In February and March of 1941, Julius “Jules” Bledsoe might have been the biggest name to visit the Baylor University campus. Bledsoe’s upcoming appearance in Waco Hall on March 13 merited a front-page story in The Lariat, trumpeting the singer’s many accomplishments, calling him “one of the greatest concert and opera singers of the present time.” It was even claimed that Bledsoe had sung his signature song, “Old Man River” from “Show Boat” an astonishing 18,000 times.
Perhaps even more astonishing was that fact that Waco native Bledsoe was an African American, one of the very first Black Americans to ever perform on the Baylor campus – as early as 1916. The same campus that had historically been off-limits to Bledsoe and all African Americans since its founding. And yet, in the breathless prose of The Lariat that day, Bledsoe’s appearance on behalf of British War Relief was “one of Waco’s most famous native sons.”
In 1941, two years before his untimely death, Jules Bledsoe was a star.
Bledsoe was born in East Waco on December 29, 1899 to a large family of singers and musicians. He showed prodigious musical talent early, performing in his home New Hope Baptist Church at age 6, attending Bishop College in Marshall, and performing at an outdoor concert on the Baylor campus in July 1916 – a mind-boggling feat in that era of ferocious segregation.
In short order, while enrolled in medical school at Columbia University, he was cast in Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle’s ground-breaking all-black revue, “Shufflin’ Along” in 1921. From there, he studied with top vocal coaches before making his New York debut in 1924. In time, Bledsoe would become the first African American to perform with a host of American opera companies and symphonies, establishing a flourishing career in Europe, writing and performing with the top artists of the day and even recording numerous radio shows with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.
It is “Show Boat,” of course that Bledsoe is known for. Bledsoe debuted “Old Man River” on Broadway on December 29, 1927, before returning to Europe, which allowed Paul Robeson to sing the iconic song in the American movie version.
Bledsoe’s Baylor concert, according to the Waco Sunday Tribune-Herald in 1941, drew a mixed audience of 2,500 people in a “packed” Waco Hall, who demanded repeated encores. After the show, he received “white and colored” friends and guests, the paper reports, at the home of his aunt Naomi Cobb at 817 North Fourth Street.
But Bledsoe, who had maintained an exhausting schedule most of his adult life, collapsed of what was said to be a “cerebral hemorrhage” at his manager’s house in Hollywood on July 14, 1943. His funeral in Waco was front page news in the Waco newspapers and the memorial service was attended by thousands, both blacks and whites, before he was buried in Greenwood Cemetery.
Today, despite his fame, Bledsoe is little more than a footnote. His early death in that segregated age has reduced the legacy of this brilliant composer/pianist/singer to a single song from a single Broadway musical.
Enter Dr. Horace Maxile, Associate Professor of Music Theory. Maxile, himself a brilliant keyboardist in great demand from gospel to classic to jazz venues, has immersed himself in Bledsoe’s nearly forgotten musical scores, arrangements, letters, programs, and other ephemera in the Texas Collection. In the boxes of rare documents, much of it written in Bledsoe’s spidery cursive, Maxile has discovered that far from being a one-song wonder, Bledsoe was prodigy on piano and a composer/arranger of uncommon skill and creativity worthy of international acclaim.
Maxile, who has published widely on classically oriented African American composers of the 20th century, was aware of Bledsoe’s ground-breaking career in opera and art song long before coming to Baylor – but not his compositional and piano performance skills. When Maxile visited the Texas Collection’s one-of-a-kind repository of Bledsoe’s papers, he found boxes of mostly unpublished compositions that Bledsoe had written for his many performances, including national network radio programs.
“The first thing that caught me was the breadth of work,” Maxile said. “I had not seen any purely instrumental compositions; all of his compositions that I’d seen were for voice. I found, among other things, a choral working, there are some other patriotic songs, there are spirituals, and there are perhaps lullabies or ballads in dialect in that collection.”
