Jules Bledsoe

Julius Lorenzo Cobb Bledsoe was born on December 29, 1897, in Waco, Texas, the only child of Henry L. and Jessie Cobb Bledsoe. After his parents separated in 1899, he was raised by his mother and the extended Cobb family, whose members taught him to sing and play piano. His grandfather, Stephen Cobb, had founded New Hope Baptist Church in 1866 as the first organized religious congregation for freed slaves in Waco, and it was there that Bledsoe reportedly gave his first concert at age five. He attended Central Texas Academy from 1905 to 1914, graduating as valedictorian, and went on to earn a B.A. magna cum laude in liberal arts and music from Bishop College in Marshall, Texas, in May 1918. Bishop College later awarded him an honorary doctorate. Following graduation, he moved to Harper's Ferry, West Virginia, where he served in the Civilian Chaplain Service, worked as a secretary, and organized musical entertainment for the YMCA. He was also a member of the ROTC at Virginia Union University in Richmond, Virginia, and after his discharge in December 1918 relocated to Brooklyn, New York, working as a freelance musician. In 1920 he enrolled at Columbia University to study medicine, but after his mother's death he redirected his ambitions toward a professional singing career, beginning voice study with Claude Warford and later training under Lazar Samoiloff, Luigi Parisotti in Rome, and Mme. Bakkers in Paris.

Bledsoe's professional debut took place on Easter Sunday, April 20, 1924, at New York's Aeolian Hall, under the sponsorship of impresario Sol Hurok, who would later manage contralto Marian Anderson. The engagement was notable at a time when opportunities for Black male singers on the concert and operatic stage were nearly nonexistent in the United States. Early in his New York years, Bledsoe lived on Sugar Hill in Harlem, with addresses that included 409 Edgecombe Avenue, 880 St. Nicholas Avenue, and the Garrison Apartments at 435 Convent Avenue, where in 1929 he became one of the cooperative building's original shareholders and board members. Later in his career he lived at 147 East 56th Street in East Midtown.

His Broadway career spanned 1926 to 1927 and encompassed three significant productions. In 1926 he created the role of Tizan in Deep River, a voodoo-themed opera set in 1835 New Orleans, written by W. Franke Harling and Laurence Stallings and produced by Arthur Hopkins at the Imperial Theatre. That same year he appeared as a soloist at concerts in Boston under the direction of Serge Koussevitsky. In 1927 he shared the stage with Rose McClendon, Abbie Mitchell, and Frank Wilson in Paul Green's In Abraham's Bosom, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama that year. Also in 1927, he originated the role of Joe in Florenz Ziegfeld's production of Show Boat, with music by Jerome Kern and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II, based on Edna Ferber's 1926 novel. It was in connection with this production that Bledsoe announced he was changing his first name from Julius to Jules. His performance of "Ol' Man River" established the song as a popular American classic and remained his most celebrated stage achievement. He recreated the role in the part-talkie 1929 film Show Boat, in which he was also filmed singing the song in the sound prologue.

Bledsoe's operatic career extended well beyond Broadway. He performed the title role in Modest Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov and was in high demand internationally, in part because he could sing in eight languages: English, French, Italian, German, Russian, Spanish, Yiddish, and Dutch. In 1932 he was called up with only twenty-four hours' notice to replace Mostyn Thomas as Amonasro, the Ethiopian king, in Giuseppe Verdi's Aida with the Cleveland Stadium Opera Company, a performance that crossed the color line in American opera for the first time. He reprised the role of Amonasro in 1933 with Alfredo Salmaggi's Chicago Opera Company at the New York Hippodrome and with the Royal Dutch-Italian Opera Company in Amsterdam, and again in November 1934 with the Cosmopolitan Opera Association, also at the New York Hippodrome.

In 1930, Bledsoe developed an original Afro-centric operatic adaptation of Eugene O'Neill's play The Emperor Jones, retitled L'Empereur Jones in French and excising the word "nigger" from the text. He was unable to secure the opera rights, as O'Neill had already granted them to composer Louis Gruenberg. Literary scholar Katie N. Johnson later discovered Bledsoe's operatic scenario in an undated travel journal among his papers at The Texas Collection at Baylor University, along with nearly thirty pages of his operatic score found in a box labeled "Sheet Music" at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of the New York Public Library. In 1934, Gruenberg's adaptation of The Emperor Jones toured England and the Netherlands with Bledsoe in the title role to strong reviews. When Gruenberg's opera ran at the Metropolitan Opera in New York during the 1933–1934 season, the title role went to white baritone Lawrence Tibbett, who performed it in blackface; Bledsoe was barred from the Met because of his race. Instead, he starred in an all-Black production of the opera that summer, mounted by the Aeolian Opera Company at the Mecca Temple, now known as New York City Center, just blocks from the Met. The production was praised in both the white and Black press. That winter he reprised the role with the Cosmopolitan Opera Company at the New York Hippodrome.

Bledsoe was also a composer. He wrote a set of four songs for voice, violin, and orchestra titled African Suite, which he performed with the BBC Symphony in 1936 and with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam in 1937. His only recording of "Ol' Man River" is occasionally broadcast on the NPR musical theatre program A Night on the Town. A 2007 compact disc of vintage American Negro Spirituals includes his recording of "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot." Jules Bledsoe died on July 14, 1943.