Jester Hairston (1901-2000) has had a marvelous impact on preserving the traditional spiritual. Beyond his influence on the spiritual was his role as a choral innovator. He was born in Belews Creek, North Carolina, the grandson of a slave. His venture into higher education began in 1920 through a scholarship from his hometown Baptist church, at which time he enrolled at Massachusetts Agricultural College to study landscape architecture. During his stint at Mass Aggie, his extracurricular activities included quarterbacking for the football team and singing in the campus glee club and other community choirs. A lack of funds forced Hairston to drop out of school. But his music education was later refinanced by a woman patron, notably impressed by his singing. He enrolled and later graduated with a music degree from Tufts University in 1929. (Although he never completed his studies at Massachusetts Agricultural College, Hairston maintained strong ties with the University of Massachusetts.)
After earning his degree from Tufts, he made his way to New York where he met Hall Johnson (1887-1970). Johnson engaged Hairston as his
assistant with the famed Hall Johnson Choir during the time in which Johnson was rehearsing for the Broadway production of The Green Pastures which opened to critical acclaim at the Mansfield Theater, 26 February 1930.
Warner Brothers later produced the screen version with the Hall Johnson Choir and when the movie first opened at New York's Radio City
Music Hall, it sold roughly 6,000 tickets every hour. The Green Pastures (1936), a phrase derived from Psalm 23, is based on the original stage play by Marc Connelly. In it the Scriptures are portrayed by an all-black cast where Connelly envisioned the central character as a choir (resembling a Greek chorus). It can be said that one of the best elements of the movie is the music as performed by the Hall Johnson Choir.
Undoubtedly Hairston's experience as an actor, in addition to his conducting choral music for dramatic film works, brought drama and excitement to his own choral music and choral interpretations. With a staggering number of appearances as a film actor, his roles included work in Being John
Malkovich (1999), Lady Sings the Blues (1972), Finian's Rainbow (1968), To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), Summer and Smoke (1961), and various bit parts in Tarzan films such as Tarzan's Hidden Jungle (1955). Some of his earliest work as a professional actor was for the long-running radio and television versions of Amos 'n' Andy, and then much later in the role of Rollie Forbes on the NBC sitcom Amen in the 1980s.
Jester Hairston's big break came in 1936, when Dimitri Tiomkin (1894-1979) asked him to conduct a choir in his next project. The film, Lost Horizon, won an Oscar for best score. With that success in their pocket, Hairston and Tiomkin began a 20-year collaboration, which led Hairston to forming the first integrated choir used in films. Besides his dynamic choral music direction for the films Lost Horizon (1937), Duel in the Sun (1946), Red River (1948), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), and Land of the Pharaohs (1955), he also served as the vocal coach and choral director for Carmen Jones (1954). Hairston may be best-remembered for his spiritual "Amen" composed for Lillies of the Field (1963). He also dubbed that same song for Sidney Poitier in the same film, preserved on soundtrack.
A Russian composer and pianist, Tiomkin studied at the Petersburg Conservatory with Alexander Glazunov, who exerted great influence on
him as a composer. After emigrating to Berlin in 1921 he began studying with Feruccio Busoni (who was also mentor to Kurt Weill). At that time, Tiomkin made his concert debut playing Liszt's Second Concerto with the Berlin Philharmonic in 1923. Two years later, while on a performance tour across America, Tiomkin met George Gershwin as well as Richard Rodgers and Jerome Kern, who stimulated his interest in American popular song and musical theatre. Several years after that meeting, Tiomkin performed the French premiere of Gershwin's "Concerto in F" in 1928 at L'Opera de Paris.
Tiomkin was introduced to film studio executives in 1930 while accompanying his wife, noted choreographer Albertina Rasch, to California.
Tiomkin never intended for film music composition to become his career, nevertheless, he became one of Hollywood's most prolific music directors and
composers, writing over 250 film scores for some of the most successful screenplays ever produced. He composed the Academy Award nominated song
"Green Leaves of Summer" (1961), while his outstanding film scores include Lost Horizon (1937), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), It's a Wonderful Life (1946), Red River (1948), High Noon (1952), Dial M for Murder (1954), Giant (1956), The Old Man and the Sea (1958), Rio Bravo (1959), and The Alamo (1960).
For the movie Red River Tiomkin and Hairston created choral-orchestral grandeur with Tiomkin's composing and Hairston's
arrangements for male choir. Howard Hawk's epic film Land of the Pharaohs (1955) is cited for its score's significance in Dimitri Tiomkin: A Portrait, where Christopher Palmer writes that "'The building of the tomb' is conceived with a quasi-operatic realism, the mainspring of the musical action being the singing of the myriad workers engaged in constructing the pyramid." Here, Tiomkin composed on a lavish scale, including a ninety-piece orchestra, and a chorus of eighty under the direction of Jester Hairston. Other scenes required Hairston to conduct various choral sequences including the sound of girls' voices in the distance, and 'funeral songs of joy' where the choral ensemble becomes an integral part of the musical conceptualization–illustrating the moment of rebirth–through vocal color. This occurs again during the building of the Pharaoh's tomb, where the music totally sets the theme of a scene, void of dialogue. Deification and bondage are boldly juxtaposed as Egyptian priests sing chant-like melodies and slaves labor to sing contrapuntal chorales. Through all of Tiomkin's work in Hollywood, Hairston was one of his closest collaborators.
When working with students at college workshops, Hairston would tell them, "You can't sing legato when the master's beatin' you across your back." As an African-American, of his early character roles he said "We had a hard time then fighting for dignity. We had no power. We had
to take it, and because we took it the young people today have opportunities." He was a pioneer for his entire life. A generous and instructive choral conductor, Hairston continued to conduct well into his 90s, traversing the world as a goodwill ambassador for the United States State Department. Jester Hairston dedicated himself to preserving the classic spiritual. He organized Hollywood's first integrated choir and composed more than 300 of his own spirituals. In addition, his many choral arrangements are among the most-performed concert pieces in the genre including "I Want Jesus," "Deep River," "Poor Man Lazrus," "In Dat Great Gittin' Up Mornin'," "Oh, Rocka My Soul," "Go Down
In De Lonesome Valley," and "Hold On!." He was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Massachusetts in 1972 and received the Distinguished Alumnus Award from the Department of Music and Dance in 1992.
Of the many unlikely artistic collaborations, Dimitri Tiomkin's and Jester Hairston's pairing yielded some of the most striking choral music
in twentieth-century film, as well as bridging the gap of segregation in choral music. Tiomkin evolved as one of the most recognized film composers of the twentieth century. And while much of Hairston's work in film music was uncredited on celluloid, his legacy remains a testament to the magnitude of his artistic contributions.
