Lilla Belle Pitts was born September 26, 1884 in Aberdeen, Mississippi. As a child, Lilla Belle excelled as a pianist, violinist, and singer. Pitts studied at the Kidd-Key Conservatory (North Texas Female College) in 1905 before moving to the Chicago Conservatory of Music in 1907 where she worked with Birdie Alexander. Between 1910 and 1923, Pitts worked for the Amarillo and Dallas public schools before becoming an educational representative for Columbia Records between 1921 and 1923. Pitts is thought to have established the first orchestra in the Texas panhandle during her tenure in Amarillo.
In 1923, Pitts resigned from Columbia Records and enrolled at Columbia University Teachers College. Here she was first exposed to the progressive education ideas of John Dewey. Pitts left Columbia in 1924 for her first long-term teaching assignment at the Grover Cleveland Junior High School in Elizabeth, New Jersey, where she taught until 1938. Here Pitts developed and experimented with numerous progressive ideas in music education, such as using popular, ethnic, and folk music in the classroom and integrating music with other aspects of the curriculum, primarily history and social studies.
In 1935, Pitts received her bachelors degree from Columbia at the age of 51, and in 1938, she was hired as an assistant professor of music education at Columbia and published her first book, Music Integration in the Junior High School. According to her biographer, Gerald L. Blanchard, Pitts became the most influential music educator in the nation, since teachers from all over the country came to Columbia for workshops and summer sessions. Pitts retired from Columbia in 1954, but remained active as a clinician. During this period, Pitts coauthored the influential textbook series Our Singing World. Pitts was forced by illness to retire from active teaching in 1962. She died in 24 January 1970 in Nashville, Tennessee.
From the guide to the Lilla Belle Pitts Papers, 1928-1961, 1938-1960, (Special Collections in Performing Arts)
