Perry (left) with music students and teachers in 1949, including Milhaud and Martens
Perry was born Zenobia Powell on October 3, 1908, in the once-predominantly African-American town of Boley, Oklahoma, to physician Calvin B. Powell and Birdie Thompson Powell (who had Creek Indian heritage). Her family was well educated and middle class. Her grandfather, who had been a slave, sang her traditional spirituals as a child, which later influenced her work.
As a child, Perry met Booker T. Washington and sang for him at his appearance in Boley on August 22, 1915, where he "declared she was a future Tuskegegian." Perry took piano lessons as a child with Mayme Jones, who had been taught by composer Robert Nathaniel Dett. She won a piano competition in 1919. Perry also learned to play violin as a child. One of her biggest musical influences, however, came from the experience of hearing Hazel Harrison in concert, after which she knew she wanted to study music.
In 1925, Perry graduated from Boley High School. Her father was not supportive of her decision to study music, but her mother was, and sent her to Omaha, Nebraska, to study at the Cecil Berryman Conservatory in 1929. After her return to Boley, Dett visited her family to ask them to send her to the Hampton Institute in Virginia, where she could study with him. However, soon after, Dett left Hampton for the Eastman School of Music and Perry decided on her own to study privately with Dett in Rochester, New York. Perry studied with Dett until May 1932. She studied composition briefly during this time with Cortez Reece at Langston University in Oklahoma.
In 1935, she went on to study at the Tuskegee Institute, and, because of her family's connection with Washington and her promise to study education as well as music, she was allowed to attend. At Tuskegee she studied with William L. Dawson who encouraged her to compose original work; she was already preparing arrangements for the Tuskegee Institute Chorus. Perry graduated in 1938.
After Tuskegee, Perry became part of a teacher training program for Black Americans that was headed by Eleanor Roosevelt. Roosevelt would become a mentor and friend to Perry and even helped sponsor her graduate studies. Perry took classes at the Colorado State Teachers College and started teaching first grade in 1942. In 1945, she received her Master of Arts degree from Colorado State College.
She began "earnestly" writing her own music during the 1950s. From 1952 to 1954, Perry worked on her master's degree in music composition at Wyoming University, where she studied under Allan Arthur Willman, Darius Milhaud, and Charles Jones.
Career
Perry worked as a professor for much of her life and began seriously composing when she was in her forties. From 1941 to 1945 Perry taught while attending the Colorado State Teachers College. Two years later, she held a faculty position at the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff (UAPB), where she remained until 1955. During the years of 1949 and until she left UAPB, Perry toured with Kelton Lawrence as a piano duo in order to recruit students for UAPB.
From 1955 to 1982, Perry was a faculty member and composer-in-residence at Central State University in Wilberforce, Ohio. She continued to volunteer "on behalf of the African American community" after she retired.
In 1998 she was honored by the University of Wyoming, winning the Arts and Sciences Outstanding Alumni Award.
Work
Scene from a 2014 revival of Tawawa House in Modesto, California
Perry's music is classical and "incorporates contrapuntal, tonal, mild dissonance, with some jazz and folk influence." According to biographer Jeannie Gayle Poole, she was "also influenced by black American and Native American folklore, music, language and poetry." She wrote an opera, Tawawa House, first performed in 1987 and revived in 2014. Perry also wrote for orchestra, bands and composed a mass. One of her most widely performed pieces is Threnody, a song cycle composed for her daughter set to the poetry of Donald Jeffrey Hayes. It was initially filed for copyright under the title Atmosphere: A Cycle of Songs in 1974, labeled as Op. 12.
Archival collection
Zenobia Powell Perry's papers are held at the Center for Black Music Research at Columbia College in Chicago, Illinois. The collection is titled Zenobia Powell Perry Scores and Music Manuscripts. The collection as a whole consists primarily of original compositions and manuscripts produced by Powell herself.
Her pedagogical piano works are included in the University of Colorado Boulder's Hidden Voices: Piano Music by Black Women Composers.
Personal life
In 1932, Zenobia Powell married violinist "King" Earl Gaynor. While she was pregnant, Gaynor left and she raised their son on her own. They later divorced in 1933. Her son, Lemuel, died in 1944 at age 11 of a ruptured appendix. In 1941, she married Jimmie Rogers Perry and they had a daughter, sopranoJanis-Rozena Peri, in 1943. Perry was divorced again while her daughter was young. Perry raised her daughter alone while working towards her advanced degrees and studies and also while also working as a professor. Perry also supported her elderly mother for many years.
In 1989, Perry was diagnosed and treated for breast cancer, and her health deteriorated until her death, nearly 15 years later. She died on January 17, 2004, in Xenia, Ohio, aged 95.
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