Purnell Steen, a titan of Denver music who was also a leader in the civil rights movement, has died at 84.
Steen attended Denver’s East High School and CU Boulder. He still played regularly with the Five Points Ambassadors band and also performed as Purnell Steen and Le Jazz Machine.
Steen’s is the second major death in Denver's music scene and Black community this year. His cousin, Charlie Burrell, died in June at age 104.
Steen started playing piano when he was just a few years old.
The son of a Pullman porter and a caterer, Steen told KGNU his mother asked the organist at Zion Baptist Church, the oldest African-American Church in the Rocky Mountain region, to start him on the piano.
Steen was also inspired by his cousin Burrell. When Steen was 8, he watched as Burrell desegregated the Denver Symphony.
“I was sitting there with my mother,” Steen recalled at the Colorado Music Hall of Fame in 2017, according to Westword. “I can still hear, 68 years later, people saying, ‘Oh, my God. He’s negro.'”
But it opened a door for Steen.
“Then the deal was sealed. I knew that I wanted a career path in music in some kind of way,” he told NBC in an interview.
Music was not Steen’s only passion.
In college, he lost out on opportunities because of his race. He was told he couldn’t play classical music as a Black man. That helped spur him to get involved in civil rights activism.
He became a youth leader with the NAACP and CORE, and traveled to Washington, D.C., to meet with then-Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. Steen also participated in nonviolent protests in Denver and attended the famed March on Washington.
"With every fiber in my body, I will make sure that freedom for all people is a reality in the United States," Steen told NBC's project "Voices of the Civil Rights Movement."
In recent years, Steen focused closer to home: He told Denverite in 2022 that he thought there should be more landmarks to Black musicians in Denver.
“I wrestled with God, wanting to know why I was put on this Earth, and what my mission on this Earth is, and someone finally said, ‘It’s your gift of music,’” Steen told NBC. He liked how it built bridges.
“I’ve been in places where I couldn’t speak the language but where music brought everybody together as kindred spirits. And you know, when I leave this Earth, I just want to have somebody put on my headstone, ‘Here was a man who loved music and who loved people.’”
