41 African American composers

Margaret Allison Bonds was an American composer, pianist, arranger, and teacher. One of the first black composers and performers to gain recognition in the United States, she is best remembered today for her popular arrangements of African-American spirituals and frequent collaborations with Langston Hughes.

James Joseph Brown was an American singer, songwriter, dancer, musician, record producer and bandleader. A progenitor of funk music and a major figure of 20th century music and dance, he is often referred to by the honorific nicknames "Godfather of Soul", "Mr. Dynamite", and "Soul Brother No. 1". In a career that lasted over 50 years, he influenced the development of several music genres. Brown was one of the first ten inductees into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame at its inaugural induction dinner in New York on January 23, 1986.

Terrance Corley Burrus is an American keyboardist, composer, record producer, conductor, business, realty and fashion designer executive.

Blanche Dorothea Jones Calloway was an American jazz singer, composer, and bandleader. She was the older sister of Cab Calloway and was a successful singer before her brother. With a music career that spanned over fifty years, Calloway was the first woman to lead an all-male orchestra and performed alongside musicians such as Cozy Cole, Chick Webb, and her brother. Her performing style was described as flamboyant and a major influence on her brother's performance style.

Betty Carter was an American jazz singer known for her improvisational technique, scatting and other complex musical abilities that demonstrated her vocal talent and imaginative interpretation of lyrics and melodies. Vocalist Carmen McRae once remarked: "There's really only one jazz singer—only one: Betty Carter."

Louis Chauvin was an American ragtime musician.

Robert Allen Cole was an American composer, actor, playwright, and stage producer and director.

Alice Coltrane, also known by her adopted Sanskrit name Turiyasangitananda or Turiya Alice Coltrane, was an American jazz musician and composer, and in her later years a swamini. One of the few harpists in the history of jazz, she recorded many albums as a bandleader, beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s for Impulse! and other major record labels. She was married to jazz saxophonist and composer John Coltrane, with whom she performed in 1966–67.

Shirley Graham Du Bois was an American author, playwright, composer, and activist for African-American causes, among others. She won the Messner and the Anisfield-Wolf prizes for her works.

Marvin Gaye was an American singer, songwriter, and record producer. He helped to shape the sound of Motown in the 1960s, first as an in-house session player and later as a solo artist with a string of hits, earning him the nicknames "Prince of Motown" and "Prince of Soul".

Anna Gardner Goodwin was an American composer, mainly of religious music and marches.

Micki Grant is an American singer (soprano), actress, writer and composer. She performed in Having Our Say, Tambourines to Glory and Jericho-Jim Crow, The Gingham Dog, Don't Bother Me, I Can't Cope and has received three Tony Award nominations for her writing.

Jester Joseph Hairston was an American composer, songwriter, arranger, choral conductor, and actor. He was regarded as a leading expert on Negro spirituals and choral music. His notable compositions include "Amen," a gospel-tinged theme from the film Lilies of the Field and a 1963 hit for The Impressions, and the Christmas song "Mary's Boy Child".

Ernest Hogan was the first African-American entertainer to produce and star in a Broadway show and helped to popularize the musical genre of ragtime.

Moses George Hogan was an American composer and arranger of choral music. He was best known for his settings of spirituals. Hogan was a pianist, conductor, and arranger of international renown. His works are celebrated and performed by high school, college, church, community, and professional choirs today. He is known for single-handedly introducing spirituals into the standard chorale repertoire. Over his lifetime, he published 88 arrangements for voice, eight of which were solo pieces.

Nora Douglas Holt was an American singer, composer and music critic, who was born in Kansas and was the first African American to receive a master's degree in the United States. She composed more than 200 works of music and was associated with the leading figures of the Harlem Renaissance and the co-founder of the National Association of Negro Musicians. She died in 1974 in Los Angeles.

Bashiri Johnson is a New York City-based percussionist, whose work has appeared on many records, as well as in commercials, films, television, videogames, and concert performances. He is known to be one of the most recorded percussionists in the music business, as well as one of the most visible. While he has recorded with such artists as Luther Vandross, Miles Davis, and Patti LaBelle, he has also been a part of numerous on-stage performances; he has performed on stage with artists such as Sting, Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, Lionel Richie, Aretha Franklin, and Steve Winwood.

Francis Hall Johnson was an American composer and arranger of African-American spiritual music. He is one of a group—including Harry T. Burleigh, R. Nathaniel Dett, and Eva Jessye—who had great success performing African-American spirituals.

James Weldon Johnson was an American writer and civil rights activist. He was married to civil rights activist Grace Nail Johnson. Johnson was a leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), where he started working in 1917. In 1920, he was the first African American to be chosen as executive secretary of the organization, effectively the operating officer. He served in that position from 1920 to 1930. Johnson established his reputation as a writer, and was known during the Harlem Renaissance for his poems, novels, and anthologies collecting both poems and spirituals of black culture. He wrote the lyrics for "Lift Every Voice and Sing", which later became known as the Negro National Anthem.

Quincy Delight Jones Jr. is an American record producer, multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, composer, arranger, and film and television producer. His career spans over 60 years in the entertainment industry with a record 80 Grammy Award nominations, 28 Grammys, and a Grammy Legend Award in 1992.

L. Viola Kinney was an American composer, pianist, and teacher active during the first half of the twentieth century. Her piano piece Mother's Sacrifice was published in 1909 and recorded by Albany Records in 2005.

Leonard Albert Kravitz is an American singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, record producer, and actor. His style incorporates elements of rock, blues, soul, R&B, funk, jazz, reggae, hard rock, psychedelic, pop, folk, and ballads.

