Voice of Freedom

JEROME KERN AND OSCAR HAMMERSTEIN insisted that they wrote “Old Man River” with Paul Robeson in mind, which is no surprise given the way the song luxuriates in a bass-singer’s range. They began work on it in 1925; it would hit the stage two years later. Robeson’s first public performance as a singer took place in Boston in 1924, and he sang again a few months later at the Provincetown Playhouse in Greenwich Village. The songwriters either discovered him fairly quickly, or got to know his voice by way of the many private recitals Robeson had been giving  during the preceding years.

His father was a former slave who became a Presbyterian minister; his mother a mixed-race Quaker who died when the boy was six. Robeson attended Rutgers College (as it then was known), graduating in 1919 as a football star and class valedictorian. He earned a law degree from Columbia University three years later and was admitted to the bar – but by that time was being sidetracked by music and theater.

He had made his professional stage debut in 1924 in Eugene O’Neill’s “All God’s Chillun Got Wings” at the Provincetown, where a scene of him kissing the hand of a white woman created enough of a scandal to make the papers. He then starred in a revival of O’Neill’s “The Emperor Jones,” the success of which landed Robeson his first movie role (Oscar Micheaux’s “Body and Soul”) and a recording contract.

The 14 CDs in this collection offer 287 songs recorded between 1925 and 1958, although there’s an eleven-year gap after 1947 because Robeson was too much of a political hot potato by then to be welcomed by the labels represented here. His repertory was comparatively small, and wisely so: Although his vocal quality was astonishingly warm and unique, he lacked the training for operatic roles, and he knew it. He added few art songs to his repertory, and stayed away from the opera stage.

What we have is a plethora of spirituals, songs that were with him from his earliest performing days, while attending Rutgers University. Before graduating with honors in 1918, he was a champion athlete and orator as well as singer, already facing down discrimination with a dignity he would maintain (to varying degrees) throughout his life. As his girlfriend at the time recalled, when, at a house party, Robeson was asked to sing, “he made no excuse, set no limitations, and sang everything from the Sorrow Songs to love songs.”

It was W.E.B. DuBois who coined the name “Sorrow Songs” for what we now term spirituals, and Robeson’s enthusiasm for them helped open the genre to a much larger, whites-included audience. There was resistance. “The cultured, well-educated Negro in many incidents asked us not to sing the spirituals in audiences in which there would be white people,” recalled an accompanist at the time, fearing that such songs “brought us down (to the level of) the slave people” – thus encouraging whites to assume that this was the limit of a Black singer’s ability.

But Robeson strongly believed in the importance of these songs, and they always dominated his concert performances and recording sessions. The first of those sessions took place in July 1925, for Victor, and the five songs that start this collection, all performed with Robeson’s longtime pianist and arranger, Lawrence Brown, will be revisited over the years. Thus, you’ll find six different recordings of “Water Boy,” three of “Bye and Bye” and “Joshua Fit de Battle ob Jericho,” and “Were You There” and “Steal Away” would be recorded twice.

CD 1 also gives us the earliest version of his most-recorded song, “Ol’ Man River.” Although Robeson turned down the original Broadway production, he performed with the subsequent London cast, toured with the show, and starred in the 1936 film (for which Kern and Hammerstein wrote “Ah Still Suits Me” to give his character more of a showcase, and which you’ll find in this set in two versions).

This set includes seven different Robeson recordings of “Ol’ Man River,” spanning the years 1928 to 1958. The song undergoes fascinating transformations along the way, reflecting both Robeson’s sharpening political stance and a more slowly evolving sense of social decency.

His earliest recording was made with Paul Whiteman and His Orchestra, and, befitting the Whiteman approach in that era, it was a lavish production. Solo banjo leads into a quote from Dvořák’s “New World Symphony,” then Robeson launches right into the refrain, as originally written. He sits out the (mostly) instrumental verse that follows, and shares a refrain reprise with a chorus.

