Arlein Ford Straw

Ford was born in New York City, the second daughter of Arnold Josiah Ford and Olive Nurse Ford. Her father was from Barbados, a musician and religious leader known as "Rabbi Ford".^[1][2] After her parents separated in 1924, she lived in Barbados for a few years, then in Harlem, where she played piano with her father and her sister Enid.^[2]

Ford graduated from Wadleigh High School for Girls in 1936, and won a Rachel Herstein Scholarship from the NAACP to attend Hunter College.^[3][4] She graduated from Hunter in 1940,^[5] and earned a master's degree there in 1962; her thesis was a composition, a musical setting of Psalm 139.

During and after college, Ford and her older sister Enid played piano for children's shows called Ella Gordon's "Peter Pan Kiddies".^[6][7][8] She taught music at schools in Queens,^[9] and chaired Negro History and Brotherhood Week observances for the Jamaica branch of the NAACP.^[10] In 1952, her work was performed at the annual meeting of the National Association of Negro Musicians.^[11] She contributed music to a 1958 event organized by composer Margaret Bonds, in tribute to poet Langston Hughes.^[12] She served on the committee to develop Lift Ev'ry Voice, the NAACP's official songbook.^[13] She was a church music director in her later years.^[14]

Straw composed several works, including "Sudan" (1951),^[9] "Lullaby Little One" (1953), with Rena Greenlee Govern,^[15] "Crucifixion" (1957) for three female voices,^[16] "Two Songs of Freedom" (1967), with lyrics by her NAACP colleague Florence V. Lucas,^[17][18] and Bent Twig (1998), a "folk opera" with lyrics by her neighbor, social work professor Helen Roberts Williams.^[14][19] When Bent Twig was performed in Baltimore in 1998, she and other members of her church in Queens took a bus together to attend the performance.^[14]

Arlein Ford married railroad worker Irving Straw in 1940. They had two children, Clyde and Gerald. She died in 2009, at the age of 89, in New York City.