Josh White by Wald Elijah;

Author:Wald, Elijah;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1581738
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group

12

BROADWAY, HOLLYWOOD, AND BEYOND 1947–1950

The details of Josh’s schedule for the late 1940s are not easily pieced together, especially fifty years after the fact. When he and Bill finished their tour in Los Angeles at the end of 1947, he sold the car and flew back to New York, arriving four days after the birth of his youngest child, a fourth daughter, named Judith. His first job back home was as a special guest of the vaudeville stars Paul Draper and Larry Adler in their annual children’s Christmas show at the New York City Center. After that, his comings and goings are hard to trace with any degree of accuracy. There were frequent shows in New York or in New Jersey or Philadelphia, regular trips to Chicago and Detroit, and annual crosscountry tours, but the surviving records are only the tip of the iceberg. Whereas Josh’s first trip to any town was news, the fact that he was back six months later might not be, so the newspaper files cannot be counted on, and neither the Whites nor the people involved in his booking and management have kept records of his appearances.

If Josh’s concert career was no longer news, his branching out into other activities attracted greater attention. He had always aspired to be more than just a singer and guitar player, and in the late 1940s he began to expand into acting. His first nonsinging appearance came in February 1948 with an off-Broadway group appropriately named the Experimental Theatre. The play, titled A Long Way from Home, was an allblack adaptation of Maxim Gorki’s Lower Depths. The playwrights, Randolph Goodman and Walter Carroll, had shifted the scene of the action from turn-of-the-century Russia to present-day Durham, North Carolina, where a mingled assemblage of riffraff lived in basement quarters under a pool hall. The story involved a visit from an itinerant preacher, which transformed the characters in various ways, uplifting some but leading others into tragic missteps.

Josh played Joebuck, a crook who is having an affair with the landlord’s wife but, after the preacher’s arrival, decides to go straight and marry the landlord’s daughter instead. As the Daily Worker reviewer described the ensuing mayhem, “The landlord’s wife, in a fit of jealousy, practically scalds the feet off the daughter. The crook, who previously had rejected the wife’s appeal to kill her husband, now does so in an attempt to come to the aid of the daughter. The wife betrays him to the cop, and the cop, knowing of her desire to have her husband murdered, takes her to jail along with the crook.”

The New York Times made clear where its interest lay by illustrating its review with an old picture of Josh and his guitar. The reviewer was kind, describing the play as “fascinating” and the individual performances, including the debut of a young Ruby Dee, as “excellent.” That said, though, he added that “the performance as a whole strikes the strident note too insistently … the transitions of mood are too swift … and the overall impression is too clamorous.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.