Paul Robeson's many faces get new spotlight in recording premiere

Singing or acting on stage and film, playing football and advocating for civil rights made Paul Robeson a global star. He was one of the most famous Americans in the 1930s and 1940s. But McCarthyism saw him blacklisted, and nearly relegated him to the ash heap of history. A new set of recordings, some released for the first time, aims to reinstate this one-time cultural icon to his rightful place.

Robeson's "multihyphenate" talent and charisma "drew hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people to his attention and to interest of him over the course of his career," said Columbia University professor Shana Redmond.

She wrote essays in an accompanying illustrated book, Paul Robeson: Voice of Freedom, along with Robeson's granddaughter Susan. The 14-CD edition on Sony Classical is the first ever release of the singer's complete Columbia, HMV and Victor recordings from 1925 to 1947. All of his American recordings have been restored from the original master discs and tapes, and 25 studio recordings are available for the first time on CD, decades after Robeson died in 1976.

As the Cold War intensified, Robeson was blacklisted for political activism that saw him speak out against what he described as the U.S. government's racialized and imperialist policies. He lost concert engagements and recording contracts. His passport was revoked for eight years.

"There's a very material consideration, but then there's also the element of wanting to bury this person," Redmond told NPR's Michel Martin about that period. But Robeson was undeterred. Invited to perform in Canada to perform, but stopped at the border due to his blacklisting, Robeson sang across the border from the bed of a pickup truck parked in Blaine, Wash. Thousands of people were gathered on the Canadian side.

"He does this twice at that location because of its successes and uses it as an opportunity to publicly defy and call into question the State Department's assaults on radical thought and on people's ability to travel," Redmond recalls. He sang spirituals there, such as "Joe Hill" and "No More Auction Block for Me."

Robeson also sang "Ol' Man River," from the musical Showboat, from one of his best known roles. He had initially declined the role — written for him by composer Jerome Kern — upset with the use of derogatory, racialized language by librettist Oscar Hammerstein.

"By the middle and late 1930s, he had completely revamped the language to match not only more contemporary and more urgent representations of Blackness, but also more contemporary concerns around the growing threat of war and around resilience and resistance," Redmond said. "And so the song is forever attached to him because he made it uniquely and powerfully his."

Robeson's activism likely had its roots in his childhood. He was born in 1898 to a father who as a teen was a fugitive from slavery. William Drew Robeson served as the pastor of a church in Princeton, New Jersey until he was ousted for his outspokenness against social injustice. The younger Robeson's teacher mother died when he was six years old. Robeson attended Rutgers — a private college at the time — becoming its third Black student its first Black football player.

In the midst of the Harlem Renaissance, he turned to the stage. Robeson performed the title role in a production of Othello that ran for 296 performances from in 1943 and 1944, breaking a record it still holds for the longest-running Shakespeare play on Broadway. He came to singing almost by accident. "It's for his inability to whistle during one of his roles on stage that he was encouraged by the play's director to sing, and that starts his career as a singer," Redmond said.

And what a voice it was, deeply resonant and at ease in a variety of spirituals, ballads and folk songs. "This is a voice that caused entire nations to tremble," Redmond said. "He is truly an underappreciated but nonetheless magnificent model for humanity."

The broadcast version of this story was produced by Barry Gordemer. The digital version was edited by Majd al-Waheidi.