Harry Burleigh

Henry Thacker Harry Burleigh , a baritone, was an AfricanAmerican classical composer, arranger, and professional singer. He was the first black composer to be instrumental in the development of a characteristically American music and he helped to make black music available to classically trained artists both by introducing them to the music and by arranging the music in a more classical form.

Henry Thacker Burleigh was born in Erie, Pennsylvania in 1866 to Henry Thacker and Elizabeth Burleigh. His grandfather, Hamilton Waters, was granted manumission from slavery in Somerset County, Maryland, for himself for 50 and for his mother forin 1832 and a certificate of freedom in 1835. They traveled to Ithaca, New York, where two of Hamiltons halfbrothers lived. After his mother died, Hamilton married Lucinda Duncanson. Their first child, Elizabeth Lovey Waters, who would be Harry T. Burleighs mother, was born in Lansing, New York, in 1838. Later that year the family moved to Erie, Pennsylvania, which would be the family home until the 1920s. Elizabeth, who graduated from Avery College in Pittsburgh in 1855, was denied a teaching position in the Erie Public Schools, but she taught at the Colored School for a number of years. Burleighs father, Henry Thacker Burleigh, a naval veteran in the Civil War, was the first black juror in Erie County in 1871. After his early death in 1873,

Source: Wikipedia