Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912) was a British classical composer who is best known for his composition Hiawatha's Wedding Feast. Coleridge-Taylor's father was African and his mother British. He was first trained as a violin student with a local musician in England, which led to his enrolment in the Royal College of Music in 1890. Instead of continuing his studies in violin, however, Coleridge-Taylor focused on composition, in which subject he was mentored by Charles Villiers Stanford. The two works for which Coleridge-Taylor is best known are Hiawatha's Wedding Feast and Twenty-Four Negro Melodies. The former work is based on the poem "Song of Hiawatha" by the American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The latter work was inspired by performances of the Fisk Jubliee Singers, a black college choral group who sang traditional songs of Africans and black Americans. Although Coleridge-Taylor died young, at the age of thirty-seven, he left a large number of musical compositions both vocal and instrumental. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.