Spiritualist

St. George's Episcopal Church, in down-at-heels Stuyvesant Square, Manhattan, has its traditions. One is beet-nosed J. P. Morgan the elder, who for 28 years, as senior warden, loomed up & down its aisles with the collection plate, left it a $500,000 endowment in his will. Another is social service work, eloquently represented in such liberals as Dr. Karl Reiland and its present pastor, Elmore McNeill McKee. Another is its 72-year-old barytone soloist, Harry Thacker Burleigh, a Negro.

Last Sunday St. George's honored its most distinguished chorister with a special service of Negro spirituals. Headliner on the program was Harry Burleigh himself. Most of the spirituals were his own arrangements, including such famed items as Deep River, Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, Go Down, Moses (in all, he has written some 150). St. George's was jammed. Outside, in tree-shaded Stuyvesant Square, big crowds listened in the warm spring sunshine as the voice of Harry Burleigh and St. George's choir rolled deeply from loudspeakers.

A native of Erie, Pa., Harry Burleigh left his job as janitor when he won a four-year scholarship to Manhattan's National Conservatory of Music. Head of the Conservatory was Anton Dvorak. After supper, Dvorak would coax another Negro song out of young Burleigh's teeming repertory. Shortly afterwards appeared Dvorak's New World symphony, the first to use Negro spirituals.

From 1900 to 1925 St. George's has shared Harry Burleigh with Manhattan's Temple Emanu-El (he is the only Negro ever to sing in that choir). He once sang at two command performances for King Edward VII. By old Mr. Morgan's request, Harry Burleigh sang Calvary at his funeral. Harry Burleigh is proud of all these things. But to St. George's Harry Burleigh's proudest achievement is that he has sung Faure's The Palms on every Palm Sunday for the past 45 years.

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