Ol’ Man River – Show Boat by Paul Robeson

Spirituals at one time were only sung inside a church. However, George L. White, the Treasurer of Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, had a financial hole to fill and decided that all people “might be interested in the poignant music of his race.” Therefore, he formed a choral group of 12 students (the “Jubilee Singers”) and started to tour in October 1871. While it took a while for the concerts to catch on, once they did, the result was historic. “At the Gilmore Music Festival in Boston in 1872, an audience of some 20,000 rose to its feet and shouted: ‘Jubilee Forever!’ When the Jubilee Singers returned to Fisk University in 1878, they returned with over $150,000 in cash.”

For a long period of time, the singing of spirituals was once again confined to the church. Then, in the 1920’s spirituals returned to the concert hall, thanks to Paul Robeson, a 1919 graduation of Rutgers and only the third African American to attend the school. While at Rutgers, he competed in four sports, earned All-American honors, was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and Cap and Skull and was named by his class as valedictorian. Because he was a gifted performer, he turned to the stage and the concert hall. In 1925 and 1926 he collaborated with a gifted accompanist, Lawrence Brown, and presented critically acclaimed concerts of African-American folk songs and spirituals in New York. It is likely that Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II attended a concert by Robeson and Brown on November 14, 1926 and were so impressed by Robeson that they decided to create a hybrid of a spiritual and a Broadway song for their new musical, Show Boat. The song they created was “Ol’ Man River.” This song and this show changed the Broadway musical forever, because it started to ask the key questions about why we are alive and what our purpose on earth might be. Here is a video clip of Paul Robeson, singing “Ol’ Man River” in the 1936 movie version of Show Boat.