Today’s date marks the birthday in 1913 of the American composer Margaret Bonds. Her mother was a church musician in Chicago; her father was a physician and one of the founders of a medical association for black physicians denied membership in the American Medical Association.

One of the visitors to Margaret’s childhood home was composer Florence Price, with whom she studied composition. At 16, Bonds became one of the few black students enrolled at Northwestern University, although she was not allowed to reside on campus. At the 1933 World’s Fair, Bonds performed Price’s Piano Concerto with the Chicago Symphony, becoming the first African-American woman soloist to appear with a major American orchestra.

After earning her Master’s degree, she moved to New York to study at the Juilliard School. She met and became a close friend of the poet Langston Hughes, with whom she collaborated on many projects.

Margaret Bonds wrote around 200 works, but only 47 were published during her lifetime, and only some 75 of her scores are known today–the rest exist as privately- held manuscripts scattered all over the country.

One of her best-known works is “Troubled Water,” a solo piano fantasia on the spiritual “Wade in the Water.”