Donald Brown celebrated the life of Knoxville-born modernist painter Beauford Delaney.
Internationally renowned jazz pianist and composer Donald Brown was the featured artist for the 2025 chapter of Boundless: Artists in the Archives. His original jazz compositions — inspired by the Beauford Delaney Papers held in the UT Libraries’ archives — debuted at the Knoxville Museum of Art on March 16, 2025. The gala performance, held in collaboration with Knoxville’s Big Ears Festival, drew a standing-room-only crowd.
Donald Brown at the keyboard
The Boundless program invites musicians and other artists to visit the UT Libraries’ archives and create original works inspired by the unique primary sources preserved there. Brown explored the papers of modernist painter Beauford Delaney (1901–1979) held at UT’s Betsey B. Creekmore Special Collections and University Archives. The Beauford Delaney Papers consists of family, personal, and professional correspondence, photographs, sketchbooks and notebooks, artwork, exhibition material, and biographical records created or collected by Delaney, an African-American born and raised in Knoxville.
At the Boundless event, Brown premiered three original compositions inspired by Delaney’s papers. Delving into that collection and reading a biography of Delaney, Brown said, “One of the things I grasped right away was that his mother was this really soulful Black woman who, growing up in Knoxville in the early 1900s… you can imagine some of the things she had to endure.” The first composition presented at the Boundless event was a tribute titled “Theme for Beauford’s Mother, Delia.” “I sense that she was a very powerful woman,” Brown said. “Hopefully, you’ll hear that in the music through some of the colors that I was going for with the band.”
The second piece was inspired by the friendship between Delaney and James Baldwin. “Beauford was very close and a good friend with the great Black author James Baldwin.… I got to read a letter that he had written to Beauford. I tried to capture the feeling of what it must have been like growing up Black in Knoxville in America and then being gay.… When he moved to Paris, he became a household name throughout Europe.… I tried to capture a certain serenity that they most surely experienced. So, there are some bright moments there — and some dark moments.”
The final composition was a song Brown wrote for Beauford titled “$5 Blues for Beauford Delaney.” “From pictures I’ve seen of him, reading about him, he was like a really down-to-earth cat,” Brown said. “You know, if he lived in Knoxville back then, he had to have the blues! So, I tried to capture the feeling of Dixieland blues, juke joint blues, and modern blues.”
The ensemble that performed Brown’s compositions included: Donald Brown, Taber Gable, Margherita Fava, and Mimi Terry on keyboards; Vance Thompson on vibraphone; Greg Tardy on soprano saxophone and tenor sax; Marcel Holman on flute and soprano sax; and Kenneth Brown on drums. A studio recording of Brown’s compositions is forthcoming.
