‘Do you want to hear a Mammy song?’: A Historiography of Show Boat

Abstract

This article considers the changing fortunes of Show Boat, the 1927 Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II musical, in popular and academic criticism from the 1940s to the present. A select group of writers who weighed in on Show Boat and the question of race over the last 60 years are discussed. Given its unusual interracial cast, the production history of the work and larger social and political transformations – in particular the Civil Rights Movement – have consistently played an important role in Show Boat's changing reputation and meaning.

During the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, popular historians, composers and critics such as David Ewen, Leonard Bernstein, and Miles Kreuger minimized race as a salient element of the work while arguing for Show Boat's importance in the history of the musical as an American theatrical form. Beginning in the 1990s, academics and activist critics such as Robin Breon, Linda Williams, and Raymond Knapp brought the race question to the forefront of Show Boat scholarship, altering the terms on which the show was evaluated (at least within some sectors of the academy). However, as a heretofore unpublished exchange from 1948 between Oscar Hammerstein II and the theater critic of the Daily Worker demonstrates, the dynamic interplay between racial representation, text, and performance, often highlighted by recent scholars, has been an enduring element of Show Boat criticism. Recent archival research on the genesis of the work, begun by Scott McMillin, suggests that old and new views of Show Boat stand to be revised in the light of historical research, much of which remains to be done.

Notes

1. Leonard Bernstein describing a scene from the Gershwins' Oh, Kay! (1926) on national television, 7 October 1956: Leonard Bernstein, The Joy of Music (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1959), p. 170.

2. The music for ‘Mis'ry's Comin’ Aroun'’ was salvaged and turned into the 1927 overture, an ominous tone poem (eventually replaced by a more conventional potpourri of hits from the score for the 1946 revival).

3. ‘Rodgers, Hammerstein Reply to Lee Newton on Show Boat’, Daily Worker (New York), 25 October 1948, p. 13.

5. ‘Rodgers, Hammerstein Reply to Lee Newton on Show Boat’, Daily Worker (New York), 25 October 1948, p. 13. Newton's letter first appeared in the 16 September edition. It was reprinted in full beside Rodgers and Hammerstein's response two weeks later.

8. Ibid.

4. Hammerstein kept a copy of the article in a bound volume of clippings relating to the 1946 Show Boat revival: Show Boat scrapbook, Oscar Hammerstein 2nd Collection, Music Division, Library of Congress. (My thanks to archivist Mark Horowitz for access to this source.)

6. Ibid.

7. Ibid.

9. Bernstein, The Joy of Music, p. 168.

10. Ibid., p. 170.

11. Ibid., p. 174.

12. Ibid., p. 177.

13. Ibid., p. 172.

14. See Geoffrey Block, ‘The Broadway Canon from Show Boat to West Side Story and the European Operatic Ideal’. Journal of Musicology, 11 (1993), 525–44 for a more recent view of the musical vis à vis European opera.

15. David Ewen, Composers for the American Musical Theatre (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1968), p. 75.

16. Ewen's view has been embraced or invoked by many subsequent writers, including Rick Altman, Geoffrey Block, Ethan Mordden, Mark Steyn, and Joseph P. Swain. Among historians of the musical as a genre, this remains a majority position. Genre historians opposing Ewen's view include Richard Traubner and Gerald Bordman.

17. David Ewen, Panorama of American Popular Music (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1957), p. 312.

18. David Ewen, The Story of America's Musical Theater (New York: Chilton Company, 1961), p. 162.

19. Miles Kreuger, Show Boat: The Story of a Classic American Musical (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 199.

20. Robin Breon, ‘Show Boat: The Revival, the Racism’, The Drama Review, 39 (1995), 86–105 (p. 103).

21. Breon, ‘Show Boat’, pp. 92–93. The connection between white and black Broadway is frequently missed on both sides of the street. David Krasner's A Beautiful Pageant: African American Theatre, Drama, and Performance in the Harlem Renaissance, 1910–1927 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002) makes not a single mention of Show Boat.

22. Quoting M. Nourbese Philip, Showing Grit: Showboating North of the 44^th Parallel (Toronto: Poui Publications, 1993), p. 54.

23. Breon, ‘Show Boat’, p. 99.

24. Ibid., p. 100.

25. Martin Duberman's Paul Robeson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988) provides an earlier model for seeing Show Boat as part of other stories, rather than as itself the primary focus of historical interest.

26. Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996), p. 67.

27. Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O.J. Simpson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 161.

28. Ibid., p. 297.

29. Ibid., p. 161.

34. Williams, Playing the Race Card, p. 172.

30. Ibid., p. 173.

31. Richard Dyer, Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society (London: BFI and Macmillan, 1986), p. 87 (2nd edition published by Routledge in 2004).

32. Williams, Playing the Race Card, p. 168. Joseph P. Swain, The Broadway Musical: A Critical and Musical Survey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990) unpacks the subtleties of Kern's melody, without emphasizing how performance context adds resonance to the tune.

33. Williams, Playing the Race Card, pp. 170–71.

35. Ibid.

36. Raymond Knapp, The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), p. 194.

37. Ibid., p. 182.

38. Ibid., p. 193–94.

39. Ibid., p. 190.

40. Knapp introduces the notion of a dynamic of embodiment in his introduction.

41. Knapp, The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity, p. 194.

42. Scott McMillin, ‘Paul Robeson, Will Vodery's “Jubilee Singers”, and the Earliest Script of the Kern–Hammerstein Show Boat’, Theatre Survey, 41 (2000), 51–70 (p. 66).

43. Kreuger, presumably working from an August 1927 script in the Library of Congress (which also contains the ‘Robeson Recital’) must have known of the planned Robeson specialty. He does not mention it, but does briefly discuss parallel scenes for Kim which were excised in the re-design of Act Two. Kreuger dismisses these scenes by ignoring the Twenties context and invoking a later view of the show: ‘[E]arly scripts demonstrate Hammerstein's seeming unawareness that the great appeal of Show Boat as a stage piece tends to lie in its period sequences rather than the up-to-date situations toward the end’. (Kreuger, Show Boat, pp. 26–27.)

44. See the author's dissertation, ‘Black/White Encounters on the American Musical Stage and Screen (1924–2005)’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Michigan, 2007), pp. 116–23, for a complete timeline of the creation of Show Boat relative to the planned ‘Robeson Recital’.