Nora Douglas Holt

Nora Douglas Holt (1885 or 1890 – January 25, 1974) was an American singer, composer and music critic, who was born in Kansas and was the first African American to receive a master's degree in the United States. She composed more than 200 works of music and was associated with the leading figures of the Harlem Renaissance and the co-founder of the National Association of Negro Musicians. She died in 1974 in Los Angeles.

She was born Lena Douglas in Kansas City, Kansas, in either 1885 or 1890 to Calvin Douglas, an African Methodist Episcopal Church minister, and Gracie Brown Douglas. She graduated from Western University at Quindaro, Kansas in 1917 with a bachelor's degree in music. In 1918 she earned her master's degree in music at Chicago Musical College, becoming the first African-American woman to earn a master's in the United States. In the late 1930s, Douglas also studied music education at the University of Southern California. At the Chicago Musical College, her thesis composition was an orchestral work called Rhapsody on Negro Themes.

Douglas was married five times. At the age of 15 she married a musician called Sky James, then two years later married politician Philip Scroggins, followed not long afterwards by a marriage to a barber named Bruce Jones. In 1916 she married her fourth husband, hotel owner George Holt, taking his name and changing her first name to "Nora".

From 1917 to 1921 Holt contributed music criticism to the Chicago Defender, a black daily newspaper. In 1919 she co-founded the National Association of Negro Musicians.

Holt then spent 12 years abroad in Europe and Asia, where she sang at night clubs and private parties. By 1926, when she left for Europe, she had composed more than 200 works of orchestral music and chamber songs, which she placed in storage before departure. Upon returning, she discovered that all her works had been stolen. Only one piece survived, as it had already been published. It was called Negro Dance, a ragtime-like piano piece.

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