Robinson, Earl

ROBINSON, EARL (1910–1991). In the late 1930s and 1940s, no composer was as successful as Earl Robinson in disseminating the values of the United Front to the American public. In songs such as “Joe Hill,” “Abe Lincoln,” and “The House I Live In.” In cantatas such as Ballad for Americans and The Lonesome Train, Robinson communicated his perception of America as a great multiethnic nation whose democratic promise had yet to be fulfilled. In these works, for which he is chiefly known, he drew on the revolutionary traditions of 1776 and the Civil War to make the idea of radical change an acceptable modern notion.

Born in Seattle, Robinson attended the University of Washington as a music major. He went to New York in 1934 and joined the Workers Laboratory Theater and the Composers Collective. He wrote revolutionary songs, and sang them to guitar accompaniment, in street-theater productions and on picket lines. He further studied composition with Aaron Copland and Hanns Eisler, adopting a straightforward folk-based style unencumbered by a surfeit of twentieth-century dissonance.
Robinson wrote the music to John Howard Lawson’s play Processional (1938) and to Sing for Your Supper (1939), both Federal Theater Project productions. He based cantatas on the words of Carl Sandburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and William O. Douglas. In the 1940s he wrote film scores to A Walk in the Sun, The Roosevelt Story, and The House I Live In, which won an Academy Award. Blacklisted in the 1950s, he taught music at a New York high school. Other works for the stage include: Sandhog (1954), from a Theodore Dreiser story; One Foot in America (1962), based on two Yuri Suhl books; and David of Sassoun (1978), on Armenian legends. Individual songs that became popular were the antiracist “Free and Equal Blues,” “Black and White,” and “Hurry Sundown.”

In the 1970s, Robinson adopted a New Age outlook, adding to his Old Left consciousness such new subjects as American Indians, ecology, reincarnation, gay liberation, and radical theology. To the Northwest Indians (1974), an orchestra piece with narration; Listen for the Dolphin (1981) and Song of Atlantis (1983), both stage works; and the cantatas A Natural Human, I Been Thinkin’ about J. C, and A Concert for Francis (of the Saint Variety), all from the mid-1980s, exemplify these later concerns.

Though mostly drawn to composition with texts, Robinson also wrote concertos for banjo and piano, band pieces, and orchestral works. Either by himself or with vocal ensembles he recorded his own material and many American folk songs. As a one-man performer of his songs he became an almost legendary figure in Left and folk-music circles.

Denisoff, R. Serge. Great Day Coming: Folk Music and the American Left. Baltimore: Penguin, 1973.

“Earl Robinson.” In The New Grove Dictionary of American Music. New York: Grove’s Dictionaries of Music, 1986.

Lieberman, Robbie. People’s Songs, American Communism, and the Politics of Culture, 1930–1950. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988.

Robinson, Earl, with Eric A. Gordon. Ballad of an American. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 1998.
Video:

Earl Robinson: Ballad of an American, a documentary film produced by Bette Jean Bullert in conjunction with KCTS Television, Seattle, 1994.

Earl Robinson Papers, 1926-2013. University of Washington Special Collections. Overview. Archives West, Orbis Cascade Alliance. http://archiveswest.orbiscascade.org/ark:/80444/xv46911