She was born in Galveston, the daughter of famed civil rights leader Norris Wright Cuney, who led the Texas Republican Party during and after the Reconstruction Era, and his wife Adelina (née Dowdie), a schoolteacher.
[4] Essentially part of the second generation after emancipation, Cuney Hare studied at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston and became an accomplished pianist.
Philip Cuney sent his mixed-race sons Joseph and Norris to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, before the war for their education.
[7]: xii When white students learned that Maud Cuney and another African American, Florida L. Des Verney, were living in a campus dormitory, some of them tried to have the young women excluded.
Fearing financial pressure from white southern families, the Conservatory requested that the women find other lodgings, implying that their safety could not be guaranteed.
Her father also refused to move her, criticizing the school for dishonoring "the noble men and women" abolitionists of Massachusetts who had fought against prejudice.
While studying in Boston, Cuney became part of the Charles Street Circle (or West End Set), meeting at the home of Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin.
[9] Du Bois described Maud vividly as "a tall, imperious brunette, with gold-bronze skin, brilliant eyes and coils of black hair.
"[7]: 98 After graduating from the conservatory, Cuney returned to Texas, studying privately with pianist Emil Ludwig[2]: xx in Austin.
She chose to oppose racial prejudice when management of the Austin Opera House demanded that Negroes in the audience coming to her performance must be segregated and seated in the balconies.
For a time, she hid her identity as her husband demanded, compensating by working in the settlement movement at the African Methodist Episcopal Institutional Church of Chicago.
[7]: 105–106 Cuney Hare was politically active, and was among the first women to join the Niagara Movement in 1907, an organization founded against segregation.
[9] Throughout her career as a teacher, performer, and musicologist, Cuney-Hare believed her work contributed to the "racial uplift" of her people.
[6] As a performing pianist and lecturer, Cuney Hare collaborated with William Howard Richardson, a Canadian baritone singer, beginning around 1913.
She traveled to Mexico, Cuba, the Virgin Islands, and Puerto Rico to collect and study folklore and musical traditions.
She writes compellingly of the history of African-American music, from its beginnings in Africa, through the diaspora to the United States and elsewhere, to the development of American traditions of Negro spirituals, and finally the newer forms of blues and jazz.
She disliked ragtime, and distrusted the unstructured nature of Jazz music, preferring the classical traditions in which she had been trained.
The book contains extensive details on the lives and music of Negro musicians both in America and abroad, in voluminous footnotes as well as the main text.
[3] Maud Cuney Hare is buried in an unmarked grave next to her father and mother in Lakeview Cemetery, Galveston, Texas.