"It is from the blues that all that may be called American music derives its most distinctive charact..." — James Weldon Johnson

Labor is the fabled magician's wand, the philosophers stone, and the cap of good fortune.

And so for a couple of years my life was divided between my music and my school books.

As yet, the Negroes themselves do not fully appreciate these old slave songs.

But I must own that I also felt stirred by an unselfish desire to voice all the joys and sorrows, the hopes and ambitions, of the American Negro, in classic musical form.