Thomas Putnam Fenner was an American music educator, choral conductor, voice teacher, and collector and arranger of African American folk songs. A multi-instrumentalist and tenor, Fenner was a military band musician during the American Civil War in the Union Army. After the war, he co-founded the Providence Academy and Musical Institute in Rhode Island in 1859 where he taught into the early 1870s. In June 1872 he was hired by former Union Army general and educator Samuel C. Armstrong as the first director of the music program at Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute (now Hampton University), a college for African Americans established in 1868.
