Will Marion Cook was the first great African-American composer for the musical stage. The prodigiously talented offspring of parents who had studied at Oberlin College in Ohio, he traveled to Germany to study with violinist Joseph Joachim. But he found that the only musical career open to him in America was in the New York theater, where blacks were free to compete for audiences among a host of presenters dealing in languages of ethnic stereotype: Irish, German, and the last stages of the existing white caricature of black life known an minstrelsy. Cook and his textual collaborators, most frequently poet Paul Lawrence Dunbar (Cook also wrote quite a few texts himself), tried to humanize these stereotypes through the creation of multifaceted black characters, but listeners and presenters should be forewarned that the language and subject matter of some of these songs is now considered racially offensive. Setting that aside, Cook's songs are often clever, and they veer off from the mainstream theatrical language of the day in fascinating ways.
The dominant style for much of Cook's career was ragtime, which today is thought of mostly as an instrumental style but which anyone 100 years ago, black or white, would have identified as vocal. Cook shows great flexibility in adapting ragtime rhythms to a variety of moods, including romance, comedy, and, in On Emancipation Day and a few other pieces, a vision of social change. But he isn't limited to ragtime. Just as pianist Eubie Blake enjoyed playing waltzes, Cook often worked in forms uninflected by African-American music -- romantic parlor songs, sentimental "mother" songs, and even the old-plantation type of number that went back to Stephen Foster's Old Folks at Home. His musical sense of humor was a major part of what endeared him to audiences, and it's on display in the comic routine An Explanation. Cook's songs have been recorded here and there, but his appeal comes into full view with the generous two-disc selection recorded here.
The problem with this recording is that, although these songs were intended for the musical stage, the performances don't feel as though they belong there. William Brown, an operatic tenor, was 66 years old when he made this recording (and passed away soon afterward). His handling of the older black diction Cook sometimes used is skillful and natural, with an easy continuum between broader comic speech and standard English. But he and accompanist Ann Sears are too restrained. Cook's songs were surely often arranged for voice and piano, but even in this medium they need more rhythmic zip than they have here. Two discs of Will Marion Cook represent an important step forward in understanding one of America's most neglected composers, but the black stage musical of the early twentieth century has not yet quite been brought to life.
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