Maxile began the meticulous, sometimes excruciating task of deciphering Bledsoe’s compositional “hand” and discovered, he said, an artist whose harmonic language was musically interesting, even unique. The arrangements of so-called “Negro spirituals” showed real sensitivity, but Maxile said he marveled even more at Bledsoe’s impressive “harmonic vocabulary” in other compositions.
Equally compelling, was the artistic risk-taking and sometimes overt political statements found in some of Bledsoe’s most ambitious compositions, such as “Pagan Prayer,” which resonated with the treatment of African Americans in this country in the 1920s and ‘30s.
Many black performers of the era, Maxile said, including the popular college “jubilee” groups, typically ended their concerts with crowd-pleasing arrangements of spirituals. Not Bledsoe – he instead performed the more challenging “Pagan Prayer.”
“‘Pagan Prayer’ struck me because of the text and the setting, which was something totally different,” Maxile said.
As he meticulously combed through the reams of documents and sheaths of compositions, Maxile said he slowly began to get a sense of notoriously private Bledsoe as a person as well.
“It would be easy to think that someone who thrived in a career that was based on classical music would sometimes sit aloof from issues that were affecting the black community,” Maxile said. “What I found, particularly at the time of the ‘Pagan Prayer,’ was the word ‘race’ in a negative term, in a negative light. There were some things that were going on with him personally with regard to dates and programming where I could see him writing to other people and saying, ‘I’m shocked that this is happening to me at this point.’
“These are personal statements about what might be going on with him. And there is a deeper contextual piece, especially when set against the other pieces that he arranged. That’s a really interesting thing to think about when you think about a Renaissance man: The vehicle of composition or the way that writing a piece of music can provide as much escape for the performer as the performance of a piece could actually give him. Not to put one over the other; both are expressive in their own way. But these pieces are uniquely him.”
Despite his successes throughout Europe, Bledsoe returned to the United States in the pre-World War II years and threw himself into fund-raising for the allied war effort.
“I often wonder, ‘Why did he come back?’” Maxile said. “There are lots of jazz musicians who enjoyed being overseas because they just didn’t have to deal with a lot of [racist] stuff. Still, home is home – and so there’s something to be said for that. Perhaps the move from New York to California in the late ‘30s was sort of a move in that direction, to get away from some of the worst issues of race.”
As for Maxile, he said he hopes to perform concerts of Bledsoe’s unpublished music, as well as write several academic articles on the abundant creativity and imagination in the man’s compositions. His study of Jules Bledsoe has progressed, in time, to become a labor of love.
Why devote so much time to this?
“To create a greater awareness of the totality of his contributions,” Maxile said. “I hope that he gets another time to shine in his hometown. Eventually, I would like for his musical and compositional gifts to, someday, reach a point where ‘Old Man River’ is not the only thing attached to this time to shine. ‘Old Man River’ might put him on the map, but his musicianship kept him on the map.”
Secondly, Maxile said he would like for these performances to bring Bledsoe’s compositional voice the attention he believes it deserves.
“I would also like to generate enough of a buzz for him as a composer to where, perhaps, we could move toward printed performance editions of them,” Maxile said. “That would take a lot of work and a lot of clearances, but I think it would be worth it. There’s way too much music there to just sit in manuscript form. It’s just way too much.”
And finally, Maxile said he dreams of having the concerts and research someday come together as the basis of a Jules Bledsoe music festival in Waco.
“I would love a festival that will highlight not just Bledsoe’s classical side or the concert music side, but that will also highlight black music in general and black artistic excellence in many forms, including theater or visual arts,” Maxile said. “If he was indeed a Renaissance man, I don’t even think he would want his legacy to be limited to just music. So that would be the pie in the sky idea, not just to say, ‘Yeah, Jules Bledsoe, ‘Old Man River,’ but instead ‘Jules Bledsoe, musician, composer, arranger.’ That’s what I hope we get out of it.”
