10 FROM RADIO DAYS TO MOVIE NIGHTS
Folk songs are the music of basic realities, the spontaneous expression of the people for the people of elemental emotions
— Paul Robeson
Tobacco had smouldering glamour in the 1930s. Virtually, all the major Hollywood film stars, literati and recording artists wielded a cool cigarette as they struck their most iconic poses, with the femme fatale opting for a sleek enamel holder, colour coordinated with her string of pearls, gloves and gown. To smoke was to be sophisticated. The idea that the habit might eventually induce a slow and painful death did not have the currency that it does today.
Aware of the link between cigarette and star status, cigarette brands started to launch their products in a way that encouraged smokers to feel closer to figures in the world of entertainment. Associate the nicotine fix with a honeyed voice rather than yellowed teeth.
Wills, a popular British brand of the 1930s, launched a series of portraits of “Radio Celebrities” printed on cards given away in cigarette packs, which consumers were encouraged to collect and place in an album where each artist had its allocated place complete with a potted biography. With space for 44 cards on 17 pages, the album cost one penny. This product placement appeared innocently juvenile because it bore a close resemblance to similar promotional initiatives in the world of sport, where football players and cricketers were “carded” and given away with anything from magazines to packets of cereal.
As a sign of the overlap between the worlds of mass-market commerce and large-scale public entertainment, the 1935 Wills Radio Celebrities album is an invaluable historical document. The cover features an open-mouthed vocalist in front of a tall bulb microphone, while the inside cover depicts a family of four huddled around a wireless the size of a fridge from which lightning shafts of broadcast crackle fly out, presumably because the virtual presence of the celebrity is immeasurably exciting.
Flick through the pages and behold immaculately turned-out stars whose hair glows in Brylcreemed splendour. Among those in the hall of fame are Ronald Gourley, known for improvising humorous interludes at the piano; George Baker, the baritone from Birkenhead, Harry S. Pepper, composer and BBC producer; Will Hay, “one of the most versatile of entertainers, a character comedian of the first rank, but also an astronomer”; Eve Becke, “the girl with ‘It’ in her voice”; Stanley Holloway, “actor, singer and jester”, Beryl Orde, impressionist.
Several things stand out. A large percentage of the celebrities are from the north of England, reminding us how much that part of the country has contributed to entertainment. Many of those chosen are engaged in popular culture as well as classical music. They remind us that this was a time when some cinemas had orchestras, the most feted of which was that led by organist Reginald Dixon, whose portrait shows a man with a pencil-line Errol Flynn moustache. Above all, the album makes it clear that an appearance on the BBC gave prestige, which was why radio announcers and compères, people with the right accent and gravitas, are also in the album. So while the biography of the monocled J.H Squire, the man who apparently “introduced jazz to England in 1919”, trumpets the fact that he was at one time the musical director of six West End theatres, the final line of his entry is that: “he has broadcast over 300 times.”
Look again at that totemic family leaning towards the wireless, and after thumbing the pages, you gain a strong impression of how they may have regulated their listening to the BBC. They could tune into “light” music, dance music, organ recitals, string quartets, “gramophone interludes”, and to a BBC military band or a BBC orchestra.
So it made perfect sense for W.H. Wills to insert themselves into the fabric of popular culture, just as other brands had done in earlier years. Programmes for the 1922 musical, Shuffle Along, written by ragtime legends Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle (which ran for 504 performances on Broadway), advised patrons to purchase Mild Havana Blend Little Cigars, because “They are short smokes of real cigar quality”. Perfect for a theatre interval. Shuffle, incidentally was a word with a long history in African-American entertainment that reached back to the days of minstrelsy and was part of the range of dances such as the heel and toe, turkey trot, buzzard lope and cakewalk. In everyday speech, as in “Time to shuffle off”, shuffle meant to move off the sidewalk, especially if under the threat of a policeman’s nightstick for the crime of being black.
One might imagine that traces of Zip coonery would not show up on something as supposedly urbane as the Radio Celebrities album of 1935. One would be wrong. The most striking card in the album is that of Scott and Whaley. The former has ebony skin and bright pink lips. He is a “black-face clown”, These were two highly successful African-American entertainers who lived in Britain in the 1930s. Harry Clifford Scott hailed from Cleveland, Ohio and was a tinsmith prior to embarking on a career as a minstrel, while Eddie Peter Whaley was a dentist from Montgomery, Alabama. They arrived in Britain in 1909 to work in vaudeville and debuted on the BBC in 1926 with the show Kentucky Minstrels. In this, Whaley played the golf-loving character, Cuthbert, and Scott the pianist, Pussyfoot. Little documentation of the lives of Scott and Whaley survives, but it is known that the latter moved to Brighton in the late 1930s, and moved into a house next door to the great stand-up comic, Max Miller.
