On today’s date in 1887, Florence Beatrice Smith was born in Little Rock, Arkansas. She would grow up to be the first African-American woman to win widespread recognition as a symphonic composer. All that happened under her married name: Florence Price.

Price studied at the New England Conservatory, with the noted American composers Frederick Converse and George Whitefield Chadwick, but settled in Chicago. In 1933, the Chicago Symphony premiered her First Symphony. In 1940, her Third Symphony premiered in Detroit, and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who was in Detroit that week, was so impressed by a rehearsal of Price’s symphony that she altered her schedule to stay for that evening’s performance, and even wrote about it in her newspaper column, “My Day.”

And speaking of Eleanor Roosevelt, on today’s date in 1939, which fell on Easter Sunday that year, the First Lady and then Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes arranged for the famous African-American contralto, Marion Anderson, to perform a free, open-air recital at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. 75,000 people attended. Marion Anderson admired Florence Price’s work, and sang some of Florence Price’s songs, including Songs to the Dark Virgin, a setting of a text by Langston Hughes.

Florence Price (1887 – 1953) Symphony No. 3 The Women's Philharmonic; Apo Hsu, conductor. Koch 7518