Cook, Will Marion (1869–1944)

US composer and conductor. He composed works that drew on the idioms and themes of black American folklore and music. He was an influence on Duke Ellington's early work as a composer.

He was born in Washington, DC, the son of the first black American lawyer there; he studied composition and the violin in the classical tradition at Oberlin Conservatory of Music (Ohio), and under Josef Joachim and Anton Dvorak in Europe. Throughout the 1890s and 1900s, he composed for the stage shows of Bert Williams, the leading black comic and vaudevillian. In 1889 Cook produced and wrote the music for Clorindy, the Origin of the Cakewalk, the first musical comedy written, directed, and performed entirely by black American artists; it enjoyed success on Broadway and in London. He went on to compose the music for a number of popular black musicals, including In Dahomey (1903) and Abyssinia (1906). He led his Southern Syncopated Orchestra, a huge ragtime and concert ensemble, and composed ‘I'm Coming, Virginia’ and ‘Mammy’ in the 1910s. In 1919, on its last tour of Europe before disbanding, the orchestra and its saxophonist Sidney Bechet received enthusiastic reviews from Ernst Ansermet for an emerging jazz style. Cook free-lanced thereafter with New York music publishers.

His wife, Abbie Mitchell Cook (1884–1960), was a soprano who had a career first in his shows and then in other productions. Their son, Mercer Cook was a noted scholar at Howard University and served as US ambassador to Nigeria and Senegal.