Harry Burleigh is considered by some to be the earliest black nationalist composer²⁰. He was a singer before receiving a scholarship to New York's National Conservatory of Music in 1892. During his second year, he studied with Antonin Dvorák, who would become one of the most important influences in his work. In 1894 Burleigh continued singing, winning a competition over fifty white candidates for the position of baritone soloist at New York's St. George's Protestant Episcopal Church. The appointment of a black soloist upset many of the parishioners. In 1898 Burleigh began to compose, but also continued to sing; in 1900 he became the first black soloist at Temple Emanu-El. Burleigh's first compositions have been described as conventional sentimental ballads²¹. He became one of the most renowned musicians of the twentieth century for arranging spirituals in the manner of art songs. Around 1900 he began to concentrate on composition, becoming music editor at G. Ricordi and Company, where he could publish his own music. He was one of the first arrangers of spirituals for the solo voice; indeed his Deep River in, published in 1916, was the first published concert arrangement of a spiritual for solo voice. He left over one hundred songs: more than fifty choral compositions, fifty solo pieces, and miscellaneous works. He composed music to Langston Hughes's Lovely Dark and Lonely One, and James Weldon Johnson's The Young Warrior.

The most famous concert singers of the period, Lucrezia Bori, Ernestine Schumann-Heink, and John McCormack, helped bring Burleigh's songs to wide audiences. Considered by some historians as one of the first black nationalist composers, Burleigh was determined to capture the spirit of the Negro folksong in classically composed music²². Along the way he gained protégés in Paul Robeson, Roland Hayes, and Marian Anderson. Harry T. Burleigh's fame and veneration is revealed through the thirty year anniversary celebration of his work, which took place on March 30, 1924. The New York Times reported the event:

hundreds of persons vainly stormed the entrances to St. George's Episcopal Church on both East Sixteenth Street and Rutherford Place yesterday trying to gain admission... Mr. Burleigh is a Negro singer and composer. So dense were the throngs outside that police were called to keep the streets open for traffic. The church was filled and the doors were ordered closed half an hour before the services opened.²³

His awards include the NAACP's Spingarn Medal for highest achievement in a field, and a Harmon Foundation Award. In 1924, he revealed to the New York World his ambition "to preserve them [the spirituals] in harmonies that belong to modern methods of tonal progression without robbing the melodies of their racial flavor."²⁴