A few months later, Robeson recorded the song in London while performing the show there. He leans into it more, going from a truncated verse into a exhilarating version of the refrain that betrays some strain on his voice, no doubt the result of his stage schedule. Hammerstein changed the verse since the show’s opening, and Robeson sings the revised version, which begins “Dere’s an old man called the Mississippi, / Dat’s the old man that I’d like to be.” (And, yes, he sings this in dialect, as he sings a tremendous amount of the material, especially the spirituals, in this set. The arguments that could be made for and against this practice require, as with so much cultural controversy, an awareness of the historical context. I’ll leave it at that. We’ve got a far more controversial place to go right now.)

Robeson as Othello, with José Ferrer as Iago,
Theatre Guild production, Broadway, 1943/44

Two years later, he entered the studio with Ray Noble’s Orchestra, a pick-up band that became popular backing Al Bowlly. This is his only “Ol’ Man River” recording in which he sings the first version of Hammerstein’s verse, which begins “Niggers all work on the Mississippi.” Why Robeson chose this after having already recorded the less-offensive version remains a mystery. But the progression of his recordings of this song gets stranger still: In 1932, with Victor Young and His Orchestra, he sings “There’s an old man called the Mississippi” for the opening of the verse; four years later, recording again in London, he sings “Darkies all work on the Mississippi.”

We don’t hear the song significantly change until Robeson’s 1947 recording with the Columbia Concert Orchestra. By this point, realizing that he was inextricably bound to the song, he made some changes of his own. Where the original runs “I gets weary / And sick of tryin’; / I’m tired of livin’ / And scared of dyin’,” Robeson changed it to “But I keeps laughin’ / Instead of cyrin’; /
I must keep fightin’ / Until I’m dyin’.”  Then he went even further. On later recordings you’ll hear “You show a little grit / And you land in jail” take the place of “You get a little drunk / And you land in jail.” This would remain the way in which Robeson performed and recorded the song thereafter, not coincidentally coinciding with the worsening of his relations with American pundits and intelligence agencies.

Until then, his popularity with concert audiences only soared, and this set proves why. His was an unmistakable voice, a voice like no other, deep and resonant and unexpectedly friendly. The warmth that was said to permeate his personality comes through so that even the unhappiest of the spirituals has a sense of light at the ending. There’s also a nobility in his voice, an authority that helped legitimize songs that white people had by and large ignored.

But the course of Robeson’s exploration of repertory was by no means smooth. It was, in fact, a minefield. In 1931, Kate Smith had a hit with “That’s Why Darkies Were Born,” but would be punished for it nearly 90 years later when baseball teams stopped playing her patriotic recordings and one team even went so far as to destroy a statue of her. That same year, Louis Armstrong recorded “When It’s Sleepy Time down South,” the nostalgia of which is tempered by egregious racial stereotypes. Nevertheless, it became Armstrong theme song, which he went on to record nearly a hundred times. When it inspired protests in the 1950s, he altered some of the worst of the lyrics.

Robeson recorded both of those songs in 1931, apparently untroubled by their objectionable qualities – although, like “De Li'l Piccaninny's Gone to Sleep” (1928), “Mammy's Little Kinky-Headed Boy,” and “Picaninny Slumber Song” (both 1934), he never recorded it again. But his one recording of Stephen Foster’s “Old Black Joe,” from 1930, changes the title phrase to “Poor Old Joe,” showing some degree of self-consciousness. Yet the lyrics to the spirituals persisted in his performing and recording repertory, use of dialect intact, which suggests that Robeson recognized the verbiage in those songs as a patois, a language with its own rules and heritage that deserves study, not derision. It also could be argued that the battles needed to be fought back then were greater than language issues, that the fact of dignifying these songs with superior recordings by an acclaimed performer was revolutionary enough. Robeson himself didn’t comment on the issue. He cultivated a pleasant, accepting public persona,

Although this CD collection presents Robeson’s recordings in roughly chronological order, the first disc also includes his 1940 mini-epic “Ballad for Americans,” a four-sided one-off for RCA Victor. Earl Robinson, who composed it with lyricist John La Touche, mixed patriotism with a progressive philosophy during his long songwriting and performing career. His “Joe Hill,” which Robeson also recorded (three versions are in this set), remains a labor-movement anthem. “The House I Live In,” also recorded here, became the centerpiece of a short Frank Sinatra film in 1942, just before Robinson was blacklisted. Robeson also would discover that talent and patriotism weren’t enough to save you from misguided Congressional scrutiny and career damage.

