I think it's worth copying this from the John W. Work III Memorial Foundation website here:

About John W. Work, III

(1901 - 1967)

Composer, educator, choral director, and ethnomusicologist John Wesley Work, III was born on June 15, 1901, in Tullahoma, Tennessee, to a family of professional musicians. His grandfather, John Wesley Work, was a church choir director in Nashville, where he wrote and arranged music for his choirs. Some of his choristers were members of the original Fisk Jubilee Singers. His father, John Wesley Work Jr., was a singer, folksong collector and professor of music, Latin, and history at Fisk, and his mother, Agnes Haynes Work, was a singer who helped train the Fisk group. His uncle, Frederick Jerome Work, also collected and arranged folksongs, and his brother, Julian, became a professional musician and composer.

John Wesley Work, III was an inspiring teacher at Fisk University for 39 years, chairman of the Music Department for a number of years, director of the Fisk University Jubilee Singers®, and an internationally known composer and arranger. He graduated from Fisk University, received an M.A. from the Teachers College of Columbia University, and a B. Mus. from Yale University. In 1960, he was awarded the honorary doctorate from Fisk University. He published more than 50 compositions between 1946 and 1956, including The Singers, based on a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, which received an award from the Fellowship of American Composers at its premiere in Detroit in 1946. His string symphony, Yenvalou, was premiered at the 1946 Saratoga Spring Festival. Golgotha, based on a poem by Arna Bontemps was premiered by the Fisk University Choir at the 1949 Fisk Festival of Music and Art. In 1956, his composition My Lord, What a Morning was performed for the Festival of Music and Art by a chorus comprised of choirs from Germany, Sweden, Great Britain, South America, France, Yugoslavia, Japan, Canada, and the United States. His book, American Negro Songs and Spirituals (1960) contains 230 folk songs, and describes the origin and nature of various types of folk songs.

During the summers of 1941 and 1942, Professor Work, along with Charles S. Johnson, then head of the Fisk Sociology Department (later the University's first black president), and Lewis Jones, also from the Sociology Department, collaborated with the Alan Lomax of the Library of Congress' Archive of American Folk Song in a joint field study to record the music of the rapidly urbanizing Coahoma County, Mississippi. Some of the findings have been recently published in the book Lost Delta Found (Vanderbilt UP, 2005) and the album John Work III: Recording Black Culture won the 2007 Grammy Award for Best Album Notes, 40 years after Dr. Work's death.

John Wesley Work died on May 17, 1967.