Louisa Melvin Delos Mars was a late 19th-century African-American singer and composer who was active in Providence, Rhode Island, and Boston, Massachusetts. She was one of the first black women to achieve recognition as a composer, and was one of the first black students to graduate from the New England Conservatory. She is best known for composing five full length operettas.

Undine Eliza Anna Smith Moore, the "Dean of Black Women Composers," was an American composer and professor of music in the twentieth century. Moore was originally trained as a classical pianist, but developed a compositional output of mostly vocal music—her preferred genre. Much of her work was inspired by black spirituals and folk music. Undine Smith Moore was a renowned teacher, and once stated that she experienced “teaching itself as an art.” Towards the end of her life, she received many awards for her accomplishments as a music educator.

William Everett Preston was an American musician whose work encompassed R&B, rock, soul, funk, and gospel. Preston was a top session keyboardist in the 1960s, during which he backed artists such as Little Richard, Sam Cooke, Ray Charles, Everly Brothers, Reverend James Cleveland, and the Beatles. He went on to achieve fame as a solo artist with hit singles such as "That's the Way God Planned It", the Grammy-winning "Outa-Space", "Will It Go Round in Circles", "Space Race", "Nothing from Nothing", and "With You I'm Born Again". Additionally, Preston co-wrote "You Are So Beautiful", which became a #5 hit for Joe Cocker.

Florence Beatrice Price was an African-American classical composer, pianist, organist and music teacher. Price is noted as the first African-American woman to be recognized as a symphonic composer, and the first to have a composition played by a major orchestra.

Tomeka Reid is an American jazz cellist and composer.

Matana Roberts is an American sound experimentalist, visual artist, jazz saxophonist and clarinetist, composer and improviser based in New York City. She has previously been an active member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM). The Jazz Journalists Association selected Roberts as a finalist nominee for the 2008 "Up and Coming Musician of the Year" award.

James Sylvester Scott was an American ragtime composer and pianist, regarded as one of the three most important composers of classic ragtime, along with Scott Joplin and Joseph Lamb.

Donald Walbridge Shirley was an American classical and jazz pianist and composer. He recorded many albums for Cadence Records during the 1950s and 1960s, experimenting with jazz with a classical influence. He wrote organ symphonies, piano concerti, a cello concerto, three string quartets, a one-act opera, works for organ, piano and violin, a symphonic tone poem based on the 1939 novel Finnegans Wake by James Joyce, and a set of "Variations" on the 1858 opera Orpheus in the Underworld.

Christopher M. Smith was an American composer and popular vaudeville performer.

Harry C. Smith was an African American newspaper editor and politician. Smith was one of the strongest advocates for civil rights in the pre World War II era and was responsible for some of the strictest anti-lynching legislation in the country at the time.

Tyshawn Sorey is an American composer and multi-instrumentalist.

William Thomas Strayhorn was an American jazz composer, pianist, lyricist, and arranger, best remembered for his long-time collaboration with bandleader and composer Duke Ellington that lasted nearly three decades. His compositions include "Take the 'A' Train", "Chelsea Bridge", "A Flower Is a Lovesome Thing", and "Lush Life".

Lee Summers is an American theatre, television and film actor, singer, librettist, composer, director and theatre producer best known for creating and producing Off-Broadway's From My Hometown. As an actor, Summers was nominated for the 2018 Audelco Award for 'Best Featured Actor in a Musical,' for "On Kentucky Avenue" – which he also directed and won the 2018 Audelco Award for 'Best Director of a Musical.' Summers has appeared on Broadway and in numerous TV/Film roles, such as Core FOI in Malcolm X, a neurosurgeon on Law & Order; a turn-of-the-century cook on Boardwalk Empire, and as a Police Sergeant, opposite Tom Selleck on Blue Bloods.

Abdul Wadud, is an American cellist known for his work in jazz and classical settings. Jazz musician and fellow composer Tomeka Reid hailed Abdul Wadud's "Camille" in a 2020 feature in the New York Times on music that one could play to make friends fall in love with the cello.

Gregory T.S. Walker is an American composer, violinist, and guitarist. He was the recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters Charles Ives Fellowship in 2000, and has performed with major orchestras around the world.

Silas Seth Weeks was an American composer who played mandolin, violin, banjo and guitar. Although he played many instruments he concentrated professionally on the mandolin. He is considered to be the first African American to play mandolin during its golden period and was considered instrumental in bringing the mandolin to the prominent national standing that it had in the early 1900s. He was the first American known to write a mandolin concerto and led a mandolin and guitar orchestra in Tacoma, Washington.

Thomas "Blind Tom" Wiggins was an American musical prodigy on the piano. He had numerous original compositions published and had a lengthy and largely successful performing career throughout the United States. During the 19th century, he was one of the best-known American performing pianists and one of the best-known African-American musicians. Although he lived and died before autism was described, he is now regarded as an autistic savant.

Henry F. Williams was a musician and composer in Boston, Massachusetts, in the late 19th century. He was one of two black musicians to play in the orchestra at the 1872 National Peace Jubilee. His arrangements received widespread popularity. Later in his life he was primarily a music teacher. Williams has been called the second best known black composer of his time after Frank Johnson, with whom he worked.

Stevland Hardaway Morris, known professionally as Stevie Wonder, is an American singer, songwriter, musician and record producer. A prominent figure in popular music during the second half of the 20th century, Wonder is one of the most successful songwriters and musicians. A virtual one-man band, his use of synthesizers and further electronic musical instruments during the 1970s reshaped the conventions of R&B. He also helped drive the genre into the album era, crafting his LPs as cohesive, consistent socially conscious statements with complex compositions. Wonder is often hailed as a "genius", and has been credited as a pioneer and influence to musicians of various genres including rhythm and blues, pop, soul, gospel, funk and jazz.