At a very early age, James Price Johnson (1894-1955) began piano lessons, first under the highly disciplined instruction of
Bruno Gianinni, and later in New York City with Eubie Blake.

In jazz he was the foremost exponent of the stride piano style, and his composition Carolina Shout, recorded in 1921, became the test piece for younger musicians. From 1921 he accompanied blues singers, including recordings (1927-30) and the film St. Louis Blues with Bessie Smith. In musical theater, Cecil Mack and he wrote  Runnin' Wild, and their hit song  The Charleston  started that dance craze (1923).

Of all his accomplishments, James P. Johnson most wanted to be remembered as a serious composer of symphonic music utilizing African-American musical themes.

When the Depression ended the decade of the Charleston, James P. Johnson semi-retired from active Harlem nightlife to concentrate on symphonic composition.  Moving his family to the then-fashionable neighborhood of Jamaica, Long Island, he undertook serious private study of music theory, harmony, composition, counterpoint, instrumentation, and orchestration.
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Despite little recognition and limited encouragement, James P Johnson would write two symphonies, a piano and a clarinet concerto, two ballets, two one-act operas and a number of sonatas, suites, tone poems and a string quartet.

Written in celebration of a black community on the outskirts of Savannah,  Yamekraw: A Negro Rhapsody  (1927) was first performed by Fats Waller in a Carnegie Hall concert organized by William C. Handy.  It seems most likely that Johnson's relative inexperience in orchestral writing prompted him to ask William Grant Still to rework the score in 1928.  Still's version calls for three saxophones, two trumpets and trombone joined by banjo, drums and strings. The solo piano part amply illustrates Johnson's wide reach, with an abundance of stride piano left-hand tenths and extended right-hand excursions, all the while infused with the blues.

Seventy-four minutes of solo piano from the father of Harlem stride piano. Includes eight previously unreleased tracks, including  Yamekraw  and  Jazzamine Concerto.  20 vibrant performances, including Joplin and Handy, a Gershwin hit, and Johnson's own compositions - 1917 Classic rags, a 1923 show tune, newly discovered blues improvisations, and three of his pionering "third stream" symphonic works.

While the name of Gershwin is world famous, that of James P. Johnson is practically unknown, despite the bond of reciprocal friendship and admiration that the two composers had.  Johnson was and remains a giant, but his dark skin and a bashful temperament cost him the shameful oblivion to which he has been confined.  Most of his output is known only to the lovers of jazz, while some of his symphonic and theatrical works appear to have been lost. His rhapsody  Yamekraw  (1927) was his first large-scale work, a sort of answer to the  Rhapsody in Blue:  it is a portrait of the world of the black people made from the inside.  Like Joplin, Johnson describes a group of country people from the South, re-evoking in rapid sequence their moments of feast, of prayer, of labour. The piece was later orchestrated by William Grant Still for piano and jazz orchestra with the addition of strings, or symphony orchestra.  In the 1940s Johnson himself recorded the piano version for Folkways, but the low quality of the recording equipment did not do justice to this rhapsody, which is therefore here documented for the first time in a proper way.  We can now fully appreciate its monumental beauty and power, deriving from Johnson's granitic piano writing - which in passages makes the piano vibrate like an organ - and from the stately efficiency of his themes, each of which became well-known as a piece of its own: some of them, recorded several years later by Louis Jordan, became pre-rhythm'n'blues hits.

His first stroke in 1940 did not prevent him from presenting a concert of his own works at Carnegie Hall in 1944, but a much more serious stroke occurred in 1951, confining him to bed until his death.