Samuel Coleridge-Taylor - "the African Mahler"
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875 –1912) was an English composer and conductor. His mother Alice Martin named her son after the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Alice was English and Samuel Taylor's father was Daniel Taylor, a doctor from Sierra Leone, who returned to Africa without knowing that Alice was pregnant.
The family were musical and as Taylor showed early ability, they arranged for him to study at the Royal College of Music from the age of 15.
After completing his degree, Taylor became a professional musician and composer, achieving such success that he was referred to by white New York musicians as the "African Mahler", when he had three tours of the United States in the early 1900s. He was particularly known for his three cantatas on the epic poem, Song of Hiawatha by American Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Coleridge-Taylor premiered the first section in 1898, when he was 22.
Though successful and popular, he struggled financially as composers were not well paid for their music, and often sold the rights to works outright in order to make immediate income. Coleridge-Taylor died of pneumonia at 37.
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