1959 Josh White Blues Legend Autograph + Candid Photos Signed London England

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Seller: memorabilia111 ✉️ (808) 100%, Location: Ann Arbor, Michigan, US, Ships to: US & many other countries, Item: 176270373014 1959 JOSH WHITE BLUES LEGEND AUTOGRAPH + CANDID PHOTOS SIGNED LONDON ENGLAND. JOSH WHITE CONCERT VINTAGE PHOTOS FROM 1959 ALONG WITH A VINTAGE TICKET FROM ST. PANCRAS TOWN HALL FROM THURSDAY, 16TH JULY 1959 AT 8 P.M. ST PANCRAS HALL IS NOT  Camden Town Hall IN LONDON ENGLAND PHOTOS ARER IN FAIR SHAPE ASNF HAVE WRITING ON BACK JOSH WHITE IN DRESSING ROOM WITH SEW AND CHAZ ST PANCRAS TOWN HALL 16 JULY 1959 JOSH WHITE JULY 1959 PHOTO BY PAUL AUTOGRAPH FROM JOSH WHITE IS ONE THE BACK OF THE VINTAGER TICKET TO CHAZ LUCK ALWAYS              JOSH                   WHITE
Joshua Daniel White (February 11, 1914 – September 5, 1969) was an American singer, guitarist, songwriter, actor and civil rights activist. He also recorded under the names Pinewood Tom and Tippy Barton in the 1930s. White grew up in the South during the 1920s and 1930s. He became a prominent race records artist, with a prolific output of recordings in genres including Piedmont blues, country blues, gospel music, and social protest songs. In 1931, White moved to New York, and within a decade his fame had spread widely. His repertoire expanded to include urban blues, jazz, traditional folk songs, and political protest songs, and he was in demand as an actor on radio, Broadway, and film. However, White's anti-segregationist and international human rights political stance presented in many of his recordings and in his speeches at rallies were subsequently used by McCarthyites as a pretext for labeling him a communist to slander and harass him. From 1947 through the mid-1960s, White was caught up in the anti-communist Red Scare, and as a consequence his career suffered. Nonetheless, White's musical style would go on to influence several generations of musical artists. Contents 1 Career 1.1 Early years 1.2 1930s: The Singing Christian and Pinewood Tom 1.3 1940s: "Josh White and His Guitar" 2 At the Café Society 3 White and the Roosevelts 4 Movies and theater 5 Early 1950s: White and the blacklist 6 Later life 6.1 1955–1969 6.2 Signature guitars 6.3 Fingernail problems 7 Death 8 Legacy 9 Song and poetry tributes 10 Personal life 11 Posthumous honors 12 Filmography 12.1 Other films containing recordings by White 13 See also 14 Footnotes 15 References 16 External links 16.1 Video Career Early years White was born on February 11, 1914, in the black section of Greenville, South Carolina, one of the four children of Reverend Dennis and Daisy Elizabeth White. His father told him that he was named after the Biblical character Joshua of the Old Testament. His mother introduced him to music when he was five years old, at which age he began singing in his church's choir. White's father threw a white bill collector out of his home in 1921, for which he was beaten so badly that he nearly died, and then was locked up in a mental institution, where he died nine years later.[1][2] Two months after his father had been taken away from the family, White left home with Blind Man Arnold, a black street singer, whom he agreed to lead across the South and for whom he would collect coins after performances. Arnold would then send White's mother two dollars a week. Arnold soon realized that he could profit from this gifted boy, who quickly learned to dance, sing, and play the tambourine. Over the next eight years, he rented the boy's services to other blind street singers, including Blind Blake and Blind Joe Taggart, and in time White mastered the varied guitar stylings of all of them. In order to appear sympathetic to the onlookers tossing coins, the old men kept White shoeless and in ragged short pants until he was sixteen years old. At night he slept in cotton fields or in horse stables, often on an empty stomach, while his employer slept in a black hotel. While guiding Taggart in 1927, White arrived in Chicago, Illinois. Mayo Williams, a producer for Paramount Records, recognized White's talents and began using him as a session guitarist. He backed many artists for recordings before recording his first popular Paramount record as the lead vocalist and lead guitarist on "Scandalous and a Shame", billed as "Blind Joe Taggart & Joshua White", thus becoming the youngest artist of the "race records" era. He was still shoeless and sleeping in horse stables, with all his payments for recordings going to Taggart and Arnold. After Williams left Paramount to start his own label in Chicago, he threatened that if Taggart did not pay White for his recording services he would call the authorities and have Taggart arrested for indentured servitude and keeping the boy out of school. For a few months after Taggart released him from servitude, White shared a room with Blind Blake at Williams's home before finding his own room in a boarding house. Finally, he was being paid for his recordings and for the first time in his life was able to buy proper clothes and shoes. For the next two years, White continued an active recording schedule in Chicago, until he had saved enough money to return to Greenville and take care of his mother and younger siblings.[3] 1930s: The Singing Christian and Pinewood Tom Late in 1930, ARC Records, based in New York, sent two A&R men to find White, the lead boy who had recorded for Paramount in 1928. After several months of searching, they found him recovering from a broken leg at his mother's home in Greenville. They persuaded her to sign a recording contract for her underage son, promising that they would record only religious songs and not the "devil's music" (the blues). White then moved to New York City and recorded religious songs for ARC, billed as "Joshua White, the Singing Christian". In a few months, having recorded his repertoire of religious songs, White was persuaded by ARC to record blues songs and to work as a session musician for other artists. White, 18 years old and still underage, signed a new contract under the name Pinewood Tom in 1932. This name was used only on his blues recordings. ARC used his birth name for new gospel recordings and soon added "The Singing Christian". ARC also released his recordings under the name Tippy Barton during this period. As a session guitarist, White recorded with Leroy Carr and Scrapper Blackwell, Buddy Moss, Charlie Spand, the Carver Boys, Walter Roland, and Lucille Bogan. In February 1936, he punched his left hand through a glass door during a bar fight, and the hand became infected with gangrene. Doctors recommended amputation of the hand, which White repeatedly refused. Amputation was averted, but his chording hand was left immobile. He retreated from his recording career to become a dock worker, an elevator operator, and a building superintendent. During the time when his hand was lame, he squeezed a small rubber ball to try to revive it. One night during a card game, White's left hand was revived completely. He immediately began practicing playing the guitar and soon put together a group, Josh White and His Carolinians, with his brother Billy and close friends Carrington Lewis, Sam Gary, and Bayard Rustin. They soon began playing private parties in Harlem. At one of these parties, on New Year's Eve 1938, Leonard De Paur, a Broadway choral director, was intrigued by White's singing. For the past six months, DePaur and the producers of a Broadway musical in development, John Henry, had been searching America for an actor, singer, and guitarist to play the lead role of Blind Lemon, a street minstrel who wandered back and forth across the stage narrating the story in song. Their initial auditions with native New York singers were unsuccessful, so they looked through previous race record releases to find a suitable artist. They eventually narrowed their search down to two people, Pinewood Tom and The Singing Christian, both pseudonyms used by White. 