Discomfiting as the thought of a minstrel show being broadcast on the BBC in the 1930s is, the success that Scott and Whaley enjoyed points to the mixed fortunes of Black performers on the road to more enlightened and empowering creative possibilities. For if blackface clownery persisted, the Radio Celebrities album also tells another story. One of the other Black performers given the honour of a Wills cigarette card was, perhaps inevitably, Paul Robeson. If Robeson’s performance in Kern and Hammerstein’s Showboat at the Theatre Royal in 1928 had made him a household name, then his role in the film version in 1936 cemented his position in the show business firmament. Directed by James Whale1, the film was a commercial and critical success and is still considered to be one of the most faithful and powerful stage-to-screen adaptations. Joining a cast that included Oscar nominee Irene Dunne, vaudeville stalwart Charles Winninger, as well as Hattie McDaniel2, the first African-American to win an Academy award, Robeson became indelibly associated with the role of Joe, such was the power of his performance. His rendition of his signature tune, “Ol’ Man River”, was given an additional edge by Whale’s direction. This cleverly montaged scene shows the plight of “darkies” consigned to a life of planting cotton and longing to cross the Jordan.
Film, as a conjunction of sound and image, was a natural fit for Black music given the charisma of African-American performers such as Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith, all of whom appeared on screen, in performances that both consolidated their status as artists and located them in technological modernity. In fact, the coincidence of jazz and talkies as new forms of expression is one of the great subplots of modern art. Parallels between these forms in the use of tempo, editing-arranging techniques and narrative make a fascinating study, as does the role that jazz played in defining the film soundtrack.
The capture of Black musicians on film goes back to the beginnings of cinema, and Britain was a significant rendezvous for African-American players and European filmmakers. In 1896, French cinema pioneers, the Lumière Brothers, shot historic footage of black minstrels in Leicester Square in London. Lasting just 45 seconds The Wandering Negro Minstrels is one of the earliest cinematic records of black musicians in action, dancing, playing banjos, “tambo and bones”.3 The historical value of the footage is enormous. These players provided an echo of the previous century when the fiddler Black Billy Waters played for passers-by in nearby Covent Garden.
The tragedy is the survival in film of doggedly enduring racist stereotypes. Almost four decades on from the Lumière brothers’ film, minstrels were still to be found shucking and jiving on celluloid. After their success on BBC radio with the series Kentucky Minstrels, the British-based African-American duo of Scott and Whaley transferred the series to film in 1934. It was anything but a progressive presentation of Blacks on screen as the lead characters, Pussyfoot and Cuthbert, guffawed their way through a series of misadventures with their landlady and Massa Johnson.
This is why Showboat is such an important film. It came just two years after Scott and Whaley’s movie but, as the discussions above indicate, it is very different in tone. Although Robeson was not the star per se, he was one of the heavyweights of the cast, worthy of having his name on promotional posters above those of Kern and Hammerstein. He may have had to sing about “darkies” on the river but he did not act like one on screen.
His presence as Joe in the film version of Showboat is magnetic, from the nonchalance with which he leans back on the harbour jetty to the backbreaking strain of his lifting of bales while the white folks play. But the peak of Robeson’s rendition of “Ol’ Man River” is the chorus where his voice harmonizes with those of others as he is joined by dozens of other workers. We see a Black American song as an expression of community solidarity, for Robeson is not singing to, but with his fellow sufferers. Even though Showboat’s story centres on romantic entanglements amongst well-to-do white folk, the black characters are nonetheless afforded a framework for their artistic performance that carries political weight.
By this point, Robeson had made Britain his home, because it offered him liberal values that were not to be found in America. “My reasons were quite the same as those which over the years have brought millions of Negroes out of the Deep South to settle in other parts of the country. It must be said, however, that for me London was infinitely better than Chicago has been for Negroes from Mississippi.”4 Robeson was still officially resident in Britain when he made Showboat and given his extensive travelling in Europe he really had the status of an international Black man who exercised the right to unrestricted travel. In this respect, Robeson was a kindred spirit to the Harlem Renaissance writer, Langston Hughes, who also wandered, and wondered as he did so, extensively in Europe.5
Four years after the success of Showboat, Robeson made a film that went much further in bringing dignity to the image of the Negro at the same time as championing the cause of the working man across the racial divide. It is a film that makes a case for the brotherhood of man without succumbing to queasy sentimentality. Set in Robeson’s beloved Wales and produced by Ealing studios, Pen Tennyson’s 1940 feature The Proud Valley6 dramatized the lives of members of a small mining village, the pride of which is a male voice choir.
