author
1890–1964
An early champion of American music, he helped bring the country’s musical history to a wider audience through books, lectures, and radio. Best known for Our American Music and his biography of Stephen Foster, he spent decades tracing how American music grew and changed.
Born in Brooklyn on November 30, 1890, John Tasker Howard became one of the early writers to treat American music as a subject worth serious study. He studied composition after attending Williams College, and his career ranged widely across publishing, teaching, broadcasting, and composition.
Howard worked as managing editor of The Musician, later edited music sections for magazines including McCall’s and Cue, and served from 1940 to 1956 as curator of the Americana Music Collection at the New York Public Library. He also taught at Columbia University and wrote and hosted radio programs about American music, helping bring the subject to a broad public.
His best-known books include Our American Music (1931), an early general history of music in the United States, and Stephen Foster: America’s Troubadour (1934), which helped establish his reputation as an authority on Foster and on American musical life more broadly. Although he also composed songs, piano works, and larger pieces, he is remembered chiefly for the way he documented, explained, and championed America’s musical past. Howard died in West Orange, New Jersey, on November 20, 1964.