Paul Robeson
remains as well known as an actor and athlete as for his musical
activities, and in general is a "big name" whose music most listeners
have sampled only in bits and pieces. For that reason alone, this
seven-disc compilation of
Robeson's EMI
recordings, made in Britain, would be worth a place in libraries and
collections; it presents music by the great African-American bass not
in bits and pieces but in collections that show the full range of his
activities and capture a whole arc of his career. Missing among the
types of music
Robeson recorded are only
his explicitly leftist workers' anthems, which generally date from
years later than the 1939 cutoff point of this set. Beyond that, the
first thing to strike the listener may be the vast range of music with
which
Robeson was comfortable. He is best known for African-American spirituals and for the artful quasi-spiritual language of
Jerome Kern's
"Ol' Man River" and similar items. But even a quick Internet sampling
of this set will reveal much more. A partial list would include early
African-American musical theater (
Robeson's several versions of
Will Marion Cook's
"Down de Lovers Lane" convey perhaps the best idea yet of what these
shows sounded like in their time); minstrel and "plantation" songs like
Dixie, from both white and black composers (some of them irredeemably
racist by today's standards); pop songs including a glorious set by
Hoagy Carmichael; operetta; folk songs from Russia and elsewhere; parlor-room classics by
Ethelbert Nevin and
Carrie Jacobs Bond; country and western music (which were separate genres at the time); and American and British art songs.
Robeson sounds as natural singing of "England's green and pleasant land" in
Hubert Parry's
Jerusalem (CD 7, track 6) as in a spiritual like Steal Away. The
British origin of the recordings results in a few ridiculous moments,
but
Robeson spent years in Britain
(especially in Wales, whose industrial struggles played a key role in
the development of his activist consciousness), and in general the box
represents the mainstream of
Robeson's
career in the late '20s and 1930s, not one of its tributaries. The
remastering is superb, and the original recordings, with the later ones
supervised by legendary producer
Walter Legge, were impressive enough in their own time. The booklet notes, in English, French, and German, basically present a brief
Robeson
biography with a slight emphasis on the European phases of his career,
but the track list is detailed and informative in itself. A major
historical release that is highly listenable in itself.