1940s: "Josh White and His Guitar" After months of rehearsals and out-of-town productions in Philadelphia and Boston, John Henry opened on Broadway on January 10, 1940, with Paul Robeson as John Henry and White as Blind Lemon Jefferson. The musical did not have a long run, but it boosted White's career. He began working with Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, Burl Ives, and the Golden Gate Quartet in the CBS radio series Back Where I Come From, written by folk-song collector Alan Lomax and directed by Nicholas Ray. Ray later produced live engagements and recordings for two historic duos of which White was a member. The first of these was the duo of White and Lead Belly, who had a six-month engagement at New York's Village Vanguard nightclub, teaming the young and virile city blues singer—the "Joe Louis of the Blues Guitar"—with the older, white-haired country blues singer—the "King of the 12 String Guitar" (appellations given to them by Woody Guthrie in his Daily Worker newspaper review of their show). "Josh White & Lead Belly" achieved great publicity, the excitement of sold-out shows, positive reviews, recordings, and film shorts. Forty-five years after the event, Max Gordon, the owner of the Village Vanguard, wrote in his memoir Live at the Village Vanguard, "The greatest conversations ever heard at the Vanguard was the carving out of the guitars between Lead Belly and Josh White." The second duo produced by Ray teamed White with Libby Holman, a white "torch singer" of the 1920s, who was branded an immoral woman for allegedly killing her millionaire husband. Their pairing created more publicity and controversy for White, as they were the first mixed-race male and female artists to perform together, record together and tour together in previously segregated venues across the United States. They continued performing off and on for the next six years, while making an album and a film together. White and Holman frequently requested that the War Department send them overseas during World War II to give USO concert performances for the troops. Despite a letter of recommendation from Eleanor Roosevelt, they were repeatedly rejected as "too controversial", considering that the U.S. Armed Forces were still segregated throughout World War II.[4][5] Meanwhile, White's album Harlem Blues: Josh White Trio (with Sidney Bechet and Wilson Myers, on the Blue Note label) produced the hit single "Careless Love", and his controversial Columbia Records album Joshua White & His Carolinians: Chain Gang, produced by John Hammond, was the first race record ever forced upon the white radio stations and record stores in America's South and caused such a furor that it reached the desk of President Franklin Roosevelt. On December 20, 1940, White and the Golden Gate Quartet, sponsored by Eleanor Roosevelt, gave a historic concert in Washington, D.C., at the Library of Congress's Coolidge Auditorium to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which abolished slavery (the live recording of this concert was released on CD in 2005). One month later, White and the Golden Gate Quartet performed at the inauguration of President Roosevelt in Washington. White refashioned his music, performance and image with his re-emergence on the entertainment scene in 1939 and 1940. The industry and audiences alike no longer saw a southern black country boy, but instead a mature, self-educated, articulate, outspoken and sophisticated 26-year-old man, who possessed a strikingly handsome and sexual bearing and personality both on and off the stage. He soon became the first blues performer to attract a large white and middle-class African-American following and was the first African-American artist to perform in previously segregated venues in the US, as he transcended the typical racial and social barriers of the time who associated blues with a rural and working-class African-American audience, while performing in nightclubs and theaters during the 1930s and 1940s.[4] During the 1940s, as a matinee idol with magnetic sexual charisma and a commanding stage presence, White not only was an international star of recordings, concerts, nightclubs, radio, film, and Broadway but also achieved a unique position for an African American of the segregated era by becoming accepted and befriended by white society, aristocracy, European royalty, and America's ruling family, the Roosevelts. One of his most popular recordings during the 1940s was "One Meatball", lyrics a song about a "little man" who could afford only one meatball. The song is an adaptation by the American songwriters Hy Zaret and Lou Singer of a song called "Lay of the One Fishball" lyrics[6] by Harvard professor George Martin Lane, which was to the tune of an English folk song called "Sucking Cider Through a Straw" lyrics. When offered the song he immediately recorded it, and it became the first million-selling record by a male African-American artist; according to his biographer, Elijah Wald, it was "Josh's biggest hit by far".[7] The Andrews Sisters and Jimmy Savo soon recorded their own versions, which also became hits (other cover versions were recorded in subsequent years by Bing Crosby, Lightnin' Hopkins, Lonnie Donegan, Dave Van Ronk, Ry Cooder, Washboard Jungle, Tom Paxton, and Shinehead). White's hits from the 1940s include "Jelly, Jelly", a song with sexually charged lyrics, composed by Earl Hines and Billy Eckstine; "The House I Live In (What Is America to Me)", a patriotic American song during World War II, written by Earl Robinson and Lewis Allan, with lyrics describing what White hoped America would become after the war and government-sanctioned segregation ended (White had the first hit record with the song, which he then taught to Frank Sinatra for his MGM film short about the song, which won an Academy Award); "Waltzing Matilda", an Australian folk song taught to White by an Australian sailor backstage at the Cafe Society (White re-arranged the song in a waltz tempo and then donated his services to the government by recording it the next week for the government's V Disc label to boost the morale of the troops overseas; it was an immediate hit); "St. James Infirmary", with new words and music by White; the old English folk song "Lass with the Delicate Air"; "John Henry", with new words and music by White; "Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho", with new words and music by White; "The Riddle Song (I Gave My Love a Cherry)", a traditional English folk song; "Evil Hearted Man", with words and music by White; "Miss Otis Regrets", by Cole Porter; "The House of the Rising Sun", with new words and music by White (subsequently recorded by Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, Dave Van Ronk, Bob Dylan, and the Animals, who set it to a rock beat in 1964); and "Strange Fruit". White recorded in various contexts, sometimes accompanied only by his guitar and sometimes playing with others backing him on guitar and string bass or piano or with jazz ensembles, gospel vocal groups, or a swing jazz band, as in his popular 1945 recording "I Left a Good Deal in Mobile". He performed and recorded with the jazz pianist Mary Lou Williams, and besides his duets with Libby Holman and with Lead Belly, he recorded and performed duets with Buddy Moss and often performed duets with his friend Billie Holiday. He also recorded songs of social and political protest with Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Burl Ives, and Lee Hays in their folk cooperative group the Almanac Singers and in the later group People's Songs, which consisted of the core of musicians and activists who formed Almanac Singers. In 1945, with the success of his hit single "One Meatball", in addition to his national radio show, his appearance in the film Crimson Canary, and publicity from Café Society, White became the first African-American popular music artist to make a national concert hall tour of America, with the Jamaican singer and dancer Josephine Premice as his opening act. Subsequent concert tours included Ethel Waters, Willie Bryant, Timmie Rogers, the Katherine Dunham Company, the Hall Johnson Choir, Mary Lou Williams, Lillian Fitzgerald, the Chocolateers, and the Three Poms.[8] The success of this tour created a demand for a return tour of American concert halls the following year. On this second tour, the opening act was the innovative dancer and choreographer Pearl Primus, who had worked with him at the Café Society. Primus had choreographed several performance pieces to the music of White, and on this tour they performed these numbers together. She performed these pieces in concerts for the rest of her career. As an actor between 1939 and 1950, White appeared in dozens of radio dramas, including the classic Norman Corwin plays, and star or co-star on the New York stage in three musicals and three dramatic plays, in addition to appearing in several films. In February 1945, Paramount Pictures in Hollywood optioned John Lomax’s projected autobiography, Adventures of a Ballad Hunter, with Bing Crosby to star as Lomax and White as Lead Belly. Lead Belly stayed in California until the end of the year, hoping to be involved in the project, but the film never got past the preproduction stage. White appeared in other films, including The Crimson Canary (1945), in which he portrayed himself; the soundtrack of the film Hans Richter film Dreams That Money Can Buy (1947), in which with Libby Holman he sang the song "The Girl With the Pre-Fabricated Heart" (the film won the Special Prize at the Venice Film Festival and was a contribution to the avant-garde film movement); and the John Sturges film The Walking Hills (1949), in which White co-starred with Randolph Scott, John