their home was a piano, until her parents could afford to purchase a piano for her to play. She began performing at her local church around the age of nine and the following year became the pianist for the church choir. She graduated as valedictorian of her high school class and entered Wiley College in Marshall. She performed with the Wiley Singers from 1931, joined the sorority Alpha Kappa Alpha, and graduated magna cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts degree in May 1933. After her graduation, Towles married Rudolph McNeely, a paper hanger and house painter and they made their home in Kilgore. Towles was hired to teach music at the black high school in 1936 and 1937. She was promoted in 1938, and served as the music director for the Gregg County, Texas Negro schools until 1941. Towles left Texas at the end of the school year in 1941 and moved to Iowa, where she earned her Master of Arts degree in seven and a half months and then earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in nine months at the University of Iowa. She completed her studies in 1943 with a thesis The History of Music Education at Wiley College, becoming only the second person to have obtained a Master of Fine Arts degree at the university and the first African-American to have done so. Towles spoke English, French, German, and Spanish. Concert career (1943–1966) In October 1943, Towles was hired as an assistant professor in the music department of Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. She enrolled in Juilliard to pursue her doctorate, studying under Sascha Gorodnitzki, and was appointed as "artist in residence" at Tennessee State University. She debuted at Tennessee State on October 22, 1947 and the review of Ruth Campbell of The Tennessean compared her performance to that of Arthur Rubinstein, a well-known pianist with an international reputation. Rubinstein offered Towles a free fellowship to study with him at his studio in Hollywood. She spent the summer of 1948 studying with him and took courses at the University of California, Berkeley, while touring to capacity crowds in major cities throughout the South. Taking a leave of absence from Fisk, in 1949 Towles traveled to Paris to study with Marcel Ciampi, a friend of Rubenstein's who taught at the Conservatoire de Paris. She also studied at the American Conservatory at Fountainebleau with Nadia Boulanger and