The Black Songwriters Project

Without question, songs written by Black Songwriters between 1880 and 1930 received less promotional effort than songs by their white counterparts. Accordingly, many people today are unaware that some of most enduring songs from this period were written by African American composers. “Oh, Dem Golden Slippers,” “Some of These Days,” “St. Louis Blues,” “At the Darktown Strutters Ball,” and “Sweet Georgia Brown,” are just a few of the dozens of well-known songs of the time written by Black composers.

But what of the hundreds of other songs written by these composers? This project aims to seek them out and make them available for musicians to study and perform. Many of these obscure songs are available from sheet music collections. But the early twentieth-century arrangements of these songs do not provide an accessible score for musicians to perform from. From that premise, I have sought to convert the original sheet music arrangements into lead sheets—melody, chords, and lyrics—in order to provide an accessible vehicle for those who might want to explore them.

I have made no effort to precisely convert every harmony to chords, not have I tried to add “the right changes” that might appeal to modern ears. Rather, I strove for something in between—chords that are somewhat faithful to the original, but commonplace enough to feel comfortable to someone familiar with traditional jazz. I hope you will enjoy looking through these songs and perhaps reviving some for public or personal performance.