Early Beginnings
Spoken word albums have been made since the early days of recording; examples include the popular Ronald Colman 1941 version of Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol on American Decca Records. However, a true milestone was reached when Columbia Masterworks, which had previously released an album of excerpts from Shakespeare's Richard II with Maurice Evans, made a complete recording of Margaret Webster's famed (and never filmed) 1943 Broadway production of Othello, starring Paul Robeson, José Ferrer, and Uta Hagen, on an eighteen-record 78-RPM set running a total of two hours and eight minutes. It was later transferred to LP. It was the longest spoken word album made up to that time. The album gave millions of listeners who otherwise were unable to attend a theatrical performance a chance to hear Robeson as Othello and Ferrer as Iago. Sales of the album, however, were affected after Robeson was blacklisted by the U.S. government in 1950 for his alleged Communist sympathies.
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