Robert Nathaniel Dett (11 October 1882–2 October 1943), composer and educator, was born in the Village of Niagara Falls (formerly Drummondville), Ontario, Canada. His father, Robert Tue Dett, a railroad porter and hotel manager, played piano and guitar and sang baritone, and his mother, Charlotte Johnson Dett, was an accomplished pianist and soprano. Initially playing by ear, Dett began piano lessons at an early age. In 1893 the family moved to Niagara Falls, New York, where Dett continued his lessons. As a teenager, he worked as a bellboy at a hotel whose manager encouraged him to play the piano to entertain patrons. He also played mixtures of classical repertory and popular music for community events and benefits. Dett's first composition, "After the Cakewalk," a ragtime tune, appeared in 1900. From 1901 until 1903 he refined his skills at a conservatory in nearby Lockport, New York.
In 1903 R. Nathaniel Dett began a program in piano and composition at Oberlin College, from which he received a Bachelor of Music in 1908. He continued his studies throughout his career, most notably with Nadia-Juliette Boulanger in France. He published a volume of his poetry Album of a Heart (1911). While studying composition at Harvard University, Dett won a Bowdoin Prize (1920) for his essay "The Emancipation of Negro Music," which had appeared in the Southern Workman in 1918. He received as well the Francis Boott Prize for his choral composition "Don't Be Weary, Traveler." Howard University and Oberlin College granted him honorary doctorates in 1924 and 1926, respectively. In 1927 the Harmon Foundation awarded Dett a gold medal for vocal and instrumental composition. He received an M.M. from the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, in 1932.
Dett taught music at Lane College, in Jackson, Tennessee, from 1908 until 1911 and at Lincoln Institute (later Lincoln University), in Jefferson City, Missouri, from 1911 until 1913, when he joined the faculty at Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute (later Hampton University). There he directed various choral groups, including the Hampton Institute Choir and the Hampton Choral Union, a community chorus established in 1914. He also organized the Musical Arts Society (1919) to promote recitals by members of the institute's community and by notable artists from outside Hampton.
Under Dett's direction Hampton's choirs toured extensively and performed in such prestigious venues as Carnegie Hall and once before President Calvin Coolidge. A 1926 performance by an eighty-voice Hampton Institute choir at the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Festival at the Library of Congress exemplified Dett's musical philosophy. Including spirituals, Russian liturgical music, Christmas songs, and several of Dett's own classical compositions (based on themes from the spirituals), the concert followed Dett's pattern of varied choral traditions. If a choir, he once explained, "can't interpret world music, it cannot interpret Negro music. Our endeavor is to do both." Dett's successful conducting of Hampton's music program culminated in a 1930 European concert tour by a forty-member Hampton choir. Dett led the group in concerts in Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom, as well as in recording sessions with Pathé Talking Picture Company. Three thousand people heard the choir sing at Westminster Abbey. In Berlin, the choir received calls for more than a dozen encores. In 1928 Hampton established a school of music, one of Dett's longstanding objectives, and he became director. He remained at the school until the autumn of 1931, when he took a sabbatical to study at the Eastman School of Music and announced he would not return to Hampton, partly as a result of the administration's criticism of Dett's management of the tours and his frustration with the university's interference with performances.
While teaching, Dett maintained an independent career as a recitalist and lecturer. Magnolia (1912) and In the Bottoms (1913), which included the popular tune "Juba," are perhaps the best known of his five piano suites. After a Carnegie Hall performance in March 1914 as part of the annual festivals supporting the Music School Settlement for Colored People, Dett received a prize for "Listen to the Lambs," perhaps his best-known choral composition. At the Syracuse University Music Festival in May 1921 Dett premiered the full-orchestrated version of his eight-part motet Chariot Jubilee, which was based on "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot." He was a founding member of the National Association of Negro Musicians, for which he served as chairman of the advisory board (1919) and as president (1924–1926).
After leaving Hampton, Dett moved to Rochester, New York, where he established a studio, conducted a radio choir that performed weekly over the NBC network, and organized the Negro Community Chorus in Rochester. During the autumn term of 1935, he was a visiting professor and director of the a cappella choir at Samuel Huston College (later Huston-Tillotson University) in Austin, Texas. At the Cincinnati Music Festival in 1937 he won acclaim for his oratorio The Ordering of Moses, for which "Go Down, Moses" provided the musical motif. That year Dett accepted a position at Bennett College, in Greensboro, North Carolina, where he remained as director of the music department until he resigned in 1942. He continued composing and teaching music in Rochester, and in February 1943 joined the United Service Organizations as a director of musical affairs.