Ireland, Ella Raines, and Arthur Kennedy, in one of Hollywood's first films in which an African American was portrayed as an equal character in the story. As a leading artist and activist of the era, who had begun writing and recording political protest songs as early as 1933 and who would speak and sing at human rights rallies, White was prominently associated with the civil rights movement of the 1940s. This activism made White's politics suspect in Hollywood during the McCarthy era and, accordingly, The Walking Hills was his final film role. At the Café Society White and Mary Lou Williams, ca. October 1947 (photograph by William P. Gottlieb) The Café Society nightclub, located in New York's Greenwich Village, was the first integrated nightclub in the United States, where blacks and whites could sit, socialize and dance in the same room and enjoy entertainment. It opened in late 1938 with a three-month engagement of the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra, Billie Holiday and comedian Jack Gilford, immediately making it New York's hottest club. One day, John Hammond asked White to meet Barney Josephson, the owner of the club. As soon as Josephson heard White and saw the charisma he exuded, he told Hammond that White was going to become the first black male sex symbol in America. It was Josephson who decided at that first encounter, on the stage apparel he would have designed for White—which would become a trademark for years to come—a black velvet shirt open to the stomach and silk slacks. While starring at the Café Society over the next decade and becoming exposed to audiences, performers and beautiful music from around the world, White expanded his musical interests and repertoire to include various styles which he would subsequently record. He had remarkable success in popularizing recordings in diverse musical genres, which ranged from his original repertoire of Negro blues, gospel and protest songs to Broadway show tunes, cabaret, pop, and white American, English and Australian folk songs. The Greenwich Village club was so successful that Josephson soon opened a larger Café Society Uptown, at which White also performed, gaining him recognition by the New York Times as the "Darling of Fifth Avenue". The Roosevelt family, New York society, international royalty, and Hollywood stars regularly came to see White at the Café Society, and he used his fame and visibility to create, foster and develop relations between blacks and whites, making him a national figure and voice of racial integration in America. He was thought to have had numerous romantic liaisons with wealthy society women, singers, and Hollywood actresses, but the rumors were never substantiated. The women in question always referred to White as their close friend, and Lena Horne and Eartha Kitt also referred to him as a mentor. The Café Society made White a star and put him in a unique position as an African American. However, because of the club's unique social status of mixing the races, it also became a haven for New York's social progressives, whose politics leaned to the left. As it played a vital role in White's ascendancy to stardom, it would also one day play a crucial role in his fall from grace. White and the Roosevelts Beginning in 1940, White established a long and close relationship with the family of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, and would become the closest African-American confidant to the President of the United States; and the Roosevelts were the godparents of Josh White, Jr. (born November 30, 1940). In January 1941, White performed at the President's Inauguration, and two months later, he released another highly controversial record album, Southern Exposure, which included six anti-segregationist songs with liner notes written by the African-American writer Richard Wright, and the subtitle of which was An Album of Jim Crow Blues. Like the Chain Gang album, and with revelatory yet inflammatory songs such as "Uncle Sam Says", "Jim Crown Train", "Bad Housing Blues", "Defense Factory Blues", "Southern Exposure", and "Hard Time Blues", it also was forced upon[clarification needed] the southern white radio stations and record stores, caused outrage in the South and also was brought to the attention of President Roosevelt. However, instead of making White persona non grata in segregated America, it resulted in Roosevelt asking White to become the first African-American artist to give a command performance at the White House, in 1941. After that first White House command performance ended, the Roosevelts invited White into their private chambers, where they spent more than three hours talking about White's life story of growing up in Jim Crow South, listening to his songs written about those experiences, and drinking Café Royale (coffee and brandy). At one point during that evening, the President said to White, "You know, Josh, when I first heard your song 'Uncle Sam Says,' I thought you were referring to me as Uncle Sam....Am I right?" White responded, "Yes, Mr. President, I wrote that song to you after seeing how my brother was treated in the segregated section of Fort Dix army camp.... However that wasn't the first song I wrote to you.... In 1933, I wrote and recorded a song called 'Low Cotton,' about the plight of Negro cotton pickers down South, and in the lyrics I made an appeal directly to you to help their situation." The President, interested and impressed at the candor of his response, then asked White to sing those songs to him again. A friendship developed, and five more command performances followed, in addition to two appearances at the Inaugurations of 1941 and 1945; and the White family would spend many Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays with the Roosevelts at their Hyde Park, New York mansion (Springwood). The President sent White to give concerts overseas as a "goodwill ambassador", and he was often referred to in the press as the "Presidential Minstrel".[9] More importantly, it was White's songs of social protest, such as "Uncle Sam Says"listen and "Defense Factory Blues",listen which caused the President to begin exploring how to desegregate the U.S. armed forces.[citation needed] Meanwhile, White's recordings of "Beloved Comrade" (the President's favorite song), "Freedom Road", "Free and Equal Blues", and "House I Live In (What Is America to Me)", were great songs of inspiration to the Roosevelts and the country during World War II.[citation needed] After the President's death, White's younger brother William White became Eleanor Roosevelt's personal assistant, house manager and chauffeur for the remainder of her life. In 1949, Fisk University honored White with an honorary doctorate; and the local Chicago NBC radio series Destination Freedom, written by Richard Durham, aired a half-hour dramatized biography of White's life entitled "Help the Blind". In 1950, Eleanor Roosevelt (then the United Nations ambassador in charge of war relief) and White made a historical speaking and concert tour of the capitals of Europe to lift the spirits of those war-torn countries. The tour built to such proportions that when they arrived in Stockholm, the presentation had to be moved from the Opera House to the city's soccer stadium where 50,000 came out in the pouring rain to hear Mrs. Roosevelt speak and White perform.[citation needed] All during this tour, audiences across Europe enthusiastically requested White to sing his famed anti-lynching recording of "Strange Fruit", but on each occasion he would respond, "My mother always told me that when you have problems in your background you don't give those problems to your neighbor....So, that's a song I will sing back home until I never have to sing it again, but for you, I would now like to sing its sister song, written by the same man ('The House I Live In')." Movies and theater As an actor, White acted several more times on Broadway in the late 1940s. In 1947 he appeared in German artist and avant-garde filmmaker Hans Richter's Dreams that Money Can Buy, co-starring Libby Holman along with the participation of Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, Alexander Calder, Darius Milhaud and Fernand Léger. It won an award at that year's Venice Film Festival. He also appeared in John Sturges' 1949 western The Walking Hills with Randolph Scott, Ella Raines, Edgar Buchanan, and Arthur Kennedy, in which his character, an itinerant musician, was not a stereotype but on an equal footing with the white characters. He was still young and very handsome and it hard not to speculate on what might have been had the blacklist not put an end to his budding movie career.