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Booker T. Washington was an early influence in William Dawson's career. While a student at Tuskegee Institute, he learned to play the trombone and the euphonium, took piano classes, sang in the school's choir, and in a special small ensemble, the Tuskegee Singers. Dawson graduated from Tuskegee with top honors in 1921. In 1925 he earned a bachelor of music degree with honors from the Horner Institute of Fine Arts in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1925. In 1927 he graduated from the American Conservatory with a masters of arts degree in music. During his life he also took classes at the Chicago Musical College, and studied at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York.
After playing trombone with the Chicago Civic Orchestra, Dawson returned to Tuskegee as the director of music and conductor of the chorus. Tuskegee took off under Dawson's leadership, becoming one of the most famous and renowned college choirs in the country. The Tuskegee Choir played at Radio City Music Hall, sparking personal requests for performances from Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt. The Choir also toured Western Europe and Russia. Dawson was commissioned by CBS in 1940 to compose an orchestral composition for their broadcast series, School of the Air. Dawson's composition, A Negro Work Song would prove one of his most enduring and popular pieces.29
One of the highlights of Dawson's career was the 1934 premiere of his Negro Folk Symphony by the Philadelphia Orchestra. The symphony attracted a plethora of critical acclaim, and marked the first symphony by an African-American composer to be premiered by a major American orchestra. He revised the Negro Folk Symphony in 1952, after a trip to West Africa. This version was recorded by Leopold Stokowski, the director of the Philadelphia Orchestra. Like Harry T. Burleigh, was inspired by the views of Antonin Dvorák and approached his music with a nationalist philosophy. Almost echoing the sentiments of Harry T. Burleigh, he remarked that with respect to the Negro Folk Symphony, he aspired to "write a symphony in the Negro folk idiom, based on authentic folk music but in the same symphonic form used by the composers of the romantic-nationalist school."30
29 Ashyia Henderson, ed. Contemporary Black Biography, Volume 39. Gale Group, 2003.
30 Eileen Southern. The Music of Black Americans: A History. p. 452.
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