This album -- which is practically a greatest-hits collection for
Earl Robinson
-- has something of a split personality. The first half is devoted to his best-known work in Hollywood, while the second half is a showcase for his non-movie songwriting and some of his best singing. In 1945,
Robinson
and
Millard Lampell
wrote a group of songs to be used in the feature film
A Walk in the Sun
, directed and produced independently by
Lewis Milestone
. It was the first Hollywood feature to use topical (though perhaps "referential" is a more correct word) folk-style music in the underscoring, a technique that would become a huge success seven years later when
Dimitri Tiomkin
utilized it in
High Noon
. As it was, some of what
Lampell
wrote was not present in the final cut of the movie, as they encountered resistance first from the movie's music director,
Freddie Rich
, and then it was found that some test audiences didn't react well to the presence of the folk songs on the soundtrack. The songs as represented in the movie were sung by
Kenneth Spencer
, a classically trained vocalist with a rich baritone voice, and they get a good account, but
later decided to record his renditions of the music that he'd written for the movie -- that's what is represented on the first half of this LP,
's versions of his music for
, accompanied by his own guitar. With the exception of
"Ballad of the Lead Platoon"
"Waiting,"
nothing here runs even two minutes, but this is still a pretty full menu of material, borrowing from folk and gospel traditions in its music and lyrics, though all presented with a topical, activist edge of a true believer in the causes of the people and the workers.
's traditional folk ballad approach is so different from the one utilized by
Spencer
in the movie, that this will be a revelation even to longtime fans of the film -- he surges and growls and whoops, while his guitar does its best to represent the chaos behind sung accounts of battle and the quiet of its aftermath.
's is a beautifully expressive voice, but with a narrow range, and he wraps it around the words, not the music. This is quite different from what
, with his operatic-quality voice, does in the film score recordings, and turns this into what -- in 1945 in some quarters -- could have seemed like a potentially subversive body of work. The result is also more bracing and exciting, if not as dignified and elegant. Oddly enough, on the remaining material on this album -- for which
accompanies himself very elegantly at the piano -- including
"The House I Live In,"
the medley
"Texas Girl"
/
"From Here on Up"
"Train Song,"
"Joe Hill,"
"Spring Song,"
he does successfully take a kind of operatic approach to the music, stretching notes and going for other dramatic effects, and emphasizing the richness of his intonation.
"Spring Song"
"Good Morning"
show a side of his work that leads one to suspect that Broadway lost a potential major composer -- he writes romantic ballads and playful patter songs as well as anyone this side of
Rodgers & Hart
, or, at least,
Jerome Moross
. The album closes with
's rendition of the biggest single hit song of his career as a composer,
"Black and White"
-- you'd never know from the
Three Dog Night
version just how serious and angry a song it was as originally conceived, but listeners can find it out here, with its topical references to racial strife in Little Rock, AR and other, similar matters. ~ Bruce Eder