[10] Early 1950s: White and the blacklist White had reached the zenith of his career when touring with Eleanor Roosevelt on a celebrated and triumphant Goodwill tour of Europe. He had been hosted by the continent's prime ministers and royal families, and had just performed before 50,000 cheering fans at Stockholm's soccer stadium. Amidst this tour, while in Paris in June 1950, White received a call from Mary Chase, his manager in New York, telling him that Red Channels (who had been sending newsletters to the media since 1947 about White and other artists who they warned were subversive) had just released and distributed a thick magazine with subversive details regarding 151 artists from the entertainment and media industries whom they labeled communist sympathizers. White's name was prominent on this list. There never had been an official blacklist—until now. White immediately went to discuss the situation with Mrs. Roosevelt—to ask her advice and help. With great empathy, she told him that her voice on his behalf would hinder his efforts to clear his name. She explained that if she wasn't the widow of the president they would also be crucifying her. She continued that the right-wing press had been calling her a "pinko", citing her social activism and friendships with non-whites. That night, White called his manager and alerted her that he would be flying back to America the next day so that he could clear his name. Upon arriving at New York's Idlewild Airport, the FBI met him, took him into a customs holding room, interrogated him, and held him for hours while waiting word from Washington as to whether White, who was born in the United States, would be deported to Europe. For a decade, White had been a leading voice of black America and a voice that reminded Americans of social injustices, while also becoming a major pop star and sex symbol from his platform at the Cafe Society. However, when Barney Josephson's brother and attorney Leon, who was also a lawyer for the communist-created International Labor Defense, was brought before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1947 and refused to testify, he was sent to prison. The right-wing media publicity centered on the Cafe Society as a hotbed of communists. By December of that year, the original downtown club had to close, and by 1949, the uptown club was forced to shut its doors. Virtually every artist who regularly worked at the club had contributed to left-leaning benefits and was suspected as being a communist sympathizer. White was not a communist and was not active in any political party. However, when he was told that people's human rights were being threatened and asked to participate in a benefit or a rally, he was always willing to lend his voice to the cause. Whether it was the plight of African Americans in the South or oppressed people in Yugoslavia, it was all the same to him. Since his return from Europe in June 1950, White had been interrogated every week, and was threatened that his career would be finished and that he would lose his family. Controversially, in a fervent desire to defend his reputation, and challenge his accusers and the blacklist (while under intense pressure from his manager and his family), White told the FBI that he would go to Washington, appear before HUAC and set the record straight.[citation needed] With the assistance of his daughter Bunny, White began writing a lengthy letter about his life and his beliefs that he would plan to read as a statement at his HUAC appearance. Before going to Washington, he made trips to visit two trusted friends and ask them read his statement—Eleanor Roosevelt and Paul Robeson. Bunny accompanied him on his trip up to Hyde Park to visit Mrs. Roosevelt. She recalled the visit in an interview with Josh White Estate Archival biographer Douglas Yeager: "Mrs. Roosevelt told Daddy that he had written a good letter. However, she cautioned him not to go to Washington, explaining that the HUAC Committee would turn his testimony against him if he appeared and they weren't satisfied with his statement." A few days later, White drove up to Paul Robeson's Connecticut home by himself. Paul Robeson, a former All-American football player, was a Columbia University-trained African-American attorney fluent in 12 languages, who lived most of the 1920s and 1930s in London and was active in world human rights and the movement to decolonize Africa. However, he was best known as an international star of recordings and film, the most celebrated stage Othello in history, and the highest-paid concert performer in the world. He also was the most respected and admired artist-activist throughout the world, with friendships that included the leaders of many countries including the Soviet Union, where Robeson was considered a cultural and social giant and iconic figure. To the social progressives in America, he was the most respected and important voice of truth and social justice in the world. In 1939, at the onset of World War II in Europe, Paul Robeson and his family returned to America and maintained a residence in Connecticut. Robeson had been White's friend and artistic collaborator for many years and was the godfather to White's daughter Beverly. They did not always agree on everything politically, however White held great respect for Robeson. Years later in a radio interview, White stated that Robeson never once mentioned the Communist Party to him, and in fact advised White not to get too involved with any political party. Robeson supported America's war effort and was considered a patriotic champion of freedom and liberty after his national radio broadcast concert performance and subsequent record album Ballad for Americans. However, when American Negro soldiers returning from the war were still confronted with government sanctioned segregation, racism and even lynchings, it became evident that Robeson was greatly disappointed with the American government. In the postwar years, his socialist belief structure seemed better aligned to the Soviet Union, which had been America's ally in the war, but by 1947 had become their bitter enemy. In 1949, America's media and press reported a speech Robeson had made in [Paris], alleging that he said if a war would ever take place between the USSR and America that American Negroes would not fight in America's army (the U.S. media and press version of the speech has since been found to be inaccurate and slanted).[citation needed] Before going to Washington, White felt he had to meet with Robeson, ask him read his statement, and tell him of decision to go to Washington. One paragraph out of the long biographical letter referred to Robeson: "I have great admiration for Mr. Robeson as an actor and a great singer, and if what I read in the papers is true, I feel sad over the help he's been giving to people who despise America. He has a right to his own opinions, but when he, or anybody, pretends to talk for a whole race, he's kidding himself. His statement that the Negroes would not fight for their country, against Soviet Russia or any other enemy, is both wrong and an insult: because I stand ready to fight Russian or any enemy of America." In the biography Robeson: Lives of the Left, Martin Duberman wrote about the encounter. Apparently White and Robeson went up to the bathroom of Robeson's master bedroom, turned on all the faucets so that the FBI listening devices couldn't hear their conversation, and began discussing White's statement and his upcoming appearance before HUAC. Robeson read the prepared statement and told White that he personally felt it would be wrong to go to Washington and appear before HUAC. He continued that he would never appear before the Committee, but that this was a decision White would have to make on his own. Reportedly, White painfully told him, "I feel like a heel Paul, but they've got me in a vise... I have to go." White was called into the FBI offices dozens of times between 1947 and 1954, but no one is absolutely certain what special vise they had him in, besides threatening to destroy his career and family, as many of the pages found in his FBI files (via the Freedom of Information Act) are still blacked out by the government. It is the belief of White, Jr., and many others however, that the FBI, displeased with White's prowess with white women, used it against him (as they had done with Jack Johnson years earlier), by threatening him with imprisonment and saying that they would concoct a trumped-up charge of violating the Mann Act, "for transporting women across state lines for immoral purposes".