Will Vodery

Will Vodery (October 8, 1885 - November 18, 1951) was an African-American composer, conductor, orchestrator, and arranger, and one of the few black Americans of his time to make a name for himself as a composer on Broadway, working largely for Florenz Ziegfeld.

He had offices at the Gaiety Theatre office building in Times Square.

Vodery was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on October 8, 1885, his mother was a pianist and his father was a teacher at Lincoln University. From an early age Vodery's family rented rooms to theatrical performers, exposing Will to many talented black performers at the turn of the 20th century, including members of the Williams & Walker Co. He attended the University of Pennsylvania on scholarship, where he studied with Hugh A. Clark.

Beginning in 1910 Vodery served as the musical director for performances at the Howard Theater in Washington, D.C., until 1911. During this time, he cowrote music and lyrics for J. Leubrie Hill's My Friend from Dixie. This show was subsequently revised and expanded into the Darktown Follies. Darktown Follies became one of the landmark shows at the Lafayette Theater in Harlem.

While Vodery did compose the music for the show From Dixie to Broadway (1924), he is most famous for the vocal and choral arrangements that he created for the original Broadway stage production of the classic musical Show Boat (1927). His arrangements for the show were used again in the London production of the show (1928), and the first revival on Broadway (1932), as well as in both the Universal Pictures film version (1936), and the prologue to the part-talkie 1929 film version (also by Universal) of Edna Ferber's novel, on which the show is based. Vodery's original arrangements were combined with new ones by Pembroke Davenport for the 1946 Broadway revival of Show Boat.

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