Freedom Through Music,Waltzes & Love Songs of Henry Hart

By Alisha Proffitt • Photos By Matt Johnson 

Rachel Grimes has spent a good chunk of her career listening for the voices history tends to leave at the margins. The Louisville-based pianist and composer is known for her years with the chamber-rock group Rachel’s, whose work fluidly moved between post-rock, folk, and contemporary classical composition. In recent years, her focus has been on another kind of composition. Her interests lately involve reconstructing lives through archives and genealogy. Her latest undertaking, focusing on the music of Henry Hart, continues that work with an impressive depth. 

The project’s muse is Henry Hart, a 19th-century Black composer, violinist, and bandleader born in Kentucky in 1839, whose music once heavily impacted the social life of Indianapolis but, in large part, has disappeared from public memory. During the late Gilded Age, “Professor Hart & His Orchestra” was considered indispensable entertainment for the city’s wealthy white families, including those connected to Eli Lilly. The US Library of Congress lists Hart’s song “Good Sweet Ham” as a hit song of 1873. Hart’s dance music was widely published and performed, but after 1877, the publications abruptly stopped. Grimes’ uncovering of Hart’s story began with someone else. 

In 2017, while researching her folk opera The Way Forth, she was studying her ancestor Elizabeth Callaway as a possible historical voice for the work. Instead, she found herself drawn to Dolly, an enslaved woman brought to Kentucky in 1775 by Colonel Richard Callaway as part of the same expedition traveling with Daniel Boone and the Transylvania Company. “I pivoted my research focus to Dolly,” Grimes says. “She was enslaved to the Callaway family and helped to raise their children.” 

She wrote songs around Dolly’s life and continued researching her family long after the opera premiered. This all led her to Dolly’s son, Frederick Hart, and eventually to Henry Hart. A death certificate listed Frederick and Judy Hart as Henry’s parents, and after extensive genealogical work, Grimes confirmed that Henry’s father was the same Frederick Hart who was the first child born at Fort Boonesborough in November 1775. 

The discovery linked Hart’s music to a much larger Kentucky story of enslavement, freedom, and artistic inheritance. “There is always more to learn about our collective history,” Grimes says. “I felt deeply compelled to share what I was learning about this ground-breaking family and their experiences in Kentucky’s story.” That impulse became Waltzes & Love Songs of Henry Hart, an album of newly arranged works, along with new sheet music editions of eight of Hart’s compositions and the first commercial recordings ever made of his music. 

Hart’s disappearance from the canon, Grimes notes, is a reflection of both politics and technology. As Jim Crow laws took hold during the late Reconstruction era, publication of his compositions halted. His family moved from Evansville to Indianapolis in 1879, and his later years focused on live performance rather than publication. Then came sound recording. “The arrival of audio recordings in the early twentieth century captured national attention and diminished the decades-old practice of playing sheet music at home,” she says. “Suddenly, the music could be replicated in your living room, while you lounged in a chair.” 

For Grimes, restoring Hart’s work is archival recovery, yes. But it’s also part of a larger cultural reckoning, especially as the United States approaches its 250th anniversary. “Black artists and creators have been central to the development of American musical forms and styles,” she says. “My hope is that people will enjoy Hart’s lively dance music and charming songs and broaden their understanding of our continually evolving American cultural heritage.” 

Her arrangements share that same commitment to context. Rather than treating Hart’s work as a historical artifact to be preserved under glass, she approached it as performance music meant to live in the present.

Hart was a violinist who occasionally played cornet and led dances such as the quadrille, a precursor to the square dance. His wife, Sarah, was a pianist, and their daughters were trained on piano, viola, cello, harp, xylophone, and drums. In later years, Hart often performed with his daughters at Indiana summer resorts, including Lake Wawasee and West Baden. Grimes chose violin, cello, and piano for her chamber arrangements to honor that family ensemble. 

That sense of continuity expands in her collaboration with the Louisville Youth Orchestra, where young musicians are now performing orchestral versions of Hart’s work. “Working with the Louisville Youth Orchestra to create custom orchestra arrangements for their spring concert has been an absolute pleasure,” she says. As she worked on those orchestrations, she found herself imagining Hart’s own response. “I would laugh and think what fun Henry might have had with these songs on such a large scale.” 

With a full orchestra, Hart’s waltzes take on a new dimension. Pizzicato strings behind the dance pulse, low brass creating the “oom-pa-pa” rhythm, percussion expanding that energy, and a final coda that can become, in her words, “huge and celebratory.”

Grimes began playing piano before she was a year old, sitting in her father’s lap. Her grandmother kept two pianos in the living room, and music-making was a part of her family dynamic. Later, she played with her brother Edward in Rachel’s, making the idea of the family band feel familiar long before she ever encountered the Hart family archive. That history helps explain in part why Henry Hart resonates so strongly with Grimes.

Hart’s story is not just one of a lost repertoire. It is about freedom through music. Hart was born enslaved; this was wrongfully imposed upon him and countless others. Because of the determination of his parents, freedom was secured for their family, allowing him access to music education, entrepreneurship, and the ability to support his own children through performance. 

That story feels especially urgent now. “We are living through an upheaval of moral and civic order in America,” Grimes says. Protecting cultural history is inseparable from defending civil rights and democratic memory. Revisiting Hart’s work means preserving both the music and the conditions that made it possible. When audiences encounter the music of Henry Hart, she hopes they leave with both the pleasure of the compositions and the weight of that history. 

“So many people did not get the same chance at freedom,” she says, “and we will never know how their lives could have flourished if not for the oppression forced upon them.” 

Waltzes & Love Songs of Henry Hart is available on Grimes’s Bandcamp, attached to the QR code below, with a special live performance on Friday, May 29th, by Rachel Grimes and Ensemble at The First Presbyterian Church in Frankfort. 

To follow and learn more about Rachel’s work, visit: www.rachelgrimespiano.com