[citation needed] On September 1, 1950, White, appearing with only his wife Carol at his side, sat down before HUAC in Washington, D.C., regarding communist influence in the entertainment industry and African-American community. He did not give the HUAC Committee names of Communist Party members. At length, he told them of his life story as a child, seeing his father beaten and dragged through the streets of Greenville by white authorities, and having to leave home at the age of seven to lead street singers across America in order to feed his family. He defended his right and responsibility as a folksinger to bring social injustices to the attention of the public through his songs, and then passionately read the chilling lyrics of one of his most famous recordings, the anti-lynching song "Strange Fruit" (written by Abel Meeropol) which was then placed into the Congressional Record. He also included his words about Paul Robeson regarding the alleged statement Robeson had made in Paris. White would later defend his testimony as a "friendly witness" (a term applied to those who appeared voluntarily before HUAC) by claiming that he had a right to defend his name against unjust accusations, that the scope of his testimony was limited, that he did not state anything that was not already known, that he never gave the FBI or HUAC names of members of the Communist Party, and that he was sincerely opposed to communism. However, testifying before the committee and speaking out against Paul Robeson angered his large socially progressive fan base, who believed that testifying before the HUAC Committee acknowledged their right to exist. Not being privileged to know the details of his FBI interrogations, many of this group also suspected that he had given the FBI names of Communist Party members, which he had not. The fact that the future career and reputation of baseball legend Jackie Robinson was not hampered when he appeared before the HUAC Committee one year earlier, while expressing virtually the same words as White had about Robeson's alleged statement in Spain, did not seem to matter to White's detractors. Robinson's fan base did not derive from the political left as White's had. White's HUAC appearance greatly affected his posthumous reputation in America, causing him to become the only artist of the era to be blacklisted by both the Right and Left. He felt immense pressures from several sides to appear before the HUAC Committee, and based upon his harsh early life experiences learned in Jim Crow South, it was apparent that White believed his only option to protect the lives of his family and career and to survive, was to figuratively "ride the fence post"—go to Washington, denounce the Communist Party, but not name any names of Communist Party members. In the end, Mrs. Roosevelt had an astute understanding of the political climate in Washington and in America when she warned White that the government would turn his testimony against him. Indeed, this was the case, and White's blacklisting would not be lifted for years. With work rapidly drying up in America, White relocated to London for much of 1950 to 1955, where he hosted his own BBC radio show, My Guitar Is Old as Father Time, resumed his recording career, with new successes, such as "On Top of Old Smokey", "Lonesome Road", "I Want You and Need You", "Wanderings", "Molly Malone" and "I'm Going to Move to the Outskirts of Town", and gave concert tours throughout Europe and beyond. However, back in the United States—the country of his birth—the McCarthy anti-communist hysteria had already greatly dismembered White's career as early as 1947, when he lost his record contract and his national radio show, and was barred from appearing on other radio shows. His Hollywood blacklisting began in 1948, after completing his final film role in The Walking Hills, and he would not be allowed to appear on U.S. television from 1948 until 1963. Meanwhile, the 1940s politically Left-leaning social progressives who had survived the Red Scare, had begun reviving the folk music industry in America. They would keep White shut out from their folk festivals, their folk magazines, their emerging record companies, and their media and press for most of the remaining years of his life. Later life 1955–1969 From the mid-1950s until his death in 1969 from heart disease in Manhasset, New York, White primarily performed in concert halls, nightclubs, and folk music venues and festivals around the world outside America. However, in 1955, the brave young owner of a new American record company, Jac Holzman, who wasn't afraid of the political pressure from the right or the left, offered White the opportunity to record again in his home country. He could only offer him $100, but he promised him artistic control and the best recording equipment available. They recorded the Josh White: 25th Anniversary album, which established Elektra Records and slowly began reviving White's career by finding a young, new audience who made it possible for him to work again in America. Accordingly, his name and reputation in America has only begun to recover in recent years. At the same time the UK guitarist and entrepreneur Ivor Mairants worked with White to create The Josh White Guitar Method (Boosey & Hawkes) in 1956. This was the first blues guitar instruction book ever published, and was an influential book for the fledgling UK blues and folk scene. The UK guitarist John Renbourn and the American guitarist Stefan Grossman (who was living in the UK at the time) have cited it as a critical influence on their playing, and in 1961 he starred in The Josh White Show for Granada Television (a franchise holder for the commercial ITV network) in the United Kingdom. White's blacklisting in the American television industry was finally broken in 1963, when President John F. Kennedy invited him to appear on the national CBS television's civil rights special "Dinner with the President".[11] Kennedy told him how his records had inspired him when he was a college student in the Roosevelt era.[12] Later that year he was seen again on national television performing for the masses on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial at the historic March on Washington. In 1964, White gave a command performance for Lester Pearson, the Prime Minister of Canada, and in January 1965 he performed at the inauguration of President Lyndon Baines Johnson. In his final years, he would make American television appearances on The Merv Griffin Show, Hugh Hefner's Playboy's Penthouse and Hootenanny, among others. Meanwhile, he starred in two concert specials for national Swedish television in 1962 and 1967; starred in the 1965 ITV Network special Heart Song: Josh White in the United Kingdom (with guest artists Julie Felix and Alexis Korner); was a guest star on the Canadian CBC-TV program Let's Sing Out with Oscar Brand in 1967; and made his final television appearance in May 1969 on the CBC-TV variety show One More Time. Signature guitars The success of the 1956 book The Josh White Guitar Method prompted Mairants to commission a Zenith "Josh White" signature guitar based on White's Martin 0021 from the German guitar maker Oscar Teller. The Scottish guitarist Bert Jansch owned one of these models in his early playing years. On the last page of Josh White Guitar Method (printed in 1956) is a photo of this Zenith Josh White signature guitar and some text about it.[13] The Guild Guitar Company in the US worked with White on a signature model in 1965. This fact was confirmed in a TV program, The History Detectives, by Mark Dronge, whose father, Al, was one of the founders of Guild Guitars. Dronge took White to the Guild factory in 1965. A guitar made to White's specifications was meant to become a signature guitar for White, but it was never mass produced. Dronge explained that "The scene was starting to change. The Beatles were so influential and all these bands came out and the electric music was getting bigger and the plans for Josh White model just kind of fell by the wayside, unfortunately."[14][15] White's custom-made Ovation guitar, 1965–66 Carol White vividly recounted to White's archival biographer, Douglas Yeager, that in 1963 and 1964 the engineers of a new guitar company in development spent several months with their paperwork and drawings on her dining room table, as White and the engineers designed the first round-bodied guitar. Upon completion, the first Ovation Guitar was called the Josh White Model.[16] According to the "Ovation Original Program" White played the Josh White Model Ovation guitar at the Hotel America, in Hartford, Connecticut, on November 14, 1966.[17][18] In 1965–1967, the Ovation Guitar Company made a signature guitar for White, which was the first made for an African American.[19][20] White was the first official Ovation endorser.