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Judy Garland sang The Trolly Song in the 1944 movie Meet Me In St. Louis and it became one of her standard performance pieces. Here Judy sings it as a duet with Mel Torme “the velvet fog” one of the great vocal improvisers of jazz.

Paul Robison was an athlete, lawyer, actor, singer, civil right activist and political exile. Born in Princeton New Jersey in 1898, Robeson was he third black student ever to be admitted to Rutgers University. e won fifteen varsity letters in football, baseball, basketball, and track and field, was inducted into phi beta kappa and was valedictorian of his graduating class. After graduating from Rutgers Robeson entered Colombia University Law School and worked his way through school by acting and singing professionally and by playing professional football in the Akron Pros and the Milwaukee Badgers, two teams in the American Professional Football Association, predecessor to the NFL. After graduation Robeson was hired by the law firm of Stotesbury and Miner in New York City. Robeson quit after a white secretary refused to take dictation from him.

Robeson went back to the stage, performing in Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess,” Eugene O’Neill’s “The Emperor Jones” and played the part of Othello, first in England and then on Broadway. Robeson toured the world with Othello for many years. Robeson played the part of Joe in the 1928 London production of “Show Boat,” repeated that part on Broadway and again in the 1936 film version.

Robeson founded the American Crusade Against Lynching in 1946 and pressed President Harry Truman to take action to protect the lives of African Americans endangered by the unwillingness of state and local authorities to protect them. Robeson’s political activities and his tours of the Soviet Union, where he was treated royally, and his public statements supportive of Stalin’s regime, caused him to be labeled a Communist sympathizer. In 1949 the Peekskill Riots erupted over two attempts by Robeson to hold a benefit concert in Peekskill, New York for the Civil Rights Congress. Pete Seeger has told a harrowing story of his escape from Peekskill through the battering and rock throwing crowd.

This clip is from the 1936 film “Show Boat,” and is probably Robeson’s most remembered performance.

Thanks to Svetlana at Windows to Russia for reminding me to write a post about Paul Robeson.

One of the greatest films of all time, made in 1942, during the uncertain early years of WWII, Casablanca was a masterpiece of storytelling. One of the keys to this remarkable film is the song “As Time Goes By,” a pop song written by Herman Hupfeld and central to the never produced play “Everybody Comes To Ricks,” which the film is loosely based on. Dooley Wilson, who plays the part of Sam, the piano playing nightclub singer, sings the song, which Rick, played by Humphrey Bogart, has forbidden him ever to sing in his club. He sings it at the request of Ilsa, played by Ingrid Bergman, Rick’s lost love, just arrived from occupied France with her Czech resistance leader husband.

Dooley Wilson did not play the piano, he was a drummer.

Later, when Rick is contemplating giving Ilsa and Victor Lazlo the stolen travel “letters of transit,” which will allow them to escape to America he asks Sam to play the song again, triggering a memorable flashback sequence, which reveals the romance in Paris between Rick and Ilsa to the audience.