Jester Hairston

Jester Joseph Hairston (July 9, 1901 – January 18, 2000) was an American composer, songwriter, arranger, choral conductor, and actor whose Broadway appearance in the 1930 revue Hello, Paris marked an early milestone in a career that would span decades across stage, film, radio, and television. He became widely recognized as a leading authority on Black spirituals and choral music, and he composed more than 300 spirituals over the course of his life.

Hairston was born in Belews Creek, North Carolina, a rural community situated at the intersection of Stokes, Forsyth, Rockingham, and Guilford counties. His grandparents had been enslaved, and listening to his grandmother and her friends recount and sing about plantation life instilled in him a lifelong commitment to preserving that history through music. After his father died in a work-related accident, Hairston was raised by his grandmother while his mother worked. The family relocated to Homestead, Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh, where he graduated from high school in 1921. He initially enrolled at Massachusetts Agricultural College in the 1920s as a landscape architecture student before his musical abilities drew the attention of accompanist Anna Laura Kidder, who became his benefactor and funded his studies at Tufts University, from which he graduated in 1929 as one of the institution's first Black students. He subsequently studied music at the Juilliard School. In 1925, he pledged the Chi chapter of the Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity.

His early professional work as a choir conductor brought him to Broadway, where his association with the Hall Johnson Choir proved formative, if initially difficult. Hairston had developed a Boston accent at Tufts and struggled with the rural dialects required for the spirituals the choir performed. Johnson told him directly that the choir was singing "ain't" and "cain't" while Hairston was singing "shahn't" and "cahn't," and that the two did not mix in a spiritual. Hairston worked to shed his acquired accent and relearn the country speech of his parents and grandparents. The Hall Johnson Choir performed in numerous Broadway productions, including The Green Pastures, and in 1936 the group traveled to Hollywood to sing for the film adaptation of that show. It was during that trip that Russian composer Dimitri Tiomkin heard Hairston sing and invited him into a collaboration that would last approximately thirty years, during which Hairston arranged and collected music for films.

In 1939, Hairston married Margaret Swanigan. His film work encompassed composing, arranging, and choral conducting, but he also acted in more than twenty films, many of them in small or uncredited roles. His screen credits included early Tarzan films, St. Louis Blues, To Kill a Mockingbird, In the Heat of the Night, Lady Sings the Blues, I'm Gonna Git You Sucka, and Being John Malkovich. In John Wayne's The Alamo (1960), Hairston played Jethro, a slave owned by Jim Bowie. In To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), he portrayed the uncredited role of the father of Tom Robinson, the accused man at the center of the story. In In the Heat of the Night (1967), he played the butler of a wealthy racist whose murder is under investigation. Among his notable compositions was the Christmas song "Mary's Boy Child," which he wrote in 1956. He also arranged "Amen," a gospel-inflected piece he dubbed for Sidney Poitier's film Lilies of the Field, which became a 1964 hit for the Impressions.

On television, Hairston portrayed the society sophisticate Henry Van Porter on The Amos 'n' Andy Show and played the character Leroy on both the radio and television versions of that program. He also played Wildcat on That's My Mama and, in his later years, appeared as Rolly Forbes on the sitcom Amen. His final television appearance came in 1993 on an episode of Family Matters. On radio, he played the character King Moses on Bold Venture, the program starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall.

In 1961, the U.S. State Department appointed Hairston as a Goodwill Ambassador, a role that took him around the world to teach and perform the folk music of enslaved people. Throughout the 1960s, he organized choral festivals with public high school students, introducing them to Negro spiritual music and leading groups of several hundred students in community performances. In 1985, he brought the Jester Hairston Chorale, a multiracial ensemble, to China at a time when foreign performers rarely appeared there. During his extensive travels across the United States, Hairston consulted local phone books to locate other people with the Hairston surname and succeeded in reconnecting members of his extended family, both Black and white. He received honorary doctorates from multiple institutions, including the University of Massachusetts in 1972 and Tufts University in 1977. For his contributions to the television industry, Hairston received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6201 Hollywood Boulevard. He died in Los Angeles of natural causes on January 18, 2000, at the age of 98, and is interred at Inglewood Park Cemetery in Inglewood, California.