Paul Robeson: The Complete EMI Sessions, 1928-1939 = 170 Songs – Paul Robeson, bass-baritone/Lawrence Brown, piano and vocals/Elisabeth Welch, vocal (It Still Suits Me)/Ruthland Clapham, piano/Orchestras conducted by Ray Noble/Walter Goehr/Carroll Gibbons/Herman Fink/Ronnie Munro/Clifford Greenwood/Muir Matheson/Jack Hylton/Percival Mackey/Eric Ansell/Van Phillips/Ernest Irving/Herbert Dawson
EMI (7CDs) 2 15586-2, 63:38; 63:50; 76:09; 76:53; 63:39; 68:23; 64:52 *****:
Shuffle Along (1921) was the first all-black musical. . . .It
revolutionized the whole Broadway musical. Nobody [after]
dared produce a musical that didn’t have syncopation in it or
have some jazz dancing.
Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake found [themselves] with all
these bandanna-type, handkerchief kind of costumes. So we
had to write a number for it. . . .Sissle was in Boston and I
was in New York. One of the chorus girls was
Josephine Baker. Paul Robeson was in the quartet. The Harmony
Kings. . . .Paul said, “I’ve never been on a stage.” I said, “Listen,
you don’t have to do anything but sing.”
— Eubie Blake, quoted in The Spectator (Turkel)
Paul Robeson (1898-1976) accomplished a great deal more than the epithet “singer” might convey: athlete, scholar, polyglot, actor, lawyer, activist, humanist, pedagogue, and martyr, he embodied a cosmos of heroic experience, both for the voice of Afro-Americans and for Americans in general. His deep bass-baritone embodies Everyman, the musical, expressive possibilities in each of us. In Robeson, the currents of Art and Politics inevitably collide, since for Robeson slavery of the mind–Blake’s “mind forg’d manacles”–offends the artist and the freedom-loving individual equally. This huge collation of his work for EMI at Abbey Road Studio contains plantation songs, spirituals, British Classics, art songs, popular folk tunes and ballads, and even spoken renditions of William Blake’s poem, “The Little Black Boy” (rec. 1939) and Langston Hughes’ “The Minstrel Man” (1937). Robeson provided the “missing link” from the vocalism of American slavery to the new optimism of the Harlem Renaissance and beyond, into the political militancy of post-WW II, civil-rights modernism. And all of this repertory, politically correct and inept, came from Robeson without apology, his only “modification” coming in his alteration–beyond the scope of this set–in the lyrics of Kern’s “Old Man River,” in which Robeson insisted that “I must keep fightin’ until I’m dyin,’” in lieu of its original resignation to fatigue and fear.
How might Robeson “justify” or “explain” his commitment to Plantation songs, with their inevitable “N” word, which he himself vilified and fought with the indomitable persistence of a modern crusader, much to the chagrin and enmity of the press – black and white? Likely, the humanity that lies under the surface of skin color would prove his banner: for not a single song extols anything less than compassion to family, to youth, to children, to Nature, to love, to the joy of life. The fifth of the series contains excerpts from The Song of Freedom, Jericho, King Solomon’s Mines, and Big Fella, films banned during the conservative years of television of the 1950s and 1960s, under the regime of Senator McCarthy, John Foster Dulles, and the HUAC mentality. “I was your emperor, and now you hate me,” Robeson laments in Ansell’s song from Song of Freedom, recorded 1936. In those films, Robeson insisted on roles that expressed black dignity and leadership; and if injustice, ingratitude, or exploitation existed, it did not obtain from an African source. Robeson’s favorite film The Proud Valley, set in the beloved Welsh mining towns, expressed perfectly his values of social justice and equality, and of the innate dignity of the working man. Every Negro spiritual proclaims a living faith, a belief in miracles, the possibility of salvation, redemption, and forgiveness, especially for the fallen dream, the original, American Dream which Robeson never abandoned.
It was in 1925, the apocryphal story goes, that Paul Robeson and Lawrence Brown happened outside of Carnegie Hall and noted the program of music by Ernest Bloch. In a note in the printed booklet, Bloch had written, “In my music, I have tried to express the spirit of my people.” Robeson and Brown felt the shock of recognition, that inspiration to make concert programs equally devoted to black folk music, spirituals, slave songs, and traditional art songs. The “classical” tributary of the Harlem Renaissance had found its voice. So Discs 6 and 7 juxtapose Mussorgsky and “Lay down late,” Dvorak and “Loch Lomond,” Gretchaninov and “Dear old southland,” Duke Ellington and Hubert Parry. Has anyone ever suggested that Sinatra, Ol’ Blue Eyes himself, may have learned his respect for a song’s articulated diction from a Robeson delivery? Listen to the parlando style of “You didn’t oughta do such things” by Ansell. The gentle giant consistently advises Humanity to be kinder to itself. Pardon me, if I hear the voice of Prometheus, knowing full well his inexorable fate for having cherished humanity beyond the will of the distant, cruel, and selfish gods. What is that line from Shaw’s Saint Joan: “O earth, when will you be ready to receive thy saints?” Like Zola, Robeson was a moment in the conscience of Man.
— Gary Lemco
