AN AMERICAN MUSICIAN
On its way from Natchez to Baton Rouge, Highway 61 runs through Woodville (MS), ten miles north of the state line. Jefferson Davis grew up on a cotton plantation and attended school in Woodville. William Grant Still, Jr. was born there in 1895. His parents were both college graduates, teachers, and owned a share in a grocery; his father died three months after young William's birth.
With her infant son, Carrie Still left to join her mother in Little Rock, AR. She taught at Union School, organized student programs to raise funds for a library, and remarried to postal clerk Charles Shepperson. Charles encouraged the boy's interest in music; William took violin lessons and taught himself to play oboe, clarinet, and cello. His mother, however, wanted him to study medicine; so after he graduated from Gibbs Highs School, he attended Wilberforce University in Ohio.
At Wilberforce, though, Still got involved with the school's band, playing several instruments and learning conducting and arranging in the style of his musical idol black English composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. He left Wilberforce in his final year to get married, move to Columbus to work as a janitor for Oberlin Conservatory, and occasionally work as arranger/performer for midwestern bands (including W.C. Handy's touring band, where he made his first published arrangements). He took classes in music theory at Oberlin, and was allowed to join the composition class for free.
Still briefly served in the US Navy during WW1, and on his discharge made his way to NYC. He resumed arranging for Handy, as well as for recordings of Fletcher Henderson, Paul Whiteman, and James P. Johnson, meanwhile playing in the Harlem Symphony. He joined the orchestra for "Shuffle Along," playing in NYC and Boston for almost a year, until it closed. When Harry Pace later started Black Swan Records, he hired Still as musical director. That position also led to study with Edgard Varèse
Throughout the 1920s, Still composed and arranged music for many Broadway musicals and radio shows, he performed in bands and orchestras, and was a member of the Clef Club. At the same time, he was beginning to write concert works in the classical tradition. In 1930, he went to Los Angeles to work on orchestrations for Paul Whiteman's weekly radio show while the bandleader was making the movie "King of Jazz;" he made a number of connections with musicians there.
William moved to Los Angeles in 1934, scoring for films including ‘Lost Horizons’ and ‘Pennies From Heaven’. He conducted excerpts from two of his compositions at Hollywood Bowl in 1936, and by 1939 his classical works were being broadcast nationally from that venue on the Standard Oil School Broadcasts.
Still composed nine operas, five symphonies, four ballets, and nearly 200 other works. He was three times a Guggenheim fellow, and received nine honorary doctorates. Still was the first African-American to conduct a major US orchestra, the first to have a symphony performed by a major US orchestra, the first to have an opera televised.   As well, he was the arranger and composer of more than a thousand works for popular bands and musical shows.
He passed away in 1978. The City of Los Angeles created and operates the William Grant Still Arts Center.
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