ABSTRACT
When William Grant Still wrote his Afro-American Symphony in 1930, he had already gained considerable exposure among the New York set of avant-garde composers. Taken together with another, earlier comment that he had hoped for "presenting a great truth" in his first symphony, Still's retrospective remark situated his perhaps most famous composition in a conceptual framework that drew on several key tenets of both transnational and Americanist discourses about music during the 1930s. For the "Afro-American" elements, Still faced the difficulty of what might best serve as ethnic underpinning. He considered the music most often identified with African American culture, the Spiritual, as tainted by "the influence of Caucasian music". In contrast, Still felt that the Blues was "the secular folk music of the American Negro" and therefore better suited to furnish an authentic African American voice, despite its perceived triviality as a genre.
