1971 Hairston
Jacqueline Butler Hairston was born in Charlotte North Carolina to George Butler, Sr. and his wife Ethel. She loved music from her early childhood she recalls in the Charlotte Observer April 8, 2007 article “Charlotte Native No Longer `Unsung' - Composer, Musical Coach Wins Jefferson Award For Public Service.” She told that she was a late starter at age 8; she’d bang away on an imaginary piano at the kitchen table until her parents decided they’d better buy the girl a real piano. By the age of twelve she was music minister at Charlotte's Gethsemane AME Zion Church. “The choir director didn’t know music, so she counted on me to teach the notes and arrangements to the choir,” Hairston said.
Her mother spent the summers during Hairston’s high school years working on master’s in education at Columbia University and Hairston took classes at The Juilliard School of Music.
After graduating at the top of her class in 1950 from West Charlotte High School she then earned a music degree at Howard University and a master's degree from Columbia. She returned to Charlotte and taught music in Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools and eventually Johnson C. Smith University.
It was during her time at Johnson C. Smith University that the Charlotte Junior Woman’s Club nominated her for the WBT’s Charlotte Woman of the Year award for her “unselfish creative contributions to her fellowman and the community at large.”
Harrison has made her home in California since 1973 actively teaching composing and performing. While training classical music it is her work in the realm of the Negro spirituals that she is known for most Her arrangement, You (and I) Can Tell the World, was premiered by the mezzo-soprano, Denyce Graves, and the Orlando Opera Chorus and Orchestra in 1998.
Her works have also been recorded by The London Symphony Orchestra and Andre Kostelanetz Orchestra. She was commissioned by renowned soprano Kathleen Battle and master guitarist Christopher Parkening for their 1996 Christmas CD titled Angels’ Glory. Battle preformed two of Hairston’s spiritual arrangements at Carnegie Hall in 1993. The Negro Spiritual Foundation of Orlando, Florida hosted her as Composer-in Residence in 1998. Other commissions have included Florence Quivar, New York’s Opera Ebony, Shirley Verrett, Madame Grace Bumbry, Benjamin Matthews, William Warfield, Robert Sims and the 1993 March-On-Washington. In 2004, she coached LaToya London for the “American Idol” competition.
She was the 2007 Jefferson Awards Winner in San Francisco for her preservation of Negro Spirituals; in 2006 she received the “LIGHT IN OUR CITY AWARD” from Arts First Oakland and in 2005 the “Living Legends Award” from the Georgia and Nolan Payton Archive of Sacred Music.
She is not the only musician in the family. Her father was a self-taught musician, and mother was a singer. Older brother, George Butler Jr., is a former Columbia Records executive who produced singer Nancy Wilson, jazz musicians Dizzy Gillespie, Herbie Hancock, Wynton and Branford Marsalis and Harry Connick Jr. A cousin by marriage, the late Jester Hairston, wrote popular spirituals such as “Amen” and “Mary’s New Boy.” Hairston was recently commissioned to write a book on his life.