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Chronicles was made possible thanks to a community assets grant provided by the Erie County Gaming Revenue Authority, Springhill Senior Living, support by the Department of Education, and the generous support of Thomas B. Hagen.

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[MUSIC] Everybody in this world wants to make the best of life.

Nobody wants to work beyond what is essential.

Everybody wants to lay up enough treasure upon Earth to make him comfortable, not rich necessarily, but enough to secure his welfare and happiness.

The mind alone is the real means by which man advances, by which each step is secured, which makes the vantage ground on which we better our conditions and lessen the burdens and difficulties of life.

The scheme of education which gives a man just enough to carry him through life is selfish and short-sighted.

Nothing will tend more to make a man mean and narrow than to train himself to provide only for the comforts of life.

The bread and butter education is good enough for bread and butter, but it is soon exhausted.

The truly successful man has more power than will.

He always has a surplus.

Some have objected to higher education for the masses from the apprehension that will lift them above their sphere, make them dissatisfied with their station in life and endanger the tranquility of the state.

For the object and end of all education is to desire for something better, a higher position than the one we have now.

Contentment with present place and position is the enemy of progress and makes of life a stagnant pool fit only for the lower orders of existence.

Every man is the maker of his own fortunes still holds true.

Tell a man to stay where he is and we will have no excellence, for we will have no incentive.

And where there is no incentive, you cannot expect progress.

Mr. Harry T. Burleigh, June 24, 1887.

[MUSIC] In the more than 200 years of Erie County's history, there have been lives that have transcended beyond the borders of our region.

Some have helped compass the direction of the country.

Others have aided in molding our young minds by entertaining us and laying the foundation of our morals.

And a few have offered their interpretation of what it means to be human.

But there is one who in his time came to epitomize all the complexity of the great American experiment.

The here and the now is built on what was.

And our ability to see us as we were has to inform our potential to make and improve our built world: our culture, our structures, and our future.

[MUSIC] Harry Burleigh is an exemplar, stands as a demonstration of the life within the reach of a talented, shining star, a community member for the reconstruction period.

We go through all of our struggles to make something worth having, sharing, and experiencing.

To hand something to those that come after us worth having and improving on.

And for Harry Burleigh's life, so much came together to demonstrate a shared life, a shared art, it's one thing to sing, it's another to hear the beauty, to receive.

[MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] Harry T. Burleigh's compositions of art songs and his arrangements of spirituals laid the foundation for a musical lineage that thrives to this day.

The ingredients of his foundation and his musical aptitude were a mixture of his family, his faith, and his education.

His insatiable appetite for musical expression was his by birthright and was a defining characteristic of his career.

He drew inspiration from the contemporary performers and musical genres of his day.

The city of Erie provided a musical kaleidoscope that would serve Burleigh well.

From the German brass bands at Perry Square, the sea shanties at the Cascade docks to the soloists performing at the Erie Opera House.

But he was always looking for opportunities to hear great singers.

And so there's a great story of his hiding in the balcony when Pasquale Amato, the Italian tenor, was coming to sing.

He hid in the balcony because he wanted to hear it, and he knew they wouldn't let him in.

But he managed to get in and hide, and he heard Pasquale Amato sing So he was always looking for any opportunity to hear great music, great singers.

[MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] To truly understand Burleigh's lifelong pursuit towards betterment, it is vital to understand the course charted by Burleigh's grandfather, Hamilton Waters.

On March 5, 1832, Hamilton, a slave on the Tilghman farm of Somerset, Maryland, would change his family's destiny by purchasing his freedom.

Hamilton Waters was a man who was enslaved.

He purchased his freedom and he freedom of his mother in 1832.

He took his mother to Ithaca, New York, where they had relatives, and his mother actually died there, and he met his wife, Lucinda Duncanson there.

They were married, and their first child, Elizabeth, who would be Harry T. Burleigh's mother, was born near Ithaca.

And then they traveled, they migrated to Erie, Pennsylvania, where they settled.

Back then, despite its remoteness to the hustle back east, Erie had a reputation as a place that had work and was in need of a labor force.

So it was that Hamilton packed up his family in pursuit of the ability to provide for his loved ones in Erie.

He quickly found his place in the community known as Jerusalem.

Jerusalem is considered the area north of 6th Street, West 6th Street, and west of Sassafras.

Picture a stream going through downtown, later a canal going through downtown, and it was William Himrod sold lots at a reasonable price to the first white And black residents.

It was an established area with established businesses, established homes.

So there were job opportunities of various sorts.

There were teamster positions, there were a lot of wagon drivers, whitewashers, there were barbers.

There was a very early family called the Vosburghs that ran a successful barbering business.

It was in fact the Vosburghs who served as Hamilton Waters' first employers upon his arrival to Erie.

It's important to acknowledge and to note how much it took to have it, what it offered the community in the community's growth over time.

So Jerusalem is a solution to a problem that probably shouldn't have been at issue, but we live in our times and build up what builds our community over time.

Upon attaining some stability, Burleigh's grandfather continued to improve his lot in life along with that of his children.

His grandfather, of course, didn't have the kind of educational opportunities, but he was always wanting more education.

So it was a family that was always reaching for education and for greater understanding.

I'm thinking about Elizabeth Waters especially.

She offers the address at her graduation from Avery College in French, and comes back to an Erie County that refuses her the opportunity to teach in the tax-supported career ladder of the Erie School District, and instead offers her an opportunity to clean as janitress And yet she persists.

She does go on to teach, not under that structure, being prepared to offer so much more than our community at that time was ready to receive a failure of imagination, a failure in many directions, and yet she persisted.

It was their church that Hamilton, Elizabeth, and her children would return to time and time again to find their inner peace.

[MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] Of the many things that Burleigh is celebrated for, it is his arrangements of the spirituals that has found itself to be at the core of his celebrity.

His drive and willingness to put pen to paper and preserve the songs his grandfather sang to him honored and eulogized the former slave-turned-community pillar, and in turn, helped keep Burleigh's relevance intact long after his time came and went.

H. W. Johnson's long and very rich introduction spends a great deal of time talking about the fact in his introduction to the 1925 book of American Negro Spirituals that he believes that the spirituals, particularly as arranged by Burleigh and made available in forms that ordinary people, musicians, singers, could use, had had a major effect in reducing the prejudice against African Americans.

And he credited Burleigh in his work because when he starts creating arrangements of spirituals in that format, they make the spirituals accessible to people in a way that they had never been before.

And James Weldon Johnson was convinced that that had played a major role in helping white people understand the beauty and the value of the spirituals, and this had helped to reduce their prejudice, which is a pretty major effect.

But at that time, 1925, 1926, it had made a major difference.

What I know as I listen to a Burleigh arrangement or composition is that so many aspects of the concepts being brought forward, whether it's a love song or whether it is an art song of a different form, like a spiritual, there is a genuine complexity there.

One that can meet the many different folks who might be hearing it or encountering it.

There is a genuine, multifaceted way of taking into account and including what it means in the human condition to consider the love, the strife, the ascending hope, the pain of the human experience.

He can be trusted with the complex.

[Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] Chronicles was made possible thanks to a Community Assets grant provided by the Erie County Gaming Revenue Authority, Springhill Senior Living, support by the Department of Education, and the generous support of Thomas B. Hagan.

We question and learn.