Ex. 11-11: Travel's End

"Travel's End" is an undated song by Florence Price, first published in 2010 as No. 2 of Five Art Songs, a set gathered by the scholar Rae Linda Brown. In the poem, a weary traveler longs for the childhood bed in "my mother's house" — a song about the end of life's journey and the longing for home. The song exists in two keys — B major for a low voice, its original key, and F major for a high voice.

Florence Price was a pioneer. In 1933 the Chicago Symphony Orchestra performed her Symphony in E minor — making her the first African-American woman to have a symphony played by a major American orchestra.

Her life was not easy. She had left Little Rock, Arkansas, to escape a wave of racial violence, and moved to Chicago in 1927. She divorced her husband after money troubles and abuse, and raised two daughters on her own. To make a living, she played the organ for silent films, wrote music for radio, taught, and entered composing competitions. In 1932 she broke her foot, and the forced rest gave her time to finish the very symphony that would win her a major prize. She even joked that she had been lucky to break her foot, since it gave her the time to compose.

The same collection, Five Art Songs, also includes two poems by Langston Hughes, a leading writer of the Harlem Renaissance — "Hold Fast to Dreams" and "Fantasy in Purple." Price knew Hughes through the Black artistic circles of Chicago, and set several of his poems to music.

For a long time, the poet of "Travel's End" was credited as "Mary Folwell Hoisington." But her name was really May, not Mary — "Mary" was a printing mistake that went uncorrected for decades, until one of the poet's descendants came forward in 2022.

After Price died in 1953, she was largely forgotten, and many of her manuscripts were lost. Then, in 2009, a couple fixing up an old, run-down house in St. Anne, Illinois — Price's former summer home — found stacks of her lost manuscripts and papers there. The discovery set off a major revival, and her music is now performed and recorded around the world.

From the album Hold Fast to Dreams: Songs by Florence Price by Ted Black and Sascha El Mouissi (2026)
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