Robeson plays the part of David Goliath, an African-American who arrives seeking work and joins the choir, run by Parry (Simon Lack). While the subplot of a national singing competition gives Robeson and fellow cast members a chance to display their fine voices, the central theme of the film is the unbreakable spirit of a tightly-knit community in the face of tragedy, and the need for central government to recognize that industry must be run for people rather than profit.
Robeson presents an empowering image of the black man. Goliath has talent and integrity but above all he has the intelligence to understand what the mine and the choir mean to people in this Welsh village, and how that resonates with his own background as an itinerant Negro worker in search of stability.
The film also had significant resonances for Black Welsh history. Goliath was a ship’s stoker, one of the primary jobs done by colonial seamen from Africa and the West Indies, and if there was an authenticity in his portrayal, then it was because Robeson had engaged personally with the subject matter. “I also came to know another class of Africans – the seamen in the ports of London, Liverpool and Cardiff. They too had their organizations, and had much to teach me about their lives and their various peoples.”7
The political activism portrayed in The Proud Valley, when the miners walk to London to lobby against the pit closure, must have struck a chord with Robeson, who, as noted above had joined a group of Welsh miners and sung with them after a march to London in 1928 to demand emergency funds for villages hit by unemployment. However, it is the scenes involving the choir that are the most memorable in The Proud Valley, particularly “Deep River”, a beautiful spiritual whose melody is embellished by the glorious harmonies of the voices. Compelling as his vocal performances are in the film, Robeson also impresses in the scenes of straight dialogue, because he brings subtleties to a character who is ultimately defined by his heroism. In an age where stereotypes of Blacks were common, Robeson unveiled a man with a wholly credible dignity and self-respect.
Negro spirituals are what Robeson remains indelibly associated with, and although his voice could easily stand out against the full accompaniment of a choir or rhythm section, it is really when he was backed by nothing more than a piano that he comes into his own. A marvellous example of this is the version of “Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child” that Robeson recorded on March 1937 at the BBC premises: No3 studio, 37 Abbey Road, London. The pianist, Lawrence Brown, who accompanied the singer for much of his career, had a measured, sensitive touch on the keyboard, and the delicacy with which he brings chords to life provides an effective contrast to Robeson’s deeper strains and gives space to his lighter ascents. It is the voice, though, that attracts our attention, not just for its tonal richness but the transformations that it undergoes as the song unfolds, giving the performance a distinctly choral feel, as if there were other singers present.
The changes occur at very specific words of the lyric. On the “feel” of the title, Robeson has a levity and brightness, but elsewhere all is gravity and sombre colours. A single syllable, such as the very symbolic “way” is stretched into “wa-ay-ay” to highlight a rounder quality of basso, suggesting that the singer liked to shift at will between baritone and bass, but he also hits a low pitch close to the area known as sub-bass in contemporary electronic music.
Given the fact that this range is enhanced by adjustments in Robeson’s volume and attack, it is reasonable to assume that he must have had a good microphone technique, such as using changing distances from the recording device to heighten the impact of his voice. This was at a time when even the latest microphones, of which the iconic chrome bulb of the Shure was then the state of the art, were nowhere near as responsive as they are today to the slightest breath or murmur, so the way singers positioned themselves, leaning back or leaning in to vary the sound of the voice, was important.
Striking as Robeson is, the accompanist, Brown, plays a key role in the performance, by leaving liberal amounts of space between some of his chords, which he brings right down to sotto voce as the piece reaches its conclusion. For most of the arrangement, he introduces discreet shades to the canvas against which Robeson is cast, but his rhythmic push in the second verse lends necessary momentum to the piano part as the singer intensifies his emotion. The artistic empathy between the two men is very evident.
“Motherless Child” makes the case that the Negro spiritual may indeed be the genre in which Robeson excelled, despite the fact that he also included pieces by European classical composers in his repertoire. But to hear him on this song, as well as “Joshua Fit De Battle of Jericho” or “Deep River”, is to hear a man accomplish the ultimate goal for a singer, and that is to make the story of the song the story of his life.
