Cohen Quest III: The Red Herring

Welcome again, travelers, to yet another installment of my award winning blog series Cohen Quest. Today, hear the whistle of the archival train as we pull into our next stop, the Sheet Music Consortium. An initial search of “Cecil Cohen” proves fruitless; confining the search to “Names” seems to break the database even further (but maybe the website is just bad). A search of “Charles Cohen,” however, pulls up an interesting piece of music entitled “Baby Lou,” held in the Duke University Digital Collections. Let’s follow it down the proverbial rabbit hole, shall we?

I have many questions to answer regarding this particular entry, such as: when was this piece composed and/or published? who is Vandersloot Music Pu. Co? who is Kenneth Lacey? is this our same Mr. Cohen? And this is where Sheet Music Consortium, or the archivist who entered this data, has failed us. There is no outside link to the material, and when I searched “Charles Cohen,” “Baby Lou,” and “Vandersloot” in the Duke University Digital Collections, it came up empty. After some deeply frustrating searches through WorldCat and the UMKC audio archives, it seemed as though, yes, this “Baby Lou”, which really is the B-side to a record called “My song of the Nile”, was in fact composed by our same 1894-1967 Cecil Cohen. Great, now we have another piece of his to add to the collection!

Sheet music for "Carnival Bingo" by Charles (Chas.) Cohen.

“Carnival Bingo” by Chas (Charles) Cohen, held at the Mississippi State University Library.

The next two search results under “Baby Lou” are a pair of entries for a song called “Carnival Bingo”. The first doesn’t give us much besides that its also held at Duke University (no results when searched in the Duke digital collections) and the publisher being Vandersloot. The second gives us a bit more: actual images for sheet music to “Carnival Bingo,” this time held at the Mississippi State University Library. Excellent! Sheet music! I never thought I would get this excited over sheet music. Let’s look at the entry in the MSU database and… oh. The composer is listed as “Cohen, Charles, 1907-“. No matter, maybe they just credited his dates wrong? Let’s click the name to pull up the other entries to see if the pieces we recognize are there, and…

Now I’m confused. The other two pieces listed, “River Side Rag” and “Fashion Rag”, both include a portion on the front page listing “Chas Cohen” as composer of “Carnival Bingo,” “I love you still,” and “Baby Lou”. A search in WorldCat for “I love you still” brings up yet another piece found in the Duke University Collection, but this time with a link to a piece by “Cohen, Charles, 1878-1931”. Clicking this name, I find an entry for “Baby Lou,” and putting “Carnival Bingo” in WorldCat brings me to the same guy.

Y’all, it was a red herring. There are two Charles Cohen’s: both mixed-race composers and pianists, born late 1800s, and died early/mid 1900s. The major points of differentiation are that this Chas Cohen composed primarily rags and stayed around the East Coast (New York and Pennsylvania), whereas the guy I’m looking for wrote mostly art song, was born in Chicago, and worked at Howard University in DC until his death. There is a very real possibility that our Cohen started going by his middle name of Cecil so as not to be confused by the other Charles Cohen.

There is a real issue going on: it seems as though these two black composers are being conflated by various databases simply because no one has done the necessary work to separate them. Composers of color are not given the same care and attention to identify them as distinct, with rich inner lives; this is a tragedy that needs remedying. The best way to do this, of course, is to encourage archivists and librarians to focus more on composers from marginalized backgrounds and identities; unfortunately this is a lot more difficult than it sounds because the powers that be make more money by upholding white supremacy in Western music.

See you next time on Cohen Quest, dearest reader.

Cohen Quest: Marian Anderson’s Lincoln Memorial Concert

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Welcome to Cohen Quest! In the very first installment, I have some exciting letters, telegrams, and newspaper articles to share and discuss that solidify our guy Chas’s1 place in history. Spoiler alert, it has to do with Marian Anderson’s Lincoln Memorial Concert; but you already knew that, didn’t you? You’re so smart. 

I should start with an explanation of what the Cohen Quest series is: last year, I received the art song “Epitaph for a Poet” composed by a Cecil Cohen. In doing my song research, I had extreme difficulty finding information on the composer besides two short biographies from the African American Art Song Alliance and the African Diaspora Music Project, respectively. This lack of information is indicative of a greater issue:  composers of color are often left out of history, their stories forgotten and pushed to the side. Who was this man who composed a “deceptively simple”2 but absolutely gorgeous piece? And why is it that I, an undergraduate vocal performance major in Minnesota in 2021, am seemingly the first person to try to piece together a narrative of Cohen’s life? This series, I hope, will get to the bottom of both of these questions. So let’s get started before I hit the word count!


Dorothy Maynor sings Cohen’s “Epitaph for a Poet” live at the Library of Congress, accompanied by Arpád Sándor.

