[William Grant Still conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl in a piece titled Old California that he wrote for the city of Los Angeles’ Birthday Concert on Sept. 8, 1965.]
[Judith Anne Still with her father, William Grant Still, a few years before his death in 1978.]
University of Southern California
Dornsife College
“I want to accomplish my father’s longed-for dream of using his music to bring racial harmony and understanding to our country.” Judith Anne Still
By Susan Bell
November 9, 2012
"My father was a wonderful mixture of Gandhi, Einstein and your
kindergarten teacher,” Judith Anne said affectionately. “He was a
sweetie, very spiritual in nature and not at all an egotistical person.”
He enjoyed sharing his love of music with his children, creating
homemade kazoos out of combs and tissue paper to amuse them. However,
painful memories of his own mother’s insistence that he study medicine
rather than music — which she believed was not a respectable career for
an educated person of color — impelled him to never force his children
to play an instrument.
Thus, when Judith Anne’s mother pushed her to learn the piano, the
celebrated composer intervened, saying, “Leave her alone, she’s going to
be a writer.”
And she did, winning several awards for her writing, including an
Independent Publisher Book Award in 2008. Still won a full scholarship
offered by USC to academically gifted students of color and majored in
English in USC Dornsife.
“USC was thinking out of the box in offering these wonderful
opportunities,” she said, referring to some of the nation’s first
minority programs.
The Still family already had close connections with USC. Still had
given talks at the university, where he had many friends. Students and
faculty were familiar with his music from the concerts he gave at nearby
Exposition Park.
While attending USC Dornsife, Judith Anne was active in honor societies Phi Kappa Phi and Phi Beta Kappa.
She also fondly remembers evenings spent playing the card game bid
whist and reciting poetry with friends at the Trojan Grill, then a
popular eatery in the basement of the student union.
Judith Anne met her future husband, Larry Allyn Headlee ’65 at USC,
while he was studying for his master’s in marine geology in USC
Dornsife. The couple married in 1962 and had four children, the second
of whom, Lisa, was born seven days after Judith Anne graduated magna cum laude.
Although her years at USC coincided with a period of major political
upheaval, including the assassination of President John F. Kennedy,
Judith Anne’s devotion to her children and her studies kept her
preoccupied. Despite the demands of her growing family, she continued
her studies and graduated from Cal State Fullerton with a master’s
degree in English in 1968.
After graduating, her husband worked on a mini-submarine for a
private company, General Oceanographics. In 1969, Headlee’s
mini-submarine rescued crewmembers of another mini-submarine trapped on
the ocean floor at a depth of 432 feet. Judith Anne’s marriage was
tragically cut short when Headlee drowned saving a fellow crewmember
while attempting to raise a sunken pleasure cruiser off the coast of
Catalina Island on Sept. 21, 1970.
“USC helped us through in the lean years after my husband died,” she said. “The USC Symphony played my father’s piece Rhapsody, dedicated to the memory of my husband, and my whole family attended.”
Both she and her father maintained lifelong ties with USC, which
never forgot William Grant Still’s outstanding contribution to classical
music. The university awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1975. The
composer’s final public appearance before his death was at a USC-hosted
tribute dinner to commemorate his 80th birthday. Then-Los Angeles Mayor
Tom Bradley was among the many guests and the eminent composer and
conductor Howard Hanson flew out from New York to lead the tributes.
When Still died three years later and his family struggled to pay the
funeral expenses, USC stepped in and organized a memorial concert.
USC has played a continuing role in her family’s life, Judith Anne said.
“Sometimes it seems as if everything radiates from there,” she said.
“A couple of years ago USC had a concert of my father’s work and our old
neighbors from Cimarron Street came to hear it.”
Five generations of the Still family have forged and perpetuated the
legacy of William Grant. The composer acquired his deep love of music
from his grandmother, Anne Fambro, a former slave who taught him the
great African American spirituals, then called Negro spirituals, and
from his stepfather, Charles Shepperson, who brought home a Victrola
gramophone and introduced him to the operas of Verdi and Puccini. His
father, William Grant Still Sr., who died when the younger Still was a
baby, routinely traveled 75 miles from Woodville, Miss., to Baton Rouge,
La., to learn the coronet and later started a uniformed band in
Woodville. His mother, Carrie Still Shepperson, an English teacher,
pianist, choral director and strict disciplinarian, was the dominant
force in his early life, giving him the determination to succeed against
all odds.
Now his daughter’s devotion to his memory has ensured that his
musical legacy will not be forgotten. Judith Anne’s daughter, Lisa
Headlee, who is working on a book of photographs of her grandfather, is
poised to receive the baton from her mother and carry it forward.
“My father’s motto was ‘We all rise together or we don’t rise at
all,’ ” Still said. “My cherished hope is that my father’s story will
one day be brought to an even wider audience through a feature film.
“I want to accomplish my father’s longed-for dream of using his music to bring racial harmony and understanding to our country.”
[WilliamGrant Still (1895-1978) is profiled at AfriClassical.com, which
features a comprehensive Works List by Prof. Dominique-René de
Lerma, http://www.CasaMusicaledeLerma.com
Recordings, sheet music and books of William Grant Still are
available at www.WilliamGrantStill.com,
which is operated by the composer's daughter Judith Anne Still]
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