Robert Nathaniel Dett

Robert Nathaniel Dett, often known as R. Nathaniel Dett and Nathaniel Dett, was a Canadian-American composer, organist, pianist, choral director, and music professor. Born and raised in Canada until the age of 11, he moved to the United States with his family and had most of his professional education and career there. During his lifetime he was a leading Black composer, known for his use of African-American folk songs and spirituals as the basis for choral and piano compositions in the 19th century Romantic style of Classical music.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article on Robert Nathaniel Dett.

From the period sources

Robert Nathaniel Dett, a noted Negro pianist and composer, was born in Drummondville, Quebec, in 1882. He trained at Oberlin and in New York, and according to Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians: American Supplement (1920), he first appeared as a pianist in 1908. Dett held several significant academic posts, serving as music-director at Lane College in Tennessee from 1909, then at Lincoln Institute in Missouri from 1912, and since 1913, as a teacher and choral conductor at Hampton Institute in Virginia, as noted in The New Encyclopedia of Music and Musicians (1924). His published works include the piano suites The Magnolia and In the Bottoms, as well as the cantatas The Chariot Jubilee and The Death of Moses.