Seven of the discs in this collection – half of the set – were made for HMV, recorded in London, where Robeson found a greater recognition of his abilities. The seven discs were issued as a set by EMI in 2008, and are exactly replicated here.

We find Robeson beginning to veer away from spirituals, with such varied fare as “St. Louis Blues” (proving he was not comfortable as a blues singer), “Lazy Bones, “Blue Prelude,” and the odious “Little Man, You've Had a Busy Day.” We’re better served by the sentimentality of his versions of the evergreen “Trees” and the improbable “Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes.” “In My Solitude,” benefits from the art-song treatment he gives it, and if his “Gloomy Sunday” doesn’t touch the searing agony of Billie Holiday’s version, that’s only because no other singer could touch her at that.
Robeson was offered a role in “Porgy,” and the subsequent opera “Porgy and Bess.” He would have been superb had he accepted it, but we are left with his recordings of “It Take a Long Pull to Get There,” “It Ain't Necessarily So,” “A Woman is a Sometime Thing,” and, of course, “Summertime” as what-might-have-beens.

Civil Rights Congress demonstration
outside the White House, Washington D.C.,
August 5, 1948

Also covered in the HMV period are songs from his movies, although the songs are usually as lousy as the movies were. Once we get past “Show Boat,” there are numbers from “The Song of Freedom,” “Jericho,” “Sanders of the River,” “King Solomon's Mines,” “Big Fella,” and then the
best of them, “The Proud Valley.”

Here, too, is the Hebridean folksong “An Eriskay Love Lilt,” “Encantadora Maria,” from Mexico, and the 18th-century Welsh song “David of the White Rock” (“Dafydd y Garreg Wen.”) “Song of the Volga Boatmen,” entered his repertory in the late 1930s, a time during which Robeson plunged into the study of other languages and became particularly fluent in Russian. He performed many times throughout that country, lauding the equality he witnessed, going so far as to enroll his son in a Moscow school for a few years. The admiration persisted through World War II even as others with whom he was politically aligned fell away. He was the only American in a group of seven named to receive the (ironically named, as it turned out) 1952 Stalin Peace Prize. And even when Khrushchev revealed, in 1956, the extent of Stalin’s murderous brutality, Robeson responded only with silence.

Discs 9 and 10 comprise his recordings for Columbia Masterworks, made from 1942 to 1947. There’s a solid repertory of spirituals revisited here, alongside the more experimental “King Joe,” a collaboration with Count Basie saluting Joe Louis, but one of the weaker items in this collection.

Ivan Dzerzhinsky’s 1935 opera “Quiet Flows the Don” was based on an acclaimed Russian novel in four volumes, published between 1928 and 1940. Robeson recorded two of its songs: “From Border to Border” and “Oh, How Proud Our Quiet Don,” making explicitly political statements in so doing, and collecting those and six other songs in the 1943 collection “Songs of Free Men.” They’re all here, still powerful: “The Purest Kind of a Guy” by Marc Blitzstein; “Joe Hill;” the German concentration-camp song “Moorsoldate” (“The Peat-Bog Soldiers”); “The Four Insurgent Generals,” arranged by Hanns Eisler; and two tributes to Russia: “Song of the Motherland” (“Native Land”) and “Song of the Plains.”

During ten recording sessions in August and September 1944, Robeson recorded much of the Broadway production of “Othello” he was performing with Uta Hagen and José Ferrer. The 33 original discs were re-mastered for this collection, giving us eleven scenes that total about two hours and twenty minutes of the show.

It’s a vital souvenir of a landmark event, the first time an African-American actor portrayed Shakespeare’s Moor on the American stage. Robeson had played the role in London in 1930, sparking the idea of a U.S. production. It became – and remains – the most successful run of a Shakespeare play on Broadway, notching 296 shows before the cast traveled on an eight-month cross-country tour, playing only in non-segregated theaters (which wiped out the South).

