Katherine Davis

Katherine Kennicott Davis wrote Carol of the Drum in 1941; the world came to know it as The Little Drummer Boy. Born in St Joseph, Missouri, she was composing as a teenager, took the Billings Prize at Wellesley College in 1914, and went on to the New England Conservatory and to Nadia Boulanger in Paris. She taught at Concord Academy and the Shady Hill School. Her output of more than six hundred works includes cantatas, children's operettas, sacred songs, keyboard pieces, arrangements and educational collections. She set the Welsh air The Ash Grove as Let All Things Now Living. She died in 1980, leaving her royalties to the music department at Wellesley. Her first piece, Shadow March, dates from her fifteenth year, and after graduating she stayed on at Wellesley as an assistant in the music department, teaching theory and piano. She joined ASCAP in 1941 and held an honorary doctorate from Stetson University in Florida. She wrote until illness stopped her in the winter of 1979 and died at Littleton, Massachusetts, on 20 April 1980, at eighty-seven. She also helped establish the Concord Chorus.