Earl Robinson

Earl Hawley Robinson ( July 2, 1910 *, † July 20, 1991 in Seattle ) was an American songwriter, composer and singer from Seattle. Robinson is probably as well known for his left-wing political setting ( a member of the U.S. Communist Party in the 1930s ) as for his music to the song Joe Hill and the cantata Ballad for Americans belong. He wrote many popular songs and was a composer for Hollywood movie.

Life

Robinson learned as a child violin, viola and piano and studied composition at the University of Washington, where in 1933 his Bachelor of Music degree and teaching license acquired. In 1934 he moved to New York, where he studied with Hanns Eisler and Aaron Copland. He was in the time of the Great Depression to the staff at the Federal Theatre Workshop of the WPA, was actively involved in the anti-fascist movement and was the musical director of the summer camp run by communists Camp Unity in upstate New York. In the 1940s, he wrote film music in Hollywood, but was set in the McCarthy - era blacklisted. Since he could no longer work in Hollywood, he moved back to New York, where he led the musical program of the Elisabeth Irwin High School.

At Robinson's musical influences include the singer Paul Robeson, Leadbelly and American folk music. He composed the cantata Ballad for Americans ( text by John La Touche ), which was a hallmark of Paul Robeson. It was recorded by Bing Crosby.

More composed by Robinson songs are The House I Live In ( a 1945s hit song by Frank Sinatra ), Joe Hill (on a poem by Alfred Hayes, later recorded by Joan Baez and used in the same film), a musical poem on the life and death of Abraham Lincoln, titled Lonesome Train, and Black and White in celebration of the judgment in the case of Brown v. Board of Education, performed by Three Dog Night. His late works include a banjo concerto and a piano concerto entitled The New Human.

Robinson died in 1991 at the age of 81 years due to a car accident in his hometown of Seattle.

For several years, Robinson taught music at the Elisabeth Irwin High School in New York City, where he led the orchestra and the choir. Its based on the Preamble to the Constitution of the United Nations cantata was first performed in 1962 or 1963 in New York by the choir of the Elisabeth Irwin High School and the Greenwich Village Symphony Orchestra.

The jazz clarinetist Perry Robinson is his son.

Swell

  • Mari Jo Buhle ( et. al. ) ( 1998) Encyclopedia of the American Left, Oxford University Press ( NY)
  • Don Michael Randel (1996 ) Harvard Biographical Dictionary of Music, Belknap Press
  • Steven E. Gilbert. " Earl Robinson ", Grove Music Online, ed L. Macy ( last accessed on 30 January 2006 ), grovemusic.com (access paid subscriptions ).
  • R. S. Denisoff (1973 ) Great Day Coming: Folk Music and the American Left, Baltimore, Maryland
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