Dett published essays on African American music as well as two volumes of spirituals. He edited and wrote the introduction for Religious Folk-Songs of the Negro as Sung at Hampton Institute (1927), an edition of Thomas Putnam Fenner's 1874 compilation, Cabin and Plantation Songs as Sung by the Hampton Students. The four-part Dett Collection of Negro Spirituals (1936) included essays on understanding and the authenticity of the spiritual. Dett struggled to define what "Negro" music was and how it should sound. Recognizing the spiritual as the distinct contribution of the African American to American music, he strove to preserve spirituals through arrangements that incorporated the European musical idiom he knew. In his 1918 essay "The Emancipation of Negro Music," Dett asked whether "there is any other music in the world that makes so strong an appeal to the average white American as these simple songs" and then answered the question by citing examples of how leading white composers had used African American music. Dett's own arrangements of traditional songs included richer harmonies, counterpoints, and thicker textures that kept the essential simplicity of the spirituals but also made audiences listen to the songs as serious musical forms.
On 27 December 1916 Dett married Helen Elise Smith, of New York, a pianist, graduate of the New York Institute of Musical Art (later Juilliard School), and cofounder and former director of the Martin-Smith School of Music. They had two daughters. While visiting Battle Creek, Michigan, to direct musical activities for the United Service Organizations, Robert Nathaniel Dett suffered a heart attack and died on 2 October 1943. He was buried at Fairview Cemetery in Niagara Falls, Ontario. Into the twenty-first century Dett retained a high reputation. A British Methodist Episcopal chapel in Niagara Falls, Ontario, where he once played, bears his name, as do an auditorium and the wing of a building at Hampton University. The Toronto-based Nathaniel Dett Chorale, formed in 1998, has performed and recorded his compositions.
Sources Consulted:
"From Bell Stand to Throne Room: A Remarkable Autobiographical Interview with the Eminently Successful American Negro Composer," Etude Music Magazine 52 (1934): 79–80, reprinted in The Black Perspective in Music 1 (1973): 73–81; May Stanley, "R. N. Dett, of Hampton Institute, Helping to Lay Foundation for Negro Music of Future," Musical America, 6 July 1918, reprinted in The Black Perspective in Music 1 (1973): 64–69; Vivian Flagg McBrier, R. Nathaniel Dett: His Life and Works, 1882–1943 (1977); Jon Michael Spencer, ed., The R. Nathaniel Dett Reader: Essays on Black Sacred Music, special issue of Black Sacred Music: A Journal of Theomusicology 5 (fall 1991); Anne Key Simpson, Follow Me: The Life and Music of R. Nathaniel Dett (1993), including portraits, catalog of compositions, and discography; Robert Nathaniel Dett Papers at Buffalo and Erie Co. Public Library, at Buffalo State College, at Hampton University (part of the Music Department Collection), at Niagara Falls [N.Y.] Public Library, and at Oberlin College, Ohio; published writings include Dett, "The Emancipation of Negro Music," Southern Workman 47 (1918): 172–176 (second quotation on 176), and "Negro Music," International Cyclopedia of Music and Musicians (1939): 1243–1246; marriage notice in The Crisis 13 (1917): 188; Norfolk Journal and Guide, 22 May 1926, 17 Oct. 1931; Musical Times 71 (1930): 416–417 (first quotation); Southern Workman 66 (1937): 303–310; obituaries in New York Times and Richmond News Leader, both 4 Oct. 1943, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, 9 Oct. 1943; memorial in Journal of Negro History 28 (1943): 507–509.
Photograph courtesy Cheyne Photograph Collection, Hampton History Museum, digitized with permission by the Library of Virginia.
Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Barbara C. Batson.
How to cite this page:
Barbara C. Batson, "Robert Nathaniel Dett (1882–1943)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2022 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Dett_R_Nathaniel, accessed [today's date]).
Return to the Dictionary of Virginia Biography Search page.