On April 9th, 1939, the very famous contralto Marian Anderson gave a concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC.3 The story goes, after being denied access to Constitution Hall because she was black, Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes invited her to perform in front of the Lincoln Memorial, an extraordinarily high honor even for a celebrated singer like Anderson. What does this have to do with Cecil Cohen, you ask? Well, at the time, Cohen was the chairman of the Howard University Concert Series, and therefore in charge of organizing and producing Marian Anderson’s concerts in Washington, DC, and therefore directly involved with one of the largest classical music concerts in modern American history.4

Newspaper article describing Marian Anderson's concert at the Lincoln Memorial on April 9th, 1939.In early January 1939, Charles Cohen approached the manager of Constitution Hall, Fred Hand, inquiring about renting it for a concert on April 9th. Cohen was informed of two things restricting their use of the space: firstly, the National Symphony Orchestra was already set to perform that afternoon, and secondly, a 1932 DAR policy restricted use of the hall to white performers. Due to the enormous popularity of Anderson, Cohen needed to book an auditorium large enough to accommodate at least 1,500 people; outstanding circumstances prevented the use of other sizable auditoriums in the area.

Cohen contacted the impresario and Anderson’s manager Sol Hurok about the issue who then contacted the DAR and was informed that Constitution Hall was available April 8th and April 10th.5 When Cohen again contacted Fred Hand to book the hall, Hand once again denied him, saying it “will not be available on either April 8th or  April 10th for the Marian Anderson Recital.” 6 The reply is short and sweet, and it speaks to Hand’s dismissiveness and callousness in the face of mounting pressure to open the hall to non-white musicians. That March, several prominent members of the DAR, including Eleanor Roosevelt, resigned from the organization, further increasing the conflict’s presence on the national stage.7 Then Secretary Ickes stepped in and Anderson performed for thousands of people at the Lincoln Memorial and the day was saved.


A news clip from Marian Anderson’s concert on April 9th, 1939, at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC.

Obviously, the story is a little more complex than that, but we’ll save those primary sources for next time. The point is, there was an extremely important figure completely left out of the narrative to make a cleaner, more concise story; not to mention his exclusion from history as a talented and forward-thinking composer and pianist. Hopefully we’ll continue to uncover more secrets of Cohen’s life as the semester goes on, the guy certainly deserves it.

1 O’Day, Caroline. [Supporters [arranged alphabetically] M-W: O’Day, Caroline]. Telegram. Marian Anderson Papers (University of Pennsylvania). Colenda Digital Repository.  https://colenda.library.upenn.edu/catalog/81431-p31g0hx4c (accessed September 27, 2021).

2 Story, Rosalyn M., [liner notes to] Dorothy Maynor, soprano, Historic Performances from the Library of Congress, December 18, 1940, compact disc, 16.

3 Special to the New York Times. Throng Honors Marian Anderson in Concert at Lincoln Memorial. Newspaper. New York: The New York Times, 1939. https://www.proquest.com/historical-newspapers/throng-honors-marian-anderson-concert-at-lincoln/docview/102759828/se-2?accountid=351.

4 Cohen, Charles C. [Howard University, 1939: Cohen to Hurok]. Letter. Marian Anderson Papers (University of Pennsylvania). Colenda Digital Repository.  https://colenda.library.upenn.edu/catalog/81431-p3fj29g1s (accessed September 28, 2021).

5 Hurok, Sol. [Howard University, 1939: Hurok to Cohen]. Telegram. Marian Anderson Papers (University of Pennsylvania). Colenda Digital Repository.  https://colenda.library.upenn.edu/catalog/81431-p3610vv2q (accessed September 28, 2021).

6 Cohen, Charles C; Fred Hand. Letter from Cohen (Howard) to Hand with his reply. Letter. Daughters of the American Revolution. NSDAR Archives Marian Anderson Documents January-April 1939.  https://www.dar.org/sites/default/files/8_SCR_DAR%20Subject%20Files_Anderson%
2C%20Marian_February%208%2C%201939%20Letter%20from%20Cohen%20%28
Howard%29%20to%20Hand%20with%20his%20reply.pdf (accessed September 28, 2021).

7 Roosevelt, Eleanor. Letter of resignation from Roosevelt to PG Roberts. Letter. Daughters of the American Revolution. NSDAR Archives Marian Anderson Documents January-April 1939. https://www.dar.org/sites/default/files/12ABC_SCR_DAR%20Subject%20Files_Anderso
n%2C%20Marian_February%2026%2C%201939%20Letter%20of%20resignation%20fr
om%20Roosevelt%20to%20PG%20Robert.pdf (accessed September 27, 2021).