The search for Thomas F. Ward, teacher of Frederick Delius

About this book

Thomas F. Ward (1856-1912), the American teacher of composer Frederick Delius, died in historical oblivion and was buried in an unmarked grave, apparently too poor to pay his own funeral expenses. This biography of Ward describes his crucial influence on Delius, an Englishman whose formative musical years were spent under Ward's tutelage in the mid-1880s on an orange plantation on the St. Johns River south of Jacksonville, Florida. Gillespie traces Ward's life from his Catholic musical upbringing as an orphan in Brooklyn, to many parts of Florida, to his death in Houston, offering new information about art and folk music in both Brooklyn and Florida in the late nineteenth century. A leitmotiv running through the book is the African-American folksong "Oh Honey, I Am Going Down the River in the Morning," whose origin in northern Florida was previously unverified and which forms the basis of one of Delius's most famous orchestral/choral compositions, Appalachia, a tone portrait of the American South.