Lawrence Benjamin Brown

Lawrence Benjamin Brown (born August 28, 1893 in Jacksonville / Florida , † December 25, 1973 in New York City ) was an American pianist and arranger.

The son of a former slave had his first music lessons with William Riddick . He continued his piano training in Boston, partly financed by scholarships and partly by working as an elevator operator. In 1915 he made his professional debut as a piano accompanist for the singer Sydney Woodward . From 1918 to 1923 he worked with Roland Hayes , with whom he traveled to England, among other places. There he continued his education at Trinity College of Music in 1920 with Amanda Aldridge , a daughter of the actor Ira Aldridge and appeared in 1921 at Buckingham Palace in front of the royal couple. In 1923 he performed his own arrangements at Wigmore Hall with the cellist Beatrice Harrison .

In the mid-1920s, Brown studied the history of African American music in depth, collecting more than a hundred songs and spirituals in the southern United States. Thirty of his arrangements of this appeared in James Weldon Johnson's Book of American Negro Spirituals (1925) and his own Negro Folk Songs (1930), including Joshua Fit De Battle of Jericho , Steal Away , Swing Low, Sweet Chariot , L'il David and Ezekiel Saw De Wheel .

Paul Robeson was the first major singer to perform Brown's arrangements in concert (1925 at the Greenwich Village Theater ). This resulted in a collaboration between the two musicians that lasted more than 40 years. Both toured Europe in the 1930s, performing in Paris, London and Dublin, before the Prince of Wales and the King of Spain and recording classics such as Nobody Knows de Trouble I've Seen , Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless for RCA Victor Child and Joe Hill up. He had a personal friendship with Robeson and his family, which also proved itself when Robeson was robbed of his job opportunities in the McCarthy era. When Robeson retired in 1963 for health reasons, Brown also retired in Harlem.

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• The New York Public Library - Lawrence Brown Papers
• Henry Louis Gates, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham: Harlem Renaissance Lives from the African American National Biography , Oxford University Press, 2009, ISBN 9780195387957 , pp. 79-80
• Washington Afro-American, January 2, 1973: Rites held for Lawrence Brown, famed composer, singer, pianist