Women Composing

a celebration through the centuries to the present


Betty Jackson King (1928 – 1994)

Betty Jackson was born in Chicago. She first started learning music from her mother and was introduced to spirituals in her father’s church. She studied composition, piano, and voice at the Chicago Musical College of Roosevelt University and other institutions. She later taught music at the University of Chicago and other colleges and high schools, and she was the president of the National Association of Negro Musicians for 14 years.

Betty Jackson King mostly composed vocal music, including arrangement of spirituals. This is her 1955 piano composition, Four Seasonal Sketches: