Biography[edit]

Mildred Jane Hill, born in Louisville, Kentucky, was the oldest of three sisters, Mildred, Patty, and Jessica. She learned music from her father, Calvin Cody, and Adolph Weidig.


It has been reported that Mildred Hill was a kindergarten and Sunday-school teacher, like her younger sister Patty. Prof. Robert Brauneis, after extensively researching the Hill family, has concluded that she was not a kindergarten teacher.^[2] She moved into music, teaching, composing, performing, and specializing in the study of Negro spirituals. Hill and her sister were honored at the Chicago World's Fair (1893) for their work in the progressive education program at the experimental kindergarten, the Louisville Experimental Kindergarten School.


She wrote about music using the pen name Johann Tonsor,^[3] and her 1892 article "Negro Music", suggesting that the existing body of black music would be the basis of a distinctive American musical style, influenced Dvořák in composing the New World Symphony.^[4]


Hill died in Chicago, Illinois, in 1916,^[5] long before her song became famous. She is buried with her sister in Cave Hill Cemetery in Louisville, Kentucky.


Mildred Hill's manuscripts and papers are held by the University of Louisville Music Library in Louisville, Kentucky.