[21] An article in Music Trades magazine in December 1966 stated that "Earlier this year, the present double parabolic form was perfected after extensive consultations with professional guitarists including the pioneering guitar folk singer, Josh White. "Ovation Instruments unveiled their new line of acoustical guitars at a reception and dinner held last month at the Hotel America, Hartford, Conn. In a program which featured demonstrations by White, one of Americas best-known folk singers, and the Balladeers, a new, young, singing group; and remarks by Charles Kaman, president of Kaman Aircraft Corporation, parent company of Ovation Instruments, and Jim D. Gurley, program manager of Ovation Instruments, the features of the Ovation guitar models were presented to 300 representatives of the press and the music industry. "Josh White, playing Ovation's "Josh White" model—declared to be the first guitar which the famous folk singer has ever endorsed—held the crowd spellbound. His thirty-minute performance brought forth every nuance of the instrument's unique capability to render clear treble and deep resonant bass notes. Closing the show with a family ensemble with his two daughters, Mr. White brought down the house. It was one of the rare occasions when he and his children, though all professionals, have played together as a group."[22] Fingernail problems White had a hands-on influence on Ovation. White used to come to the factory. His fingernails were brittle and prone to cracking due to psoriasis, a condition that got worse as he grew older. Ovation's subassembly foreman, Al Glemboski, made a cast of White's fingers, from which he made a set of fiberglass nails. White glued on these false nails with an industrial glue, Eastman 910, which would later be marketed as Super Glue. He returned to the factory every other month for a new set of nails.[23] Death In 1961, White's health began a sharp decline after he had the first of the three heart attacks and the progressive heart disease that would plague him over his final eight years. As a lifelong smoker he also had progressive emphysema, in addition to ulcers, and severe psoriasis in his hands and calcium deficiency, which caused the skin to peel from his fingers and left his fingernails broken and bleeding after every concert. During the last two years of his life, as his heart weakened dramatically, his wife put him in the hospital for four weeks after he completed each two-week concert tour. Finally, his doctors felt his only survival option was to attempt a new procedure to replace heart valves. The surgery failed. White died on the operating table on September 5, 1969, at the North Shore Hospital in Manhasset, New York.[24] Harry Belafonte, after learning of White's death, said in an interview with the Associated Press, "I can't tell you how sad I am. I spent many, many hours with him in the years of my early development. He had a profound influence on my style. At the time I came along, he was the only popular black folk singer, and through his artistry exposed America to a wealth of material about the life and conditions of black people that had not been sung by any other artist." Legacy White was in many senses a trailblazer: popular country bluesman in the early 1930s, responsible for introducing a mass white audience to folk-blues in the 1940s, and the first black singer-guitarist to star in Hollywood films and on Broadway. On one hand he was famous for his civil rights songs, which made him a favorite of the Roosevelts, and on the other he was known for his sexy stage persona (a first for a black male artist).[25] He was the first black singer to give a White House command performance (1941), to perform in previously segregated hotels (1942), to get a million-selling record ("One Meatball", 1944), and the first to make a solo concert tour of America (1945).[26] He was also the first folk and blues artist to perform in a nightclub, the first to tour internationally, and (along with Lead Belly and Woody Guthrie) the first to be honored with a US postage stamp.[1][27] White and Libby Holman became the first mixed-race male and female artists to perform together, record together and tour together in previously segregated venues across the United States. They continued performing off and on for the next six years, while making an album and a film together.[4][5] White was seen as an influence on hundreds of artists of diverse musical styles, including: Pete Seeger, Lee Hays, Oscar Brand, Ed McCurdy, Lonnie Donegan, Alexis Korner, Cy Coleman, Elvis Presley, Merle Travis, Joel Grey, Bob Gibson, Dave Van Ronk, Phish, Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem, Shel Silverstein, John Fahey, Bob Dylan, Peter, Paul and Mary, Judy Collins, Roger McGuinn, David Crosby, Mike Bloomfield, Danny Kalb, Ry Cooder, John Fogerty, Don McLean, Robert Plant and Eva Cassidy; in addition to those African-American artists, such as Blind Boy Fuller, Robert Johnson, Brownie McGhee, Lena Horne, Nat King Cole, Pearl Primus, Josephine Premice, Eartha Kitt, Harry Belafonte, Odetta, Ray Charles, Josh White, Jr., Jackie Washington, the Chambers Brothers, and Richie Havens, who in the footsteps of White were also able to break considerable barriers that had hampered African-American artists in the past.[citation needed] Song and poetry tributes The folk singer Bob Gibson and his writing partner, Shel Silverstein, wrote and recorded the song "Heavenly Choir" in 1979, a tribute to three of their most beloved artists, White, Hank Williams and Janis Joplin. The first verse is about White.[28] Peter Yarrow, of Peter, Paul & Mary and a protégé of White's, eulogized him in the song "Goodbye Josh", which was included on his first solo album, Peter.[28] Jack Williams wrote and recorded "A Natural Man", a tribute to White, on his album Walkin' Dreams in 2002.[29] The poet and historian Leatrice Emeruwa published the poem "Josh White Is Dead" in 1970.[30] Personal life In 1933, White married Carol Carr, a New York gospel singer. They raised Blondell (Bunny), Julianne (Beverly), Josh Jr., Carolyn (Fern), Judy, and a foster daughter, Delores, in their home in the Sugar Hill section of Harlem, New York. White's younger brother Billy (who he moved up from Greenville) and Carol's mother lived with them in the White household. His father died in a South Carolina mental institution in 1930, the result of beatings at the hands of Greenville deputies a decade earlier. His mother, Daisy Elizabeth, a stern and religious woman, remained in her hometown of Greenville and lived into her 80s. She came to visit White in New York several times a year, and he traveled to see her in South Carolina, but she didn't allow his nonreligious recordings in her home. Except for his childhood performances in her Greenville church in the 1920s, she never again saw her son perform, refusing to attend concerts where he sang non-sacred songs. His brother Billy and (future civil rights leader) Bayard Rustin, Sam Gary and Carrington Lewis performed and recorded with White as Josh White and His Carolinians (from 1939 to 1940) and appeared with him in the Broadway musical John Henry. After World War II, Billy became Eleanor Roosevelt's house manager and chauffeur for the remainder of her life. On occasion in the early 1940s, when the grandmother watched the children, Carol would join White in singing, performing and recording with the folk collaborative group, the Almanac Singers. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Carol was a guest on Eleanor Roosevelt's television talk show, and in 1982 she was a featured speaker at the Smithsonian Institution's 100th anniversary celebration of the birth of Franklin D. Roosevelt in Washington, while her son, Josh White, Jr., performed a musical program of songs his father had presented at one of his White House command performances. Josh White, Jr., a successful singer-songwriter, guitarist, actor, educator, and social activist for the past 60 years, performed and recorded with his father as a duet from 1944 to 1961 and performed with him in two Broadway plays (Josh White, Jr., won a 1949 Tony Award for the play How Long Till Summer). At various times in the 1950s and 1960s, White's daughters Beverly, Fern, and Judy also performed, recorded and appeared on radio and television with him. In 1964, when new anti-segregationist legislation made it easier for African Americans to purchase real estate in previously all-white neighborhoods, White and his wife bought a duplex in the Rosedale, Queens section of New York City. His daughter Beverly and her family lived upstairs, and White and his wife couple lived downstairs. White lived in this semi-suburban home for the rest of his life. Carol White continued to live there and worked until she was in her 80s, first as manager of a clothing boutique manager and then as a social worker serving people in nursing homes, until her sudden death in 1998. One week before her fatal heart attack, she received final confirmation that the United States Postal Service would honor White in 1998 with a postage stamp. When shown a mock-up photograph of the stamp by White's estate manager, Douglas Yeager, she expressed joy, gratitude and a long-awaited satisfaction that after all those painful years of social isolation in the McCarthy era, White would be receiving this recognition. She felt that she could finally go in peace.