The Heart of a Woman: The Life and Music of Florence B. Price by Rae Linda Brown

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Heart of a Woman: The Life and Music of Florence B. Price by Rae Linda Brown Elizabeth Durrant The Heart of a Woman: The Life and Music of Florence B. Price. By Rae Linda Brown. Edited and with a foreword by Guthrie P. Ramsey Jr. Afterword by Carlene J. Brown. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2020. [ix, 295 p. ISBN 9780252043239 (hardcover), $125; ISBN 9780252085109 (paperback), $29. 95; ISBN 9780252052118 (e-book), price varies.] Music examples, photos, notes, selected bibliography, discography, further reading, index. The recent revival of interest in composer Florence Price would have been impossible without the late Rae Linda Brown, the scholar who dedicated her career to advocating for Price’s music. As a musicologist, Brown spent years uncovering Price’s manuscripts, publishing her music, researching her life and career, and interviewing her surviving friends and family. Consequently, nearly all contemporary scholarship on Price is built on the foundation of Brown’s efforts. The Heart of a Woman is the culmination of Brown’s work. As the first—and currently only—book about Price, it is an important milestone that centers African American people and culture in US music history. Brown contextualizes Price and her music within historical events of the nineteenth and twentieth century to argue that the composer—and by extension African American women—played a significant role in developing the cultural and artistic movements that shaped the United States. As a result, this book is a valuable resource that not only informs readers about Price and the events of her time but also challenges and expands the narratives of music history in the process. In part 1, Brown establishes the socio-political environment that influenced Price’s family life, education, and early career. She begins by describing Price’s parents, James H. Smith and Florence Irene Smith, including their family history, careers, marriage, and decision to settle in Little Rock, Arkansas. By the late nineteenth century, the city’s thriving Black middle class earned Little Rock the nickname “the Negro Paradise” (p. 23). As a newly wealthy, upper-class family, the Smiths were poised to take advantage of these opportunities for Black citizens, and they quickly established themselves as prominent members of Little Rock’s community (p. 3). Although Brown highlights the benefits of this social structure for [End Page 402] Price’s family, she also acknowledges how its problematic elements, including classism and colorism, often excluded others from these advantages (p. 4). She further explains how positions of economic privilege carried specific expectations in Black society. Many people in upper-and middle-class Black families adopted the ideology of racial uplift—a theory that Black people could earn humane and equitable treatment by mirroring upper-class White values and demonstrating Black excellence. As a result, children from affluent Black families were expected to fulfill racial uplift by earning an education, serving their communities, and facilitating success for younger generations. As Brown demonstrates, this mission played a crucial role in shaping Price’s upbringing. Her parents nurtured their daughter’s musical talent and sent her to the New England Conservatory of Music to study organ, piano, and music education. Price also had a passion for composing, but after graduation she returned to Little Rock to teach. Brown suggests that Price “felt a sense of responsibility” to facilitate racial uplift by educating her hometown community, which likely seemed more feasible than pursuing her composing dreams (p. 56). Price further fulfilled social expectations by marrying a lawyer and having two children while balancing her career and social obligations. She dedicated her talent and energy to serving her family and community. Still, Brown relates that rising racial tensions disrupted Price’s environment and set events in motion that would transform her life. The rise of Jim Crow laws in the 1890s severely limited the rights of Black citizens (p. 25). By the 1920s, there was a substantial increase in discriminatory policies and violence against Little Rock’s Black community, which posed a direct threat to Price and her family (pp. 76–77). As a result, in 1928 the Price household left Little Rock to begin a new life in Chicago (p. 77). Brown contextualizes...