Kyle Kellams: Florence Price and her compositions continue to receive attention, albeit somewhat belatedly. The Little Rock native is noted as the first African American woman to have a piece performed by a major orchestra. She died in 1953, and in the decades since her death, her music has begun to earn more and more attention. Since 2018, no fewer than 22 recordings featuring her work have been released. And just this past weekend, Minnesota Opera premiered “My Name Is Florence”, a work inspired by Price’s correspondence.
The largest repository of Florence Price-related material is in Special Collections at the University of Arkansas. Some of those materials will be exhibited Saturday, Feb. 7 at the Fayetteville Public Library. “Resonant Voices: Music by Florence Price” is a program dedicated to the composer and will feature music performed by students and faculty from the university’s School of Music.
Last week, we asked Joshua Youngblood, associate dean for Special Collections, and Jennifer Day, director of public services at Special Collections, about Florence Price. Youngblood says Saturday afternoon’s program at the library concentrates on Price and her work.
Joshua Youngblood: Some feature other pieces from the collection, and some of those will actually be performed by Dr. Xiting Yang and her students from the School of Music. So it’ll be piano and some vocal pieces. And so there’ll be this beautiful overlap between the pieces that have been preserved by the university libraries and then the ongoing work to explore and share and learn from that music from School of Music faculty and students.
Kellams: What do the Florence Price archives include in Special Collections?
Youngblood: It’s a wealth of material. And so we’ve been collecting Florence Price since — and this is kind of a tragic story on just what an amazing musician and person she was — since before she was even celebrated at all. So since the 1970s, Special Collections has been acquiring manuscript material in partnership with legendary faculty here like Dr. Barbara Jackson, who’s in our School of Music, librarians and archivists from the state of Arkansas, such as Mary Dingler Hudgins, who was a musicologist and archivist for a long time.
In any case, we’ve been getting manuscript material and biographical information on her since then. Since 2009, we’ve had a series of sometimes miraculous, sometimes just very intentional acquisitions of Price archives. And that comes from members of her family, from estate sales, from treasures found in abandoned houses, from working with scholars, from working with people that sell archives.
But we’ve been able to acquire, which is by far the largest collection of her manuscript material, personal archives, professional papers and biographical material anywhere in the world. So now Special Collections is the center for Florence Price research. So it’s really almost everything.
If you want to ask what it is, we have everything from photographs when she was a teenager in Little Rock, from her class photos when she was at the New England Conservatory, all the way up through her major symphonies in manuscript form, unpublished manuscript materials, her ASCAP applications, just everything you could imagine from the professional life of an African American musician in the 20th century.
Kellams: Okay, I understand if family members know that you’re a repository and you’re a center and they say, “Oh, we have this.” You said estate sales. You said abandoned homes. I mean, how does that happen? Do you have a radar? Do people know you’re a repository and might find these things?
Youngblood: All of those things you just said. Do we have archival radar? Unofficially, yes. There’s that part of it. Really more the story is us having done the good work. And this is to give credit to something great that the University of Arkansas and the School of Music and the libraries have done for decades, which is that when we collected Florence Price, even before there was a lot of scholarly interest, we had online finding aids. We had access points. People could find us.
So as the story goes, in 2009, when a treasure trove of Price material was found in a house that had one time been owned by her daughter outside of Chicago, the new people that purchased it and were going to refurbish the house found this material. They said, “This looks really important.”
They went online, figured out where it should go and then contacted the University of Arkansas. That was when Tom Dillard was head of our department, and Tim Nutt was the assistant head and head of manuscripts. And so they, speaking of that radar thing, they knew that that was kind of happening. So as soon as the opportunity showed up, they said, “Oh, of course we’re going to work with these folks to collect Price because Price is really important.”
From there, from 2009 until just a couple years ago, whether it’s scholars, whether it’s people that sell rare books and archives in professional markets, whether it’s other members of her family, extended family, people know that we’re the Price archives now. So we get the opportunity to continue to preserve her legacy through lots of different channels. Some of it is we’re always keeping an eye out. Sometimes it’s working with people that reach out and have more interest. Sometimes it’s a scholarly network thing. So it’s really exciting to be the Price archives.
I joke with Jennifer and our public services folks often that we might just have to rename Special Collections at some point the Florence Price Archives, because so much of our business, the really good business we get to do, is helping people learn about Florence Price.
Kellams: Jennifer, I know there have been researchers here. I’ve talked to scholars from Nashville and other places that have come into research. What is it like working at a place like Special Collections, where experts from around the country, perhaps around the world, want to know about a figure such as Florence Price?
Jennifer Day: Well, it really is a lot of fun to be able to connect people with the materials that were created by the individual artist, in this case the composer. You really get to know the researchers on a personal level because they share their topics of interest with you, and then through our correspondence, even if it’s by email, sometimes on the phone, when people come in person, it’s a lot more fun because then we get to look at the materials together with them. But it’s really just that joy of discovery and sharing the moment of experiencing a piece of history that they normally wouldn’t be able to experience just looking at something online.
What we offer in our public services is really part of that interaction of discussing with them their research topics and their areas of interest, so we can really dive in. Our staff that works with this material often know these collections very well. So when we get requests, especially for the Florence Price materials, often it’s very quick service because we’re used to working with these materials.
As Joshua was mentioning, some of them were found in an attic, and there were some preservation issues. We’re really grateful to have a wonderful staff of knowledgeable people who can put these materials in protective enclosures so we can keep them and extend their lives beyond what they normally would be.
Kellams: When someone comes in person, and you say that’s more fun, I imagine the range of emotion if you’ve been researching a figure and perhaps this is your first encounter with physical items from their lives. I imagine it can be quite exciting and maybe emotional for some researchers.
Day: Absolutely. Yes. It can be a very emotional exchange at times. And we obviously give people space and time to enjoy and experience these materials. Sometimes it brings up a lot of feelings, and people do get emotional about it, particularly family members or people that are very close to or have been close to the artist or the creator.
So that’s a really exciting thing to be part of and to be able to facilitate those exchanges and allow that connection to occur between something that seems rather passive, maybe like a dormant piece of information, just an old document in a box somewhere. But it really comes to life when it’s in the context of a person’s learning and discovery and research.
Kellams: Safe to say, whether it’s Florence Price or any number of other people connected to Special Collections, there’s probably some forgotten or unrealized history lurking there in those collections.
Youngblood: So much work for people to still do with Special Collections. You’re absolutely right, Kyle. They should be contacting us and working with all of that material.
With students here at the U of A, part of the performance will be professional, like Dr. Xiting Yang, but also students. Students who come to the University of Arkansas, especially since 2013 or 2014 when we released new materials, know about the importance of Florence Price in particular, as well as our other collections.
This has been a really fascinating thing for me to see sometimes in the classroom, because we bring students in to work with the manuscript material often. I’ve seen students come to tears during a class period because they get to hold the Price manuscript. It’s a really powerful thing. And let me tell you, that will never get old as long as I’m working in Special Collections — seeing that moment, that emotional moment with the Price materials and other objects. It’s a really powerful thing. I’ve seen our performers as students come in and just like they can’t believe they’re holding Price.
Kellams: Joshua Youngblood is associate dean for Special Collections. Jennifer Day is director of public services at Special Collections. “Resonant Voices: Music by Florence Price” is scheduled to take place from 2 to 4 p.m. Saturday afternoon, Feb. 7 in the Walker Community Room at the Fayetteville Public Library. It’s free, open to the public and will also be livestreamed by the library. Our conversation took place last week.
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