Bayard Rustin

Best known as a key figure in the U.S. civil rights movement as an organizer of the 1963 March on Washington and an instructor of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. on the theory of nonviolence, Bayard Rustin also issued several recordings. One of them featured Elizabethan repertory as well as similar works of his own composition. Rustin was born in West Chester, Pennsylvania, on March 17, 1912. His grandparents ran a successful catering business, and his family was prosperous. Rustin grew up singing in an African Methodist Episcopal Church choir. He majored in music at Wilberforce University in Ohio and toured with the school's Wilberforce Singers. Expelled from Wilberforce in 1936 for labor organizing activities, he attended Cheyney State Teachers College (now Cheyney University) and then moved to New York's Harlem neighborhood, enrolling at the City College of New York. Rustin kept up his musical activities and even earned money on the side from them, appearing in the 1939 musical John Henry, which starred Paul Robeson, and singing in a vocal group that backed folk performer Josh White. In time, Rustin became a regular at the Café Society nightclub in Greenwich Village, which was racially integrated and whose offerings often had a political tinge. He recorded several items as one of White's backup singers. During World War II, Rustin registered as a conscientious objector and was imprisoned; while in prison, he taught himself to play the lute. At the beginning, he played a German lute-guitar hybrid but later became interested in more authentic period lutes. In 1949, Rustin was arrested after participating in one of the Freedom Rides in North Carolina and forced to serve on a chain gang; he recounted his experiences in the New York Post in the serialized article "22 Days on a Chain Gang." There was some overlap between progressive folk music and New York's nascent early music scene in the years after World War II. Noah Greenberg, who founded the New York Pro Musica ensemble, was a progressive activist, and Rustin owned a copy of his Elizabethan Songbook. It was probably because of the links between English Renaissance song and the folk balladry that he was hearing in New York that Rustin became interested in the former. After undertaking considerable research on his own (at the time, general editions of Renaissance music were just beginning to appear, and an aspiring performer often had to consult scholarly editions), Rustin issued the album Elizabethan Songs & Negro Spirituals in 1952. In addition to English songs such as John Dowland's Flow My Tears and familiar spirituals such as Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, the LP included songs Rustin had composed himself, some reflecting his interest in Indian philosophy. He was accompanied on harpsichord by Margaret Davison and by his own lute. The album appeared on Fellowship Records, an arm of the progressive Fellowship of Reconciliation group. Rustin acquired considerable expertise in the field of early instruments and amassed a substantial collection of them, including a guitar made by Francesco Stradivari, the son of Antonio Stradivari. He made several more albums of traditional African American material; all of his recordings are quite rare. Rustin died in New York on August 24, 1987.
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