First appearing at the age of eight, playing the violin at a suburban concert, Coleridge-Taylor had an English mother and a West African father, who practised in London as a doctor but, unsuccessful, returned to Sierra Leone without his wife and child. A benefactor sent him to the Royal College of Music, where, very poor and "with a large circular patch on his trousers", he studied under Stanford. Recognition first came with a commission to write an orchestral work for the Three Choirs festival in Gloucester in 1898. as a result of a recommendation from Edward Elgar. This was his Ballade in A minor. He had already started to write Hiawatha's Wedding Feast, and it was performed in the same year establishing his reputation. He very soon decided to turn the work into a trilogy, and added The Death of Minnehaha and Hiawatha's Departure. He later wrote an oratorio The Atonement, a cantata A Tale of Old Japan, other works for orchestra, chamber music, and incidental music for plays. Although he died before reaching full maturity, he provided a new and welcome style for choral societies. The Wedding Feast was at one time the third most popular choral work after Messiah and Elijah, and a programme from 1939 has photographs showing the arena of the Royal Albert Hall filled with Red Indians (in reality, members of the Royal Choral Society and dancers).

Hiawatha was a real person, a Mohawk Indian of about AD 1570. He founded the Iroquois League, substituting a tribunal of justice to settle disputes, instead of war. Longfellow drew his material mainly from the work of Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, a pioneer of American Indian ethno-logy. His poem is believed to be historically correct, with the location identified as by the shores of on Lake Superior

This Programme note, written in June 1993 for The Ascension Choir, Blackheath, was supplied through the Programme Note Bank of Making Music, the National Federation of Music Societies.