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There is an air of mystery around almost every element in Nora Douglas Holt’s life.
To start, she’s known by about a dozen different names. Part of that is the result of her five different marriages, but it’s also because she was constantly reinventing herself.
Some days, she was an adept pianist, composer and singer. Other days, she was a rebellious music critic organizing and advocating on behalf of Black musicians. At night, she’d transform again into an intellectual club-hopping socialite the tabloids loved to gossip about.
With a list of accomplishments as long as hers, you’d think she’d be prominently discussed. She’s not, though — in fact she's been called “the most famous woman you’ve never heard of.” Much of that reputation stems from a theft that took place nearly a century ago, resulting in the loss of nearly all of her music.
“I’m as a historian trying to piece together these wildly different aspects of her personality,” says Dr. Samantha Ege, a music historian, concert pianist, and the author of, “South Side Impresarios,” a new book about how Black women transformed Chicago’s classical music scene.
According to Ege, the mystique Holt built around herself was completely intentional.
“She enjoyed the fictions of her life,” Ege says, “and she enjoyed what she could put out there to fit certain narratives and sort of create this aura about her.”
The profound ambitions of Nora Holt
Born Lena Douglas around 1885, Nora Holt grew up in a Black, middle-class family in Kansas City, Kansas. She’s described by scholars as a free spirit, ambitious and creative from an early age.
Her father, Calvin Douglas, was a respected minister in the African Methodist Episcopal church. Her mother, Gracie Brown Douglas, started teaching Holt piano at age 4.
“They clearly were a family who loved music and cared about their daughter's education,” says Lucy Caplan, an assistant professor of music at Worcester Polytechnic Institute and the author of the soon-to-be-published book “Dreaming in Ensemble: How Black Artists Transformed American Opera.”
“Nora Holt was a church organist, and when her father would travel the country trying to raise money for his church, Nora Holt would go with him, and she would give these recitals,” says Ege. “She was incredibly accomplished.”
In 1917, Holt graduated valedictorian from the prestigious Western University, the first historically Black college west of the Mississippi, and part of the former Quindaro settlement, on a Kansas bluff overlooking the Missouri River. Other notable musical alumni include Kansas City’s beloved blues queen, Julia Lee, and Etta Moten Barnett, who sang lead in the 1942 Broadway production of George Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess.”
During Holt’s time at Western University, jazz, ragtime, and the blues were becoming more popular, but a lot of historically Black colleges and universities banned them in favor of more classical styles.
“These styles were seen as sort of ‘low culture,’” says Ege, something respectable men and women should not associate with.
Of course, Nora Holt didn't pay this much attention.
Her taste in music, like her life, was eclectic and unpredictable. She loved the rhythm of ragtime, but initially called jazz America’s “enfant terrible,” which translates to “terrible child.”
“Nora Holt really strikes me as a rebel because she initially aligns with this respectable way of being, and she writes in the classical vein,” says Ege. “But she begins to actually embrace these styles that were so strongly discouraged in her upbringing.”
After she graduated from Western University, Holt went on to Chicago Musical College and, in 1918, became the first Black person in the U.S. to earn a master’s degree in music. Her thesis composition was a 42-page symphonic work called “Rhapsody on Negro Themes,” written for a 100-piece orchestra.
Diversifying classical music with her pen
Nora Holt was also an excellent community organizer.
In 1919, she helped form the National Association of Negro Musicians and the Chicago Music Association to bring Black musicians together and help them advocate for themselves.
“She invited these musicians to her home,” says Ege. “Her home became this salon, basically, this intellectual and creative hub.”
It was a year of particular racial tension and unrest in Chicago, but the National Association of Negro Musicians was undeterred. It held its first convention there that July — a courageous move during the Jim Crow era, given the Civil Rights Act banning discrimination on the basis of race and sex wouldn’t be passed for another 45 years.
Another way Holt advocated for social change was by writing a classical music column for the Chicago Defender, the most influential Black newspaper of its day.
Caplan says the Chicago Symphony Orchestra performances weren’t segregated in an official capacity, but Black audience members were excluded from the scene as a whole, and there were very few Black audience members in practice.
Holt’s detailed performance reviews written specifically for Black Americans brought them into the fold and made classical music more accessible.
“She would write really beautifully about what she heard — whether that was a singer or the opera or the symphony or a pianist. But she would also write really beautifully about what it was like to go to a concert, how she felt, what she wore, what other people were wearing,” says Caplan. “I was just taken in by this woman who seemed so curious, so inquisitive, so smart in the way that she wrote about music.”
In 1921, Holt founded a monthly magazine called Music and Poetry that pushed back against white supremacy and advocated for Black musicians. It was financed by her fourth husband, George Holt, a wealthy Chicago hotel and theater owner.
While the Chicago Defender was mostly staffed by men, Music and Poetry was led by women.
“Of course, men are supposed to have better business minds than women,” Holt wrote at the time. “But I have made this thing go and the opportunities are yet unlimited.”
It sold for 25 cents in cities like Chicago, Tuskegee, Boston, Montgomery, Indianapolis, Bowling Green, Dallas and Washington. It was also mailed to subscribers as far as South America, Europe and Africa.
