Susan Holahan wrote:
> Just for the record: Pinter's death led the NY Times front page
> here--until Eartha Kitt's knocked him off.
Two major ones departing the same day reminds me with characteristic
irrelevance of Aldous Huxley dying the same day as John F. Kennedy. In
the current instance, who will get lost?
I happened to like Eartha. To a teenage boy growing up in New York, the
sound of her voice was like someone sticking her hand in my crotch. She
had the most astonishingly sexual delivery I've every heard, and to this
day I don't know how she got away with it, either on record or on TV.
The she-cat persona worked for her, I suppose almost from the start, and
continued to do so.
Lesser know about her is her mentoring of younger performers. She took
under he wing a young black operatic bass named Bruce Hubbard. Hubbard
was hired to record Joe in a studio reference recording of the
uncensored 1927 score of Kern's "Showboat." When I say uncensored, I
mean that "colored folks" didn't work on the Mississippi, "niggers" did.
And that obscene word was all over the score and script. Hubbard
reportedly was horrified and didn't know if he could continue. Kitt was
a counselor and friend who is supposed said that Hubbard owed it to his
history, the history of his people, to show the ugliness as well as the
progress made since. That word was part of his legacy and the legacy of
drama, and for a recording that was as much an historical preservation
project as a recording of a great musical play, keeping the words intact
was critical.
So Hubbard recorded it "come scritto." It's shocking no matter how
often you hear it.
Sadly, Hubbard died in the early 1990s of AIDS. But his delivery of
"Ol' Man River" is surpassed only by Robeson's. Or so I humbly suggest....
Ken, still out in Snow County
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