The recordings haven’t enjoyed a legitimate re-release until now and, even without audience reaction, it’s a powerful document of a challenging show.

After 1947, Robeson’s recording contract was not renewed, and as manufactured publicity increased the political attacks on the singer, his concert appearances dried up. He performed at the notorious Peekskill concerts in 1949, where thugs from the VFW and NY State Police were among those who beat up attendees and smashed them and their cars with rocks. (Pete Seeger, also a performer there, used some of the stones that were hurled at him in the foundation of the house he built in Beacon.)

Robeson’s passport was revoked by the U.S. government in 1950, with the comment that “his frequent criticism of the treatment of blacks in the United States should not be aired in foreign countries.” Prevented from traveling abroad to perform, he discovered that he also wouldn’t be allowed to cross into Canada, across a border that didn’t require a passport for passage. Ever the creative performer, he arranged to give a concert in 1952 at Peace Arch Park in Blaine, Washington, on the border south of Vancouver. It attracted about 40,000 people, and concerts there were repeated each of the subsequent three years.

But Robeson’s advocacy on behalf of the Soviet Union was more aggressively turned against him. He was summoned in 1956 to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, resulting in a fractious back-and-forth with HUAC counsel Richard Arens, as Robeson refused to answer any of the leading questions even as he eloquently spoke on behalf of the previously enslaved. Still, these events were taking its toll. Disillusionment in the wake of the Stalin revelations exacerbated Robeson’s depression, which was worsened still more after prostate surgery.

His passport was returned in 1958, following a Supreme Court ruling (in Kent v. Dulles) that the such a denial of a passport was a violation of constitutionally protected liberty. Two weeks before that decision, Robeson performed at Mother African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church on West 137th Street in Manhattan, where his brother Benjamin was pastor. Two months after reclaiming his passport, Robeson was performing in London at the Royal Albert Hall. Both of those concerts were recorded and get their first complete release, re-mastered, in this collection.

What makes them particularly special is the sense of rapport you hear between Robeson and his audiences. His programs for both concerts are similar insofar as they’re a mix of spirituals, folksongs, and politically aware numbers, but they also explore, through music, the commonality of seemingly disparate cultures. During the first concert, after following a Moravian hymn with traditional songs from Scotland and China, he offers a nine-minute disquisition on the similarities of song styles he discovered while exploring language and music. He follows an “Othello” soliloquy (“Soft You, a Word or Two Before You Go”) with a song from the Spanish Civil War, “The Four Insurgent Generals,” and a political parallel lurks beneath.

There’s a distinct weariness in his voice by the time he gets to London, but the program itself feels not at all dispirited. Again, a range of cultures gets its due, from the traditional French song “L'amour de moi” to Mussorgsky’s “The Orphan Girl,” to “A Chassidic Chant,” “much like the sermons in a Negro church.” And then it’s back home, so to speak, with “Didn't My Lord Deliver Daniel?,” “Ezekiel Saw de Wheel,” “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” and more in that vein. Unusually, and inspiringly, after he seems to conclude the concert with “Joe Hill” and “Ol’ Man River,” he finishes with a poem: “Let the Rail Splitter Awake,” by Pablo Neruda. It’s a plea for peace. It remains compelling and necessary today.

The CD set is accompanied by an LP-sized 160-page book, lavishly illustrated, with a long essay by Robeson scholar Shana L. Redmond and an evocative note from the singer’s granddaughter, Susan Robeson. There’s a complete discography for the material here, as well as information about Robeson’s work on stage and screen. As was standard practice during America’s blacklisting era of the 1950s, Robeson’s name was systematically erased from record books. It has since been returned, of course. Excellent books have been written – the biography by Martin Bauml Duberman is essential – and Criterion has separately issued both “Show Boat” and an eight-movie set offering an expansive overview of his work in an unkind medium. But this CD set is the finest tribute of them all, letting Robeson come to life again through the talent that brought him the most fame – his unmatchable voice and the unswerving dignity behind it.