[31] Posthumous honors In 1983, Josh White, Jr., starred in the long-running and rave-reviewed biographical dramatic musical stage play on his father's life, Josh: The Man & His Music, written and directed by Broadway veteran Peter Link, which premiered at the Michigan Public Theatre in Lansing. Subsequently, the state of Michigan formally proclaimed April 20, 1983, to be Josh White & Josh White, Jr. Day. In 1984, when asked why his father's recordings were so hard to find, Josh White, Jr. said, "Normally, when a person of my old man's stature passes away, a flood of re-releases and best-of packages are dumped on the market. But when he died [...] there was only one memorial album that Elektra put out and, after that, there was nothing. That's why in my performances I never omit a section devoted to my father's songs, his interpretations of other people's songs, and his style of guitar playing." In 1987, the Josh White, Jr. tribute album to his father's music, Jazz, Ballads and Blues (Rykodisc, produced by Douglas Yeager), received a Grammy nomination. In 1996, Josh White, Jr. released a well-received second tribute album to his father's music, entitled House of the Rising Son (Silverwolf, produced by Josh White, Jr., Douglas Yeager and Peter Link). On June 26, 1998, the United States Postal Service issued a 32-cent postage stamp honoring White, unveiling it on the National Mall, in Washington, D.C., followed by a concert tribute of his songs by Josh White, Jr. In the same year, Smithsonian Folkways released an album of White's work, entitled Free and Equal Blues, his only solo album released on the label (though he was featured on several compilation works both before and after).[32] From 2002 to 2006, the historic Americana show Glory Bound, which starred Odetta, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Oscar Brand, and Josh White, Jr., toured America, in a salute to the first three folk and blues artists to be honored with U.S. postage stamps, Josh White, Lead Belly and Woody Guthrie. On February 27, 2010, a 36-inch high bust of White was unveiled at the LeQuire Gallery in Nashville, Tennessee. It is part of an exhibit by the sculptor Alan LeQuire entitled "Cultural Heroes", which will tour museums across America in the fall of 2010. The exhibit's other cultural heroes, whose busts are honored alongside White, were Bessie Smith, Paul Robeson, Marian Anderson, Lead Belly, Woody Guthrie and Billie Holiday. August 20, 2016, was declared Josh White Day by White's hometown of Greenville, South Carolina. Greenville is also planning to place a bronze sculpture honoring White downtown sometime in 2018.[33][34] Filmography 1945: The Crimson Canary. Directed by John Hoffman.[35] 1947: Dreams That Money Can Buy. Directed by Hans Richter. 1949: The Walking Hills. Directed by John Sturges.[36] 1998: The Guitar of Josh White. Homespun Videos. (An instructional video featuring Josh White, Jr. showing his father's pioneering guitar techniques.) 2000: Josh White: Free and Equal Blues, Rare Performances. DVD. Vestapol.[37] 2010: ``Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel``. Written and directed by Brigitte Berman[38] Other films containing recordings by White 1994: Earl Robinson: Ballad of an American. Directed by Bette Jean Bullett.[39] 2001: Jazz, Episode Seven: "Dedicated to Chaos". Directed by Ken Burns.[40] 2003: Strange Fruit. Directed by Joel Katz.[41] 2006: Red Tailed Angels: The Story of the Tuskegee Airmen. Directed by Pare Lorentz. 2006: Negroes with Guns: Rob Williams and Black Power. Directed by Sandra Dickson and Churchill Roberts.[42] 2009: History Detectives. Episode: "In Search of Josh White's Guitar". 2009: American Folk. Part 3, of BBC4's five-part series. 2010: Our World War II Fathers. Directed by Les Easter. Camden Town Hall, known as St Pancras Town Hall until 1965, is the headquarters of Camden London Borough Council. The main entrance is in Judd street with its northern elevation extending along Euston Road, opposite the main front of St Pancras railway station. It has been Grade II listed since 1996.[1] History In the early 20th century the borough council was based at the 19th century vestry offices in St Pancras Way which had been commissioned for the Parish of St Pancras.[2][3] After civic leaders found that the vestry offices were inadequate for their needs, they elected to construct a purpose-built facility: the site selected on Euston Road had previously been occupied by some Georgian terraced housing.[4] The new building was designed by Albert Thomas, who also designed housing schemes for the St Pancras Borough Council, in the neoclassical style.[2] The construction which was undertaken by Dove Brothers of Islington involved a steel frame clad with Portland stone and the work started in 1934.[2] The design involved a symmetrical main frontage with 13 bays facing onto Judd Street; the central section of three bays featured three doorways on the ground floor; there were three windows on each of the first and second floors flanked by huge Corinthian order columns supporting a pediment.[1] A carving of the borough coat of arms was erected above the central window on the first floor. The design for the Euston Road frontage involved 23 bays with two sections designed in a similar style to the Judd Street elevation i.e. with windows flanked by huge Corinthian order columns supporting pediments.[1] Internally, the principal rooms were an assembly hall on the ground floor in the east of the building and the council chamber and mayor's parlour on the first floor in the west of the building.[2] The building was officially opened in October 1937.[2][5] A "Caribbean Carnival", a precursor of the Notting Hill Carnival, was held on 30 January 1959 in the town hall, organised by activist Claudia Jones as a response to the 1958 Notting Hill race riots and the state of race relations in Britain at the time.[6] A few months later, on 27 May 1959, Princess Margaret attended a meeting of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children in the town hall.[7] The building served as the headquarters of the Metropolitan Borough of St Pancras and continued to operate as the local seat of government after the formation of the London Borough of Camden in 1965.[1] An eight-storey extension designed by the borough architect's department was built to the east of the main building in 1977.[2] It was designed in a modern architectural style and was clad in white pre-cast panels with curved window corners.[8][9] A rooftop conservatory was added in the 1990s.[10] In February 2020 the council started a programme of refurbishment works to plans prepared by Purcell.[11] The works, which are being managed by Lendlease at an estimated cost of £40 million,[12] involve restoration of the historic areas used by the council and the redevelopment of the basement and upper floors so those floors can be let out as commercial space.[13] Josh White overcame seemingly insurmountable obstacles in the course of his lifetime. He experienced almost Dickensian privation as a child musician on the open road. Yet before he was twenty this child prodigy significantly influenced the Piedmont musical scene. When the Great Depression crippled the mainstream recording industry, White's early "race" recordings nevertheless sold briskly. Then, at the peak of his powers, he injured his hand and had to completely reinvent his style of guitar picking. Despite this, he went on to become an actor, radio, and cabaret star, a ground-breaking performer of powerful protest songs, and an intimate of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. Countless performers covered signature versions (including guitar arrangements) of his repertoire such as "The House of the Rising Sun," "Saint James Infirmary," and "Careless Love." On stage White pioneered a casual, intimate, yet serious persona, wearing attire that resolved the dichotomy between the tuxedo-clad night-club act and the overalls of the "country" singer. Harry Belafonte, among other acolytes, copied White's trademark casual slacks and a shirt with its top buttons opened. Josh White The red scare of the 1950s marginalized folk music from mainstream broadcasting and drove a wedge between him and many of his former fans, seriously hurting his career (though he continued to star in Europe). But Josh doubtless could also have overcome this in the following decade had not bad health, perhaps a legacy of childhood hardships, intervened. Sadly, he died in 1969 before he could re-establish his rapport with audiences. Still undeservedly neglected, Josh White is increasingly acknowledged as an innovative and influential major artist. His importance as a civil rights activist in song has yet to be recognized. Joshua Daniel "Josh" White was born on Feb 11, 1914, one of five brothers