James Alan Bland(1854-1911)

James Bland was an African-American musician and composer who wrote many songs about the American South for use in minstrel shows. His most famous was Carry Me Back to Old Virginny (1878), which became the official State Song of Virginia, being retired in 1997 due to racial controversies. Bland was born in Flushing, New York on October 22, 1854, one of eight children to educated free parents. His father bought him an eight-dollar banjo and Bland was soon performing professionally by his early teens. He attended Howard University in Washington, D.C., but soon pursued music, inspired by the music of some of the workers on the Howard campus, and joined the all-black Georgia Minstrels in the late 1870's. He soon married fellow Howard student and Virginia native Mamie Friend, and was inspired to write Carry Me Back to Old Virginny after hearing her speak of her homesickness while away at college. Other songs composed by Bland were In the Morning in the Bright Light (1879), In the Evening by the Moonlight (1879), and his second most famous song, Oh! Dem Golden Slippers (1879), known today mostly because it was used in an often-aired Golden Grahams cereal television commercial in the 1970's. In 1881, he moved to London, spending the next twenty years there before returning to the United States. While in London, he performed without blackface and gave command performances for Queen Victoria and the Prince of Wales. Bland was making $10,000 a year at one point but recklessly spent his money. In 1901 he returned penniless to Washington, D.C., and as the popularity of minstrel shows waned, Bland could not find work. He died alone in Philadelphia on May 5, 1911, a victim of tuberculosis. He was buried in an unmarked grave but in 1939 the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) provided a headstone at the grave site to commemorate his life. He was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1970.