“We think of diversifying classical music as such a recent development, but here she was a hundred years ago,” says Caplan.
The most interesting woman at the party
In the early ‘20s, Nora Holt moved to Harlem, a New York City neighborhood in the midst of the intellectual and cultural movement known as the Harlem Renaissance.
It was a golden age of Black literature, music, art and culture. And Holt fit in perfectly, quickly befriending musicians, artists, and other luminaries, like poet Langston Hughes — born in Joplin, Missouri.
“It’s interesting, reading through letters of correspondence with Langston Hughes and Gertrude Stein as well, where they're talking about how she's such an exciting person,” says Ege. “‘You have to meet her!’ ‘She's brilliant!’ ‘She's fabulous!’”
This period was also characterized by large, raucous parties — late-night jazz concerts, LGBTQ+ gatherings, and rent parties, where a hat was passed around to provide aid to a host in need.
“She felt very at home in those circles. She felt very at home with people from very different backgrounds. She felt very at home in queer spaces, which leads me to speculate about the fluidity of her own sexuality,” says Ege. “It’s really fascinating to me that that is as much a part of her as her symphonic compositions.”
In 1926, Holt moved to Paris to study composition at the Sorbonne with notable composer and music teacher Nadia Boulanger. But at night, she’d go club hopping with Josephine Baker, the famous dancer, actress and singer born in St. Louis.
“She decided to dye her hair blonde and pass herself off as this Creole jazz singer in Paris,” says Ege.
“Nora Holt definitely had this side that was quite adventurous,” says Caplan. “Her life was often in the gossip columns of these newspapers, and she worked in the newspaper business.”
Holt even described herself to the Black press at this time as “naughty little Nora.”
“She knew how these places worked, so my sense is that she knew people would talk about her and she didn't really care,” Caplan says.
Holt’s travels weren’t solely fueled by an exciting pull to explore the world, though. Caplan notes there was also a push in Holt to get away from a country where racist systems made it hard to succeed as a Black artist.
“A lot of African American artists and intellectuals and writers wanted to look beyond the Jim Crow United States and see what else was out there,” Caplan says. “They found that no place was perfect and no place was free from racism … but there were other options. There were different ways of moving through the world.”
‘The great tragedy of my life’
On track to become a prolific composer, Nora Holt was likely too busy studying classical composition to spend much time thinking about her Chicago storage space when she was roaming European cities in the 1920s.
That is, until the time she returned home to Chicago from Paris, and made a heartbreaking discovery: All of her things in the storage space had been ransacked, and all of her more than 200 compositions had been stolen. Her entire life’s work was gone in a flash.
Holt called it “the great tragedy of my life,” according to Caplan.
Nearly a century later, exactly what happened and whether it was targeted or random is a popular topic of speculation.
Samantha Ege says it’s worth noting that, at the time, Holt was going through a very public divorce with Joseph Ray, a wealthy secretary to steel magnate Charles Schwab. Their marriage imploded after public rumors of adultery, Caplan says, and Ray hired private investigators to follow Holt.
The gossip columns loved it.
“She was being attacked as a woman who wanted a divorce. She was having her character slandered, essentially,” says Ege.
Thankfully, two of Holt’s compositions were published in Music and Poetry magazine prior to the theft, so we have a small window into her musical mind.
The rest of Holt’s compositions have never been found, but scholars hope they’re out there somewhere.
“Her friends performed her music,” says Ege, “so someone might have a box from their great-great-grandparents that contains some of Nora Holt's scores — things do turn up that way.”
In one instance 15 years ago, Florence Price’s handwritten manuscripts that scholars thought had been lost forever were found in an abandoned house in Illinois.
Though Holt was talked about as an incredibly talented, prolific composer, we may never know how rich or nuanced her music really was. Would she be taught in music classes today if not for what happened?
It’s possible, says Ege, but once the music was stolen, Holt lost some of her vigor for composition.
“She made her mark in so many other ways,” says Ege. “She was really someone who could ride on the waves of the moment.”
After yet another transformation, Holt opened a beauty salon in Los Angeles, and had a career as a music teacher and radio host on WNYC in New York City.
“She moves into radio around 1950,” says Ege, “and continues to champion Black composers.”
A nonconformist through and through
At the heart of all of Nora Holt’s personas was someone uninterested in “fitting into expected narratives,” says Caplan.
Holt was aware of the social structure a Black woman in the early 20th century was supposed to exist in, and she refused to do as she was told.
Ege says community was very important to her, too — a sentiment shaped in her earliest days in Kansas City. It drove her to create networks and structures to help Black musicians get the respect they deserved.
“Those experiences remain deeply embedded in who she is,” Ege says. “She always retained that sense of being community-oriented, of uplifting other Black creatives, intellectuals (and) practitioners.”
Nora Holt died in 1974, at about 90 years old.
Her obituary in the Amsterdam News read: “Fabulous is the word for Mrs. Nora Douglas Holt.”
This episode of A People's History of Kansas City was reported by Sam Wisman and produced by Mackenzie Martin and Olivia Hewitt, with editing by Luke X. Martin and Suzanne Hogan. Mix by Mackenzie Martin and Olivia Hewitt. It is a collaboration with 91.9 Classical KC.
