In 2009, over 50 years after she had died, the family of FLORENCE PRICE travelled to St Anne, Illinois to tidy up her abandoned summer house on the banks of the lake where she used to spend her summers and compose. And there they found a vast trove of manuscripts that nobody had ever known anything about. They changed the course of history.
Florence Price was born Florence Smith, in 1887, in Arkansas. She studied in Boston, passing herself off as Mexican rather than Black, and had a short-lived post in Georgia before moving north in the great migration. A marriage to an abusive husband was short-lived too: and it was as a solo mother with two daughters that she became an integral part of the Chicago Black Renaissance, supporting herself by teaching and playing organ in the silent movies. In 1934, she became the first Black woman to have a symphony premiered by a major orchestra with her early Symphony in E. And she was celebrated in her time, first woman to be inducted into the American society of composers and her spirituals were sung by all the greats. But there’s a reason so much was left unpublished. "I have two handicaps” she used to say - “sex, and race”, and her enormous body of work is still being recorded today
FLORENCE PRICE (1887-1953)
Presented by composer Joan Tower for International Women’s Month in March, written and produced by Charlotte Wilson for WMHT
