Monday, Jul. 08, 1940

"I Hear America Singing"

The men who make the nation's songs, the people who hum, whistle and sing them, the musicians who play them, last week made music that swelled and surged in a crescendo of patriotic feeling. As the sounds from millions of radios, home phonographs, jukeboxes soared over the seaboards, plains, mountains of the U. S., Walt Whitman might again have said, "I hear America singing." The U. S. was singing, as it had not done in years, of pride in its past, of hope in its future.

Lean, twangy, Oklahoma-born Roy Harris, a sobersided, high-brow composer, has never been ranked as a popular song-maker. Last month, on the day that Italy struck at France and England, Composer Harris sat thoughtfully down to some verses he had written. Four days later he finished a song for baritone and a choral setting, with an orchestral accompaniment full of plangent brasses and surging strings of the Preamble to the Constitution:

"We the people of the United States,"

We are the people.

"In order to form a more perfect Union,"

We must plan and work together.* . . .

Roy Harris' eight-minute work, which he called Challenge 1940, had been commissioned by Conductor Artur Rodzinski --a U. S. citizen, born of Polish parents on the Dalmatian coast. Last week Rodzinski and the New York Philharmonic-Symphony gave Challenge 1040 its first performance, in a concert which brought 13,000 people to the open-air Lewisohn Stadium in Manhattan. The concert was dedicated to Democracy. Aside from two democratic Czech pieces, the program was 100% American. It made good listening.

Most ambitious work of the evening was a "ballad poem" for narrator, contralto, white and Negro choirs and orchestra: And They Lynched Him on a Tree. Poet Katherine Garrison Chapin (Mrs. Francis Biddle, wife of the U. S. Solicitor General) wrote the words; the music was by shy, devout Negro William Grant Still, who inscribed his score: "Humble thanks to God, the source of inspiration." Composer Still's inspiration often ran to obvious, ear-catching effects, but it kept pace with Mrs. Biddle's ballad: an evocation of Negroes gathering in a pine clearing after the white folks have lynched their man and gone. A tall, handsome Negro, Louise Burge, let out a big, warm voice in the lament of the lynched man's mother:

Oh my Jesus,

Where is your hand?

They've taken this boy

To a dark land.* . . .

Tennessee-born Miss Burge, head of the music department at the Agricultural, Mechanical and Normal College at Pine Bluff, Ark., owed her Stadium engagement--her bigtime debut--to a selling talk by President Alain Locke of Howard University, whence she graduated in 1934.

For most of the 13,000 Stadiumgoers, the real part of the evening began when big, magnetic, broad-smiling Negro Baritone Paul Robeson appeared. The Philharmonic, under the come-to-glory gyrations of a new conductor, Mark Warnow of radio's Hit Parade, blared a broad, thoroughly whistleable melody. It was Ballad for Americans, in which Robeson was "the everybody who's nobody . . . the nobody who's everybody," as he was in its radio launching last winter (TIME, Nov. 20). Baritone Robeson sang:

Our country's strong, our country's young and her greatest songs are still unsung,

From her plains and mountains, we have sprung,

To keep the faith with those who went before. . . .

Our marching song will come again,

Simple as a hit tune, deep as our valleys.

High as our mountains, strong as the people who made it.

For I have always believed it and I believe it now and you know who I am.

(Chorus) Who are you? America!**

Year ago fat Singer Kate Smith launched, and recorded for Victor, a song called God Bless America. Sales of the record jumped 13% when Poland was invaded, have leaped with every subsequent invasion. Throughout the U. S. today, many people rise, bare their heads when God Bless America is played. Currently Tin Pan Alley is rushing out songs like Defend Your Country, I'm a Yank Full of Happiness, I Am an American ("Shout--Wherever you may be, I AM AN AMERICAN"). Yet none of these songs has attained the current popularity of Ballad for Americans.

Paul Robeson's Victor recording of the Ballad, currently selling 200% better than a month ago (total: 20,000 albums), is the popular number most in demand at the R. C. A. exhibit at the New York World's Fair. Last week the Republican National Convention was opened with a performance of the Ballad, somewhat tamer than Robeson's, by Baritone Ray Middleton. The Republicans were reported to have considered inviting Robeson to sing, decided against it because of his color. Until New Dealers twitted them about it, the Republicans were apparently unaware that Ballad for Americans was written originally for a WPA Theatre Project show in Manhattan. Nor did they seem to have reflected that Paul Robeson and the authors of the Ballad--John Latouche (words), Earl Robinson (music)--are well-known Leftists.

Baritone Robeson (Rutgers College, Phi Beta Kappa and four Rs; Columbia University Law School) has long admired Soviet Russia, sent his son to school there because he believes the U. S. S. R. freer of race prejudice than the U. S. He denies that he is a Communist or fellow traveler. Last week Mrs. Robeson, who chaperones her husband in interviews, shushed him on politics, said "there is a witch hunt on in America now." Asked if Communism is compatible with the U. S, Constitution, the Robesons declined to reply.

Balladeer Robinson, a tall young man from the State of Washington, has expressed his political convictions in numerous songs. His Horace Greeley (words by Jack Shapiro) alters that editor's most celebrated bit of advice to read. "Join your union and go Left, young man, go Left." Abe Lincoln* indicates a lively resentment at G. O. P. claims on old Abe. This song, launched on Broadway in Hellzapoppin and widely sung by Left-wingers, performs the feat of fitting a rousing, rhythmic tune to a passage from Lincoln's first inaugural address:

This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it.

Whenever they shall grow weary

Of the existing government,

They can exercise their constitutional right of amending it,

Or their revolutionary right To dismember or overthrow it.

* Greeley and Lincoln are included in Songs for Americans, recently recorded by Robinson (Timely album 8-W, $3.50).

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