Samuel Coleridge-Taylor began his musical training with private violin lessons and went on to enroll at the Royal College of Music in London. His Ballade in A Minor was premiered at the Three Choirs Festival in Gloucester when he was twenty-three years old. Coleridge-Taylor composed many of his most important works early. His Hiawatha's Wedding Feast, which he composed in 1898, is widely regarded as his crowning achievement. In 1899, he heard the Fisk Jubilee Singers in England. Inspired, he arranged the influential collection, Twenty-Four Melodies Transcribed for the Piano, which was published in 1905²⁶.

Coleridge-Taylor was revered in the United States before he ever visited from his home in England. In 1901, The Samuel Coleridge Taylor Choral Society was founded in Washington, D.C. for the purpose of performing his works. The two hundred voice choir brought him to the United States in 1904, when they held a three evening Coleridge-Taylor Festival. He toured in the United States, making a huge impression on the American public. Moreover, he established important relationships with Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois. He is best known for his African Romances, comprised of seven songs, and his trilogy of oratorios, Hiawatha's Wedding Feast, The Death of Minnehaha, and Hiawatha's Departure. Coleridge-Taylor taught at Trinity College of Music and Guildhall School of Music in London.

Overworked and struggling to support his family from paltry one-time payments from music publishers, he contracted double pneumonia in 1912. His life and death left an indelible mark on W.E.B. Du Bois who wrote about him in his 1920 work, Darkwater: "Coleridge-Taylor's life work was not finished, —it was but well begun. He lived only his first period of creative genius, when melody and harmony flashed and fluttered in subtle, compelling, and more than promising profusion."²⁷ Yet in Coleridge-Taylor's life, Du Bois also saw a metaphor for the entrenchment of racism.

Yet, consider: to many millions of people this man was all wrong. First, he ought never to have been born, for he was the mulatto son of a white woman. Secondly, he should never have been educated as a musician,—he should have been trained for his "place" in the world and to make him satisfied therewith. Thirdly, he should not have married the woman he loved and who loved him, for she was white and the niece of an Oxford professor. Fourthly, the children of such a union—but why proceed? You know it all by heart.²⁸