Earl Robinson

Earl Hawley Robinson (July 2, 1910 – July 20, 1991) was an American composer, arranger, folk music singer-songwriter, and Broadway performer born in Seattle, Washington. His career spanned composition, performance, and writing for the stage, and his output included cantatas, popular songs, film scores, and theatrical works that reflected his left-leaning political convictions. He was a member of the Communist Party from the 1930s to the 1950s. His son, jazz clarinetist Perry Robinson (1938–2018), followed him into music.

Robinson's formal training began in childhood with violin, viola, and piano. He went on to study composition at the University of Washington, where he earned a Bachelor of Music degree and a teaching certificate in 1933, and where he was a member of Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia, a men's music fraternity. In 1934 he relocated to New York City, studying with composers Hanns Eisler and Aaron Copland. During this period he became involved with the depression-era WPA Federal Theatre Project and was active in the anti-fascist movement. He also served as musical director at Camp Unity, a Communist-run retreat in upstate New York.

Robinson's Broadway activity ran from 1935 to 1936 and included the plays The Young Go First and Catherine Was Great, as well as the productions Life and Death of an American, Snickering Horses, and the folk musical Sandhog, for which he contributed as both composer and book writer. Sandhog, co-written with blacklisted screenwriter Waldo Salt, drew on Theodore Dreiser's story "St. Columbia and the River," which concerned the tunnel workers who constructed the first tunnel beneath the Hudson River. The musical opened at the Phoenix Theater in New York on November 23, 1954.

Among Robinson's most enduring compositions is "Ballad for Americans," written with lyricist John Latouche. After Paul Robeson performed it in a CBS broadcast in November 1939, the piece became closely associated with Robeson and was subsequently recorded by Bing Crosby, Lawrence Tibbett, and Odetta. In 1936, Robinson set a poem by Alfred Hayes — a fellow staff member at Camp Unity — to music, producing "Joe Hill," also known as "I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night." The song became a widely recorded labor anthem, with versions by Robeson, Pete Seeger, and Joan Baez, and it was later used in Bo Widerberg's 1971 film Joe Hill.

In 1942, Robinson composed the cantata The Lonesome Train, a work on the life and death of Abraham Lincoln with text by Millard Lampell. Burl Ives recorded it in 1944, and it was performed live in 2009 to mark the 200th anniversary of Lincoln's birth. That same year, Robinson collaborated with Lewis Allan on "The House I Live In," which Frank Sinatra recorded in 1945 for the Academy Award-winning short film of the same name. Also with Lampell, Robinson wrote the accompanying ballad for Lewis Milestone's 1945 film A Walk in the Sun. In 1954, he composed "Black and White" with David I. Arkin — the father of actor Alan Arkin — as a response to the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision. Sammy Davis Jr. first recorded the song in 1957, and it was later covered by Pete Seeger, Three Dog Night, The Maytones, and Greyhound.

Robinson's work in Hollywood film scoring continued into the 1940s until he was blacklisted for his Communist Party membership, after which he returned to New York. There he directed the orchestra and chorus and headed the music program at Elisabeth Irwin High School. During the blacklist period he also wrote music for and performed in the 1948 short documentary Muscle Beach, directed by Joseph Strick and Irving Lerner. His later compositions included a concerto for banjo, a piano concerto titled The New Human, and the cantata "Preamble to Peace," based on the preamble to the United Nations Charter, which received its premiere in October 1960 by the Greater Trenton Symphony Orchestra and chorus, with Eleanor Roosevelt in attendance.

Robinson died on July 20, 1991, at the age of 81, killed in a car accident in his hometown of Seattle.