The landmark 1927 musical Show Boat, which was based on the novel by Edna Ferber, was groundbreaking for its time, tackling controversial social issues like racial prejudice, miscegenation (interracial marriage), the struggles of marginalized workers, and the societal limitations experienced by women. For nearly a century, large flat-bottomed showboats traveled the inland waterways of the American South and Midwest to bring vaudeville, variety acts, melodrama, and musical theater to isolated river towns with a steam calliope announcing the boat’s arrival. Ferber’s novel followed three generations of performers working on a Mississippi River showboat from 1887 to the late 1920s when the era of “floating entertainment” was drawing to a close. In retrospect, its demise was probably inevitable. By 1905 storefront theaters called “nickelodeons” where movies cost five cents were ushering in the era of mass entertainment. Then, in 1908, Henry Ford introduced the Model T, and those isolated river towns weren’t so isolated anymore.
With music by Jerome Kern and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II, Show Boat premiered at Broadway’s Ziegfeld Theater on December 27, 1927, with Jules Bledsoe in the role of Joe, a proud African American stevedore married to Queenie, the boat’s cook. While only a supporting role, Joe sings the musical’s beloved signature anthem “Ol’ Man River,” and it made Jules Bledsoe a star.
The lyrics reference the hardships endured by Black Americans doing backbreaking manual labor, and the indifference of the Mississippi River that “just keeps rolling along.” Bledsoe told a reporter that he must have sung “Ol’ Man River” at least 18,000 times over the course of his career, yet it’s singer Paul Robeson’s rendition that became the benchmark for all future performances. Jerome Kern reportedly told friends that he wrote the melody for “Ol’ Man River” after hearing the “organ-like tones” of Robeson’s speaking voice, but the role went to Bledsoe because of scheduling conflicts and delays in production, and “Ol’ Man River” became a hit. A year later Robeson played Joe in the London production of Show Boat. He reprised the role in the 1932 Broadway revival and again in director James Whale’s 1936 film adaptation, ultimately eclipsing the memory of Bledsoe’s operatic performance.
Bledsoe and Robeson were contemporaries. Born just a year apart, they were prominent figures in the Harlem Renaissance and the preeminent African American baritones in the 1920s. Tragically, Bledsoe’s career was cut short in 1943 when he died of a cerebral hemorrhage while in Hollywood, California. He was just 44 years old. Robeson outlived him by another 33 years, became an outspoken civil rights activist, and was labeled a communist by the House Committee on Un-American Activities, which blacklisted him from domestic concert venues. His last performance, as Othello at the Shakespeare Memorial Theater in Stratford-upon-Avon, England, was in 1959. While Robeson’s theatrical career has been well documented, Jules Bledsoe’s legacy is equally impressive.
Julius Lorenzo Cobb Bledsoe chose the stage name Jules Bledsoe early in his career. Born on December 29, 1897, he was five years old when he sang his first concert at the New Hope Baptist Church, the first religious congregation for freed slaves in Waco where his father was the founding pastor. After graduating as valedictorian from Central Texas Academy in 1914, he studied music and liberal arts at Bishop College in Marshall, Texas, graduating magna cum laude in 1918. He worked as a freelance musician in Brooklyn, New York until 1920 when he enrolled at Columbia University to study medicine. After graduating in 1918, he decided to pursue a career in music instead and took voice lessons with Claude Warford, who had studied at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Stuttgart, Germany before opening a music studio in New York City. He also studied voice with Lazar Samoiloff, who had been an opera singer before opening his own studios in New York and Los Angeles, and Luigi Parisotti, who specialized in the foundational techniques of bel canto, in Rome.
Read more: From the Grave Sings Old Man River
While opportunities for Black male singers on the concert stage in the United States were nearly nonexistent in the 1920s, Bledsoe signed with agent Sol Hurok and made his professional singing debut at Aeolian Hall in New York City on Easter Sunday, 1924. In addition to his impressive vocal range, Bledsoe could also sing in eight languages: English, French, Italian, German, Russian, Spanish, Yiddish, and Dutch. In 1926, a year before his breakout role in Show Boat, Bledsoe created the role of Tizan in Deep River, a voodoo-themed opera set in 1835 New Orleans, that opened at the Imperial Theater on Broadway (it’s now a New York City designated landmark). A critic at the New York Morning Telegraph who saw the show wrote that Bledsoe could “pick the heart right out of anybody.”
As it turned out, 1927 was a busy year for Bledsoe, who not only starred in Paul Green’s In Abraham’s Bosom, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama that year, but also performed the title character in Boris Gudunov by Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky. Then, of course, came the role of Joe in Show Boat that defined his career. Only one recording exists of Bledsoe singing “Ol’ Man River,” which NPR featured on A Night on the Town, a weekly radio program celebrating 100 years of American musical theater. Bledsoe never made a studio recording of the iconic song. What survives is the vocals he provided for a musical prologue for the 1929 part-talkie film.
Bledsoe was nothing if not prolific, writing poetry as well as folk songs, spirituals, and patriotic songs. He also wrote a full opera called Bondage based upon Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In the 1930s he performed with the BBC Symphony in London, and with the Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam. He spent time in Hollywood, appearing in three musical shorts and the film Drums Along the Congo (he’s credited as Kalu). Barred from the Metropolitan Opera because of his race, Bledsoe traveled across Europe where he appeared in Giuseppe Verdi’s widely adored opera Aida, and in Louis Gruenberg’s opera The Emperor Jones, which was adapted from Eugene O’Neill’s 1920 play of the same name. When the Metropolitan Opera staged The Emperor Jones in 1933, they chose to cast a white baritone in blackface to play the protagonist, a formerly enslaved African American named Brutus Jones. Three years later the Aeolian Opera Company, which was created to provide opportunities for Black opera singers, staged an all-Black production of The Emperor Jones at a theater just blocks away from the Met with Bledsoe in the lead role.
Aside from his singing career, Bledsoe also owned a resort in New York’s Catskill Mountains called Jesse’s Manna Farms that was only open to African Americans. During World War II when he toured the United States selling war bonds, Bledsoe came home to perform for an audience of 2,500 enthusiastic Wacoans, who stayed for encores that went on for more than an hour.
While his work took him around the world, Bledsoe’s final resting place is in the Greenwood Cemetery in Waco, the town where he was born. A treasure trove of his business and personal correspondence, diaries, financial papers, an extensive collection of sheet music, photographs, travel journals, publicity materials from his stage career, mementos that he collected throughout his career, and many original musical, oratorical, and poetic compositions were discovered after a family house in Waco was demolished. The family donated them to The Texas Collection at Baylor where they are permanently housed and available for research (appointments are highly recommended). The Jules Bledsoe papers begin in 1918 and conclude in 1943, the year he died. One hidden gem among his papers is an original adaptation of The Emperor Jones, which is more Afro-centric, but since the playwright had already given the opera rights to Gruenberg, Bledsoe’s version was never produced.
To browse and search the collection, visit digitalcollections-baylor.quartexcollections.com.
Curious to know what Bledsoe sounded like? The British Pathe Films video of him singing “Dear Old Southland” in 1932 is on YouTube.
