Despite losing her father at the age of three, Mildred Katherine Ellis, born on September 20, 1906, in Johnson City, Tennessee, a renowned musicologist, composer, theorist, and pianist, began her piano studies early. Her academic journey began at Douglass Elementary School in Johnson City. On Sundays, however by her teenage years, she served as a pianist and accompanist for her church choir at the all-Black Bethesda Presbyterian Church and for school programs.
In 1924, Ellis graduated first in her class from Langston High School. She then attended Fisk University in Nashville where she received a Bachelor of Arts in French and music, with piano as her principal instrument in 1928. While at Fisk Ellis was initiated into the Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc.
From 1931 to 1936, Ellis taught at Christiansburg Institute in Chesterfield County, Virginia, a private school for African American students. There, she was the choral director and French language teacher. 1937, she earned a Master of Music in music theory from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.
One of the most memorable events of Ellis’s musical career was returning to her hometown in 1947 to plan and produce a “Negro Music Festival” at East Tennessee State College in Johnson City, a town with a very small African American population. In 1954, Ellis earned a Master of Music in musicology, minoring in music theory and French, from Indiana University in Bloomington and a Doctor of Philosophy in 1969 at the age of 63. Her dissertation title was The French Piano Character Piece of the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries, a comprehensive study that significantly contributed to understanding this musical genre.
Despite her advanced age, the remainder of Ellis’s professional career was spent as a higher-education professor and administrator. At Johnson C. Smith College in Charlotte, North Carolina, she taught composition and piano and chaired the music program. She also taught at Arkansas Agricultural, Mechanical, and Normal College (now the University of Arkansas, Pine Bluff), Southern University in Louisiana, Morristown College in Tennessee, Wilberforce University in Ohio, and George Fox College in Oregon.
In 1970, Dr. Ellis was recruited by Dr. William Howard Moore, the chairperson of the Music Department, to teach theory and composition at Federal City College (now the University of the District of Columbia). During this period, she also taught at Howard University School of Music.
In 2000, Dr. Ellis, a member of the National Association of Negro Musicians, was inducted into the Hall of Fame for Cultural Arts in Washington, DC. She also held membership in the American Musicological Society, the Music Teachers National Association, the American Association of University Professors, and the National Guild of Piano Teachers.
Dr. Mildred Katharine Ellis died in Washington, D.C., on February 19, 2004. She was 97.
