OL' MAN RIVER

Ol' Man River, music by Jerome Kern, lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II, is a song in the 1927 musical Show Boat, that contrasts African American hardship and struggles of the time with the endless, uncaring flow of the Mississippi River, from the point-of-view of a dock worker on a showboat. It is the most famous song from the show. It is sung complete, once, by the black dock worker "Joe" who travels with the boat, and is re-sung three times more 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 pentatoni

c-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 featuring Bing Crosby on vocals and Bix Beiderbecke on cornet. A second version by Paul Whiteman with Paul Robeson on vocals was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2006.

(Frank Sinatra)