Ol' Man River (from Show Boat) - 1985 Digital Remaster

First published in 1926, American author and dramatist Edna Ferber's novel Show Boat chronicled the lives of a family of performers from the 1880s to the 1920s. They traveled on the Cotton Blossom, a floating theater that provided entertainment for the small isolated towns on the banks of the Mississippi.

The legendary composer Jerome Kern was impressed by the novel and wished to present a musical theatre version that followed the lives of the performers, stagehands and dock workers on a Mississippi show boat. He persuaded the lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II to adapt the book for the stage and straight away the pair felt the need for a song to pull all the diverse threads of the story together. They came up with "Ol' Man River," which is sung by a black dock worker on the showboat who contrasts the endless, rolling of the Mississippi River to the hardships of African Americans.

At first, Ferber had been shocked that anyone would want to adapt Show Boat as a musical. However, she relates in her autobiography that when Kern first played this song for her, "The music mounted, mounted, mounted, and I give you my word my hair stood on end, the tears came to my eyes, and I breathed like a heroine in a melodrama. This was great music. It was music that would outlast Kern's day and mine."