"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:
“Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the night in which it was said, There is a man child conceived.”
—Bible: Hebrew Job, 3:3.
A similar imprecation is found in Jeremiah 20:14-15.
“Every incident connected with the breaking up of the rivers and ponds and the settling of the weather is particularly interesting to us who live in a climate of so great extremes. When the warmer days come, they who dwell near the river hear the ice crack at night with a startling whoop as loud as artillery, as if its icy fetters were rent from end to end, and within a few days see it rapidly going out. So the alligator comes out of the mud with quakings of the earth.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)