At the 1939 New York World's Fair, the theme music for the futuristic Democracy exhibit played continuously for millions of visitors, yet the man who composed it could not safely attend without police protection except on a designated Negro Day. That contradiction sits at the heart of this deep dive into William Grant Still, the Dean of Afro-American Composers, and the question of how a self-taught teenager from Arkansas forced the symphony hall to accept a radically new cultural language.

We trace his dual musical diet of RCA Red Seal classical records and his grandmother's spirituals in Little Rock, his self-taught mastery of seven instruments by age 15, and his path from Wilberforce University and a janitor's job at Oberlin to free composition lessons from George Whitefield Andrews and study with the avant-garde Edgard Varese. We then fo ...