Alton Adams

Alton Augustus Adams, Sr. (born November 4, 1889, Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas, Danish West Indies – d. November 23, 1987, Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands) is remembered primarily as the first black bandmaster in the United States Navy (beginning 1917). His music was performed by the bands of John Philip Sousa and Edwin Franko Goldman and his march "The Governor's Own" (1921) appears as the first selection on the bicentennial album Pride of America, released by New World Records.

The son of aspiring artisan parents, Adams attended elementary school and later apprenticed to become a carpenter and then a shoemaker. During this time, he nurtured a passion for music and literature. Adams learned to play piccolo (chosen primarily because the instrument was less expensive than a full-size flute) and joined the St. Thomas Municipal Band in 1906. Simultaneously, he studied music theory and composition late into the nights through correspondence courses with Dr. Hugh A. Clark at the University of Pennsylvania. In June 1910, Adams broke away from the Municipal Band to form his own ensemble—the Adams Juvenile Band. Adams' band developed rapidly, becoming part of the social fabric in the islands' capital city—the port of Charlotte Amalie—by playing for a variety of social and charitable events as well as regular concerts in the city’s bandstand at Emancipation Garden, a location that remembers and celebrates Governor von Scholten proclamation which gave freedom to the slaves in 1848.

Adams had come to depend on music magazines from the U.S. mainland as a source of ideas and learning about music. His passion for reading and writing bore fruit as early as 1910 when he first contributed an article on the black composer Samuel Coleridge Taylor to The Dominant. In 1915, he became the music editor for the St. Croix newspaper The Herald. A year later he became the band columnist for Boston's Jacobs' Band Monthly. Bands at the time mostly performed rearrangements of orchestral music and Adams highlighted original works. Adams' essays garnered the attention of leading musicians in the States, such as John Philip Sousa and Edwin Franko Goldman. His grandiloquent prose style amplified a philosophy of social idealism about music's educational role in the community. When on the eve of its entrance into World War I, the United States purchased the Virgin Islands from Denmark, Adams possessed a unique combination of administrative skill and community service with credibility on the U.S. mainland and no problematic political entanglements that allowed him to take advantage of an unprecedented opportunity.

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