation. "

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Music and Scripts of In Dahomey (Music of the United States of America, Volume 25)

    (With over 1,100 performances in the United States and Eng...)

  • Swing Along!

    (For Four Part Mixed Chorus)

  • There's Place in the old vacant Chair. Song. Words & music by W. M. Cook

Connections

In 1899 he married Abbie Mitchell, a singer-dancer in Clorindy. They had a daughter, Marion, and a son, Mercer, who became professor of romance languages at Howard University and later American ambassador to the Niger Republic. After their divorce in 1906, Abbie Mitchell went on to a successful career as an actress and singer.

Father:

John Hartwell Cook

Mother:

Marion Isabel (Lewis) Cook

Spouse:

Abbie Mitchell

dancer

Daughter:

Marion

Son:

Mercer

Friend:

John Mercer Langston

References

• Swing Along: The Musical Life of Will Marion Cook