Harry Burleigh
Harry T. Burleigh was the Erie, Pennsylvania-born baritone, composer, and arranger who spent over fifty years as a soloist at New York's St. George's Episcopal Church while studying and working as a copyist under Antonín Dvořák at the National Conservatory in the early 1890s. His hundreds of published spiritual arrangements — above all ‘Deep River’ — established the Negro spiritual as concert repertoire, giving later singers like Roland Hayes and Paul Robeson a formal musical language for material that had previously circulated only by ear.
Dvořák personally coached Burleigh in composition and orchestration at the National Conservatory and — in a two-way exchange — was so struck by the spirituals Burleigh sang for him that he declared Black American music the true foundation for a national classical style; Burleigh in turn adopted Dvořák's large-form compositional craft when he began arranging spirituals for the concert stage.
listen forThere's no direct melodic quotation here — listen instead for the way Burleigh brings symphonic-composer's part-writing and harmonic support to a tune that had circulated only as unaccompanied call-and-response before he arranged it.