Robert Nathaniel Dett entered the world on October 11, 1882, in the small village of Drummondville, Ontario—now absorbed into the bustling splendor of Niagara Falls, Canada—amid the roar of one of nature’s most awe-inspiring wonders. He left it on October 2, 1943, at the age of sixty, felled by a heart attack in Battle Creek, Michigan, while tirelessly touring with a USO chorus to lift the spirits of troops during Wo…
“If a choir can't interpret world music, it cannot interpret Negro music. Our endeavor is to do both.”
Neighbourhood:
African American Poets, American Poets, Devotional Poets, Harlem Renaissance, Love Poets, Poet-Musicians
Emotional landscape: Tenderness, Joy, Longing
John Wesley Holloway was born on July 28, 1865, in Meriwether County, Georgia, just months after the end of the Civil War had shattered the chains of slavery across the American South. He entered a world still raw with the promise and peril of Reconstruction, where the red clay hills hummed with the songs of freedpeople building new lives amid the ruins of plantations. Holloway died on October 31, 1935, in Nashville,…
Neighbourhood:
African American Poets, American Poets, Devotional Poets, Folk & Ballad Poets, Nature Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Tenderness, Longing
