Occramer Marycoo, a Ghanian captured by slavers and shipped in 1764 to the American slave port of Newport, Rhode Island, apparently was the first Black composer in what became the United States to have his music published, Sophie Genevieve Lowe writes in Early Music America.
Renamed Newport Gardner and held in Newport by the slave trader Caleb Gardner, Marycoo quickly learned to speak English and French and to master the basics of Western musical composition. His dance tune “Crooked Shanks” was published in Britain in 1768, and there are accounts of his anthems being performed in a Newport church, Lowe writes.
She speculates that Marycoo was one of the aristocratic “singing men” of oral historians and troubadours in the Akan culture of West Africa. She also notes that the Akan word “okyerema,” quite similar to Marycoo’s first name, means “master drummer.”
Marycoo purchased his freedom in 1791, and his family was granted its freedom shortly afterward. He opened a singing school, and by 1807 was prosperous enough to buy a home. In 1826, Marycoo and his family set sail for Africa. Accounts differ as to whether he died on the voyage home or shortly after arriving.
Lowe, a British violinist and scholar of the music of Colonial America, tells Marycoo’s remarkable story:
America’s First Published Black Composer?
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