"Ol' Man River" (music by Jerome Kern, lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II) is a song in the 1927 musical Show Boat that expresses the African American hardship and struggles of the time with the endless, uncaring flow of the Mississippi River; it is sung from the point-of-view of a black dock worker on a showboat, and is the most famous song from the show. Meant to be performed in a slow tempo, it is sung completely once by the dock worker "Joe" who travels with the boat, and, in the stage version, is heard four more times in brief reprises. Joe serves as a sort of musical one-man Greek chorus, and the song, when reprised, comments on the action, as if saying, "This has happened, but the river keeps rolling on anyway."
The song is notable for several aspects: the lyrical pentatonic-scale melody, the subjects of toil and social class, metaphor to the Mississippi, and as a bass solo (rare in musicals, solos for baritones or tenors being more common).
Paul Whiteman and His Orchestra had a no. 1 hit recording of the song in 1928 sung in a much faster tempo than Kern and Hammerstein intended, and featuring Bing Crosby on vocals and Bix Beiderbecke on cornet. A second version, by Paul Whiteman with Paul Robeson on vocals and sung in a dance tempo, was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2006.
Read more about Ol' Man River: Various Versions, Turning An Upbeat-sounding Melody Into A Tragic One, Paul Robeson's Alterations To The Song Lyrics, Parodies and References
Famous quotes containing the words man and/or river:
“Brute animals have the vowel sounds; man only can utter consonants.”
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834)
“It is from quiet places like this all over the world that the forces accumulate which presently will overbear any attempt to accomplish evil on a large scale. Like the rivulets gathering into the river, and the river into the seas, there come from communities like this streams that fertilize the consciences of men, and it is the conscience of the world that we are trying to place upon the throne which others would usurp.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)