One of Antonín Dvořák’s best students at the National Conservatory in New York was a young Black man named Harry Thacker Burleigh, who won a scholarship in 1892 to study at the Conservatory. Burleigh, age 26 at the time he went to New York, was already an accomplished singer who had made a name for himself in his hometown of Erie, Pennsylvania. His goals for study at the Conservatory included learning the art of composition, and he eventually became America’s first prominent Black composer of classically oriented music, even as he continued his career as a singer (eventually serving 52 years in the prestigious baritone soloist position at New York’s St. George’s Episcopal Church, and 25 years as a soloist at Temple Emanu-El, a New York Jewish synagogue).

As a child, Burleigh had spent much time with his blind grandfather, Hamilton Waters, a former slave. Waters taught his young grandson many of the old spirituals that had been carried forward from slavery, and Burleigh, for the rest of his life, held a special place in his heart for the spirituals. At the National Conservatory Burleigh was encouraged by his mentor Antonín Dvořák to develop the spirituals into an important national music. After producing a variety of original compositions, Burleigh eventually set about the task of arranging spirituals for solo concert performance by trained singers, in the tradition of the European art song. His first arrangement of a spiritual – "Deep River" – was published in 1916, followed by dozens more.