Dr. Jean E. Snyder
Dr. Jean E. Snyder was born in Portland, Oregon. She lived with her family in Luray, Virginia; Akron, Pennsylvania; Goshen, Indiana; and Battle Creek, Michigan. She earned a B.S. in English Education at Eastern Mennonite College (now University), in Harrisonburg, Virginia, and an M.A. in English at the University of Notre Dame.
A mezzo-soprano, Snyder was active in church and community choirs, often featured as a soloist in oratorio and other choral performances.
She taught English at Western Mennonite High School in Salem, Oregon; at Tumutumu Girls’ Secondary School in Karatina, Kenya, where her choir sang for President Jomo Kenyatta at his home; and Northridge High School in Middlebury, Indiana. She established the Music Department at Malcolm Moffat Teachers Training College in Serenje, Zambia, and her choir sang for President Kenneth Kaunda. In Zambia she discovered ethnomusicology, and on her return to the United States she moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where she earned her Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology.
During her studies at the University of Pittsburgh she became interested in the life and music of Harry T. Burleigh, an African American singer, art song composer, music editor and pioneer arranger of spirituals, who was born in Erie, Pennsylvania. Her dissertation, “Harry T. Burleigh and the Creative Expression of Bi-Musicality: A Study of an African-American Composer and the American Art Song” was completed in 1992. In 2000 she was hired at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania, where she taught Freshman English Composition, and in the Music Department, where she taught Introduction to Music, World Music, American Music, a two-semester Music History course for music majors, and Music of Broadway.
At Edinboro she began work on her biography of Harry T. Burleigh. In addition to her research in libraries and archives, her work on Burleigh was significantly enriched by the help of Burleigh’s grandson, Dr. Harry T. Burleigh II and his wife Mary, and Burleigh’s niece, Grace Blackwell, who was very close to him in the last years of his life. Her biography, Harry T. Burleigh: From the Spiritual to the Harlem Renaissance was published in March 2016 by the University of Illinois Press. The paperback edition of this biography will be released in August 2021.