The first great Broadway drama to integrate its story with its music, Show Boat spawned a steamboat full of hits, including “Make Believe,” “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man” and “Why Do I Love You?” But its enduring anthem was this plaint, sung by a former slave, about the mindless ol’ Mississippi River. Jerome Kern, who practically invented the 20th century pop ballad, provided the churning, majestic melody to Oscar Hammerstein II’s lyrics. Hammerstein, whose later Broadway collaboration with Richard Rodgers would produce America’s midcentury secular liturgy in hymns like “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” often said, “I can’t write a song without hope in it.” “Ol’ Man River” gave the lie to that statement. Essentially the prison dirge of a people whose only crime was their skin color, it turned the Mississippi into a metaphor for the white man’s indifference: “What does he care if the world’s got troubles?/ What does he care if the land ain’t free?”
Jules Bledsoe introduced “Ol’ Man River,” but in a 1929 Broadway revival and in James Whale’s definitive 1936 film version, the song found its ideal singer: Paul Robeson, a Rutgers football star and Columbia-educated lawyer whose charismatic presence would have propelled him to the top of any entertainment medium not hobbled by racism. In Robeson’s powerful bass-baritone voice you can hear not just mourning for the black underclass but also a brilliant man’s anger at being deprived of his fair measure of roles. In the ’50s, blacklisted for his Communist Party membership — and for being so damned uppity — Robeson would alter the words of Hammerstein’s final verse from the despairing “Ah gits weary/ an’ sick of tryin’/ Ah’m tired of livin’/ an’ scared of dyin’ ” to the defiant, hopeful “But I keeps laffin’/ instead of cryin’/ I must keep fightin’/ until I’m dyin.’ “
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