Whilst rhythm is an integral part of the musical vocabulary of the Negro spiritual, another essential is the very precise control that is exerted over languorous, legato phrases by singer and choir. Holding notes, sustaining them over the pulse of a song suggests that the singer is calling on, if not supplicating, God, giving the call an added sense of passion and sincerity. It is as if the long tone in gospel music is a kind of material offering.
“Swing Low Sweet Chariot”8 is a vital link in Black British musical history. It was sung by the Fisk Jubilee singers in the Victorian age and by thousands of British soldiers during the imperial campaigns in India. On his rendition of the piece, again recorded at Abbey Road with Lawrence Brown on piano, Robeson sounds majestic.
Although he was a contemporary of artists such as Duke Ellington, jazz was less apposite for his approach. In the same year that he recorded “Motherless Child”, Robeson also cut a version of Duke’s “Solitude”, also in a London studio, and the result was by no means satisfactory. He is not aided by an orchestral arrangement that lacks both dynamics and textural invention, but Robeson himself is far too rigid in his delivery, and he won’t play with the pulse of the music, even in the most understated way, to introduce a degree of the structural flexibility, the easy trickery with time, that is such a key part of the imagination that lies at the root of the jazz aesthetic. Ultimately, Robeson was a master of folk song. Beyond the great gift of his voice, he understood why the genre existed and retained an essential place in society: “Folk songs are the music of basic realities, the spontaneous expression of the people for the people of elemental emotions.”
That declaration was made to the Wrexham Leader in 1934. Over the next six years Robeson was artistically prolific, making five feature films that included Song of Freedom, My Song Goes Forth and Big Fella as well as Showboat and The Proud Valley. The last movie was an entirely positive presentation of race relations in Britain, and shows a degree of liberalism missing in the States. Yet the world was in a dark place by the time Ealing Studios produced The Proud Valley in 1940. World War II was underway in earnest and the threat of Nazism engulfing Europe was all too real.
Unthinkably abhorrent as the proposed annihilation of Jews and other so-called ‘untermensch’ was to almost all in Britain, Hitler (who also denounced jazz as ‘Entartete Musik’ [Degenerate music]) had sympathizers in many reaches of British society, notably the aristocracy. Oswald Mosley and his British Union of Fascists was the most visibly loathsome, and the forthright kicking they got when he tried to preach hatred in the East End – the 1936 battle of Cable Street – is an example of social cohesion in the midst of the most repugnant of politics. The anti-fascists comprised communist, socialist, Anarchist, Irish and Jewish groups.
Yet while events such as this provided an uplifting example of one kind of anti-racism, the understanding of and sensitivity to people of colour was by no means as developed. Discriminatory and demeaning attitudes to people of colour were still woven into the fabric of society, in many areas of mass entertainment, and the image of the Negro as a wide-eyed minstrel was matched by the deep permeation of racist epithets in popular consciousness. A “nigger brown” coat was a winter essential. A black band was a “nigger” band. Language that imparted to people of colour the status of outsiders or lesser beings, who could be treated with condescension or outright contempt, was still prevalent, and crucially among the opinion formers in the arts. Talk of “nigger opera”9 may have appeared a kind of twisted progress from the days of mentioning nigger minstrels, but the sad reality was that Blacks were still referred to disparagingly.
On the eve of the Second World War, the BBC was the benign auntie to whose bosom the nation huddled, and amongst what it heard were blackface performers. The cover of a book by Britain’s most cherished author, Fontana’s issue of Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Niggers, featured a small golliwog doll clad in a bow-tie, white gloves and spats, the garb of the 19th century banjo-playing minstrel. There was also a noose around its neck.
1. Among James Whale’s other acclaimed movies are The Invisible Man (1933) and Bride of Frankenstein (1935).
2. Hattie McDaniel won the Oscar for playing the part of Mammy in Gone With The Wind in 1939.
3. As in tambourine and bones (dried horse-bones used as drum sticks or castanets).
4. Paul Robeson, Here I Stand (London: Dennis Dobson,1958) p. 40
5. See Langston Hughes, I Wonder As I Wander (New York: Hill & Wang, 1993).
6. The Proud Valley was filmed on location in South Wales; this would have lent an additional emotional charge to Paul Robeson’s performance, given his strong ties with the country.
7. Paul Robeson, Here I Stand (London: Dennis Dobson, 1958), p. 42.
8. Today, “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” is the unofficial anthem of English rugby fans – not something that the Fisk Jubilee Singers could have foreseen in the 1890s.
9. The phrase has often been attributed to George Gershwin.