[excerpt] The Caged Bird: The Life and Music of Florence B. Price

Описание: This is an excerpt from “The Caged Bird: The Life and Music of Florence B. Price”, a documentary which traces the eponymous Arkansas native’s life and the culture in which she lived, beginning with her birth in Little Rock in 1887. Welcomed into an extraordinarily gifted family, which moved in the circles of the social set historian Willard Gatewood referred to as “Aristocrats of Color,” Florence grew up in what was, for a time, a congenial environment. Unfortunately, however, Jim Crow laws eventually took hold of Little Rock and much of the South, creating a sort of an American apartheid system that eventually drove Florence Price and many talented people of color to leave it. Florence later settled north, in Chicago during the 1920s. Already well acquainted with many influential individuals, Florence’s circles were greatly expanded, and she came into contact with some of the most prominent African Americans in U.S. history.
The documentary was supported in part by grants from the Arkansas Humanities Council, the Department of Arkansas Heritage, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the University of Arkansas. Filmmaker James Greeson is a professor of music at the University of Arkansas and composer of more than 15 documentary film scores.