Paul Robeson Heard Over WNYC During WWII
On September 1, 1942, the African-American conductor Dean Dixon lead a free concert in Central Park featuring contemporary Russian music, including the American premiere of a work for concert band by the “Father of the Soviet Symphony” Nicholai Miaskovsky. The soloist for the evening was the celebrated bass-baritone, Paul Robeson.
What remains of the concert today is only a photograph of Robeson in performance, arms outstretched before a WNYC microphone. From this image, we can only assume that the concert was being recorded for broadcast at a later date because, by the concert's 8:00 PM start that evening, WNYC-AM had already signed off the air for the day. Like so many broadcasts in the World War II era, if recordings were made at all, they would have been cut on fragile glass-based lacquer discs. The more robust aluminum-based recording discs used at the time were taken out of production in an effort to make more metal available for the war effort which, in the summer of 1942, was raging in Europe and the Pacific. Sadly, a great many of those war-time recordings made on glass discs, including those presumably made for this performance by Robeson and Dixon at the Central Park Bandshell in 1942, have not survived.
The same, however, cannot be said of the June 24, 1940 concert from Lewisohn Stadium. That concert aired as scheduled but a recording of it, if there was one, has yet to materialize. Robeson sang the Ballad for Americans by Earl Robinson and John Latouche, a cantata for baritone solo, mixed chorus, and orchestra. It was conducted by Mark Warnow. It's worth noting that this concert also included the premiere of William Grant Still's And They Lynched Him on a Tree, a work based on a poem by Katherine Garrison Chapin. A chorus of fifty voices from the Schola Cantorum and the Wen Talbert Negro Choir with African-American contralto Louise Burge joined the orchestra in the performance conducted by Artur Rodzinski.
A year earlier station director Morris S. Novik had hopes of getting Robeson to appear on a program for the station's fifteenth anniversary. He wrote to his friend Walter White, head of the NAACP, hoping to get a solid connection for the singer. Unfortunately the best White could do was to refer him to the Ridgeway Theater in White Plains where there was a contact. But it appears nothing came of it.
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