and sisters, in Greenville, South Carolina. His father Dennis was a tailor by profession and a minister by avocation; his mother, Daisy Elizabeth, played the autoharp. As a child Josh was musical and sang in church. He was precocious and by the age of five could read aloud passages from the Bible. Josh recalled his parents as an exceptionally formal and proper couple who always addressed each other as Mr. and Mrs. White. But his childhood ended prematurely and tragically in 1921, when a white bill collector came into his home and rudely spat on the family's immaculate floor. Indignant at this insult to his wife, Dennis White grabbed the man by the collar and shoved him out the door. Shortly afterwards five white sheriff's deputies showed up to arrest him. As an example to other blacks, they beat him, tied him behind a horse and dragged him through the town to jail. Incapacitated by the after effects of the beatings and ill treatment he had received, he spent the rest of his life as a patient in a mental institution (he died in 1930). The following year, Josh, who at eight years old was already a music lover, agreed to be "lead boy" and "tambourine man" to John Henry "Big Man" Arnold, whom he had befriended on the street. Arnold was one of the countless itinerant blind minstrels who busked and sang in small clubs and parties in the Southeast and Midwest. In return, Arnold agreed to send four dollars a week home to Josh's mother. The pair traveled the South from Florida to Texas, with Josh barefoot and in dressed in ragged short pants to garner sympathy. They slept in the open and often ate only one meal a day. On those tours, during the height of the Jim Crow reign of terror of the 1920s, they witnessed tar and featherings, lynchings, and a burning. Once, in Florida, Josh was mistaken for a fugitive and beaten up and jailed. Working for Arnold, Josh developed his crowd-pleasing showmanship to the hilt, dancing, singing, playing the tambourine, and collecting coins in a tin cup. He showed such aptitude that Arnold rented out his services to other blind singers, including Blind Blake (Arthur Phelps), Willie Johnson, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Joel "Blind Joe" Taggart, and Joe Walker. Josh also diligently set himself to learn to play the guitar from the musicians he met and by the time he was 13 his picking rivaled and sometimes surpassed that of his mentors. He later claimed Willie Walker, considered the pre-eminent Piedmont-style guitar picker of the day, as his principal musical model. But though glad of the opportunity to learn from some of the best, Josh remembered these years with bitterness. Josh found wearing rags and having to pass the cup for coins humiliating, and Arnold and the other blind musicians were mean and suspicious. When at 14 Josh made his first recordings in Chicago (in 1928), accompanying Taggert, race music executives immediately recognized his talent and rescued him from servitude. J. Mayo Williams, noted black A & R man for Paramount and other companies, even allowed Josh to live for a time in his home and attend school. He stayed in Chicago for four years, and made numerous recordings, mostly as a sideman, including (color barriers being less ironclad in the 1920s than subsequently) "Wang Wang Harmonica Blues" (1929), which featured "Joshua White, the Singing Christian" with the Carver Boys, a white, old-time music group In 1932 back home in South Carolina recuperating from a broken leg incurred while playing football (but perhaps also attributable to nutritional deficiencies), he was visited by New York talent scouts W.R. Calaway and Art Satherly from ARC (the American Record Company). ARC's budget line of race recordings specialized in covers of hit songs from its sister, higher-priced label, Vocalion, that were marketed in five and ten cent stores under various labels. With Mrs. White's permission, Calaway and Satherly recorded Josh's religious repertoire for ARC. They then persuaded the youth to move to New York City to record secular blues (of which his mother disapproved). The religious records were issued under the name "Joshua White, the singing Christian," while the blues appeared issued both in his own name and under the pseudonym of "Pinewood Tom." He recorded as a soloist and with other artists, such as Clarence Williams, Leroy Carr, and Buddy Moss. He also was heard on the nationally broadcast CBS radio show, Harlem Fantasy with Clarence Williams' Southernaires. Josh's hits made significant impact in the Piedmont blues world. Blind Boy Fuller, is said to have listened repeatedly to Josh's "Low Cotton" until he memorized it. J. B. Long, Fuller's manager (and later Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee's) credited this song with persuading him to go into the record retailing business in the first place (Bruce Bastin, Red River Blues [1995], page 169). In 1934 Josh married Carol Carr, herself a talented singer who trained with Juanita Hall and later sang with the Hall Johnson Choir. They raised their children Blondell (Bunny), Julianne (Beverly), Josh Jr., Carolyn (Fern), Judy, and a foster daughter, Delores, along with Billy, Josh Sr.'s younger brother, and Carol's mother, in their home in the Sugar Hill section of Harlem. Two years later Josh badly cut his right hand; infection set in and he lost feeling in his fingers. Just before the accident, he had issued two songs that indicated a rising political consciousness: "Silicosis Blues" and "No More Ball and Chain," both written by left-wing activist Bob Miller. As a singer of serious protest songs he could integrate his identity as a religious singer with his secular repertoire. For several years, however, he had to take jobs as an elevator operator, longshoreman, and building superintendent. Meanwhile he doggedly exercised his arm and fingers until he became once more a first-rate guitarist — if minus the fast runs that had characterized his early playing. On recovery, he formed a band, Josh White & His Carolinians, which performed from 1939 to 1940 and included his brother Billy and his friends Carrington Lewis, Sam Gary, and the future civil rights leader Bayard Rustin. Their repertoire chiefly comprised spirituals, arranged with help from Josh's neighbor, Juilliard-trained composer and choral arranger Leonard De Paur, who was involved in the WPA's Negro Theater productions. He arranged for Josh to be cast as Blind Lemon Jefferson, a big part in the musical John Henry, starring Paul Robeson with music by Jacques Wolfe (based on a 1939 novel by Roark Bradford, whose stories had inspired the hit play Green Pastures). Though it ran for only a week on Broadway and somewhat longer in out-of-town tryouts, the show was an important step in the modifying the depiction of African American on the stage. During rehearsals Robeson and White convinced the authors to get of stereotyped dialect speech in the script and to substitute the word "man" for "nigger" (up to then still in common use) in the dialog and stage directions. The John Henry experience also jumpstarted the second phase of Josh White's career by bringing him to the attention of the attention of talent scout John Hammond, who signed him on Columbia records. In 1940 Josh and the Carolinians' Chain Gang, an album of social commentary so controversial at the time that Hammond recalled having to fight to get it produced. (The irascible Lawrence Gellert claimed author's copyrights to some of the material on the album. Gellert was the same who had excoriated John A. Lomax in the pages of the New Masses in 1933.) Another of hit recording of this time was a jazz version of "Careless Love," accompanied by Sidney Bechet on the clarinet. Josh's association with Hammond led to a series of engagements at Café Society, the controversial New York nightclub that featured folk singing and integrated acts. Folksinger Cynthia Gooding told Josh's biographer Dorothy Siegel, "What Josh was doing was very dangerous. . . . At that time a black singer working to white audiences and singing songs about racial equality was doing a very dangerous thing. . . . He was about the only one doing it. And nobody has given him credit for it" (quoted in Dorothy Siegel, The Glory Road: The Story of Josh White, p. 81). Blacks were not particularly welcome in Greenwich Village and their presence often provoked brawls. Geoffrey Bridson of the BBC recalled an incident at Café Society Downtown that conveys the tension of the atmosphere, as well as a sense of Josh White's powerful personal magnetism with women. According to Siegel:   [Bridson] was dining at Café Society one evening with Alan Lomax and other friends. As usual, Josh joined them. While Josh was chatting with Bridson, Lomax stood up, turned on a man who was arguing with a waiter, and knocked the man over the next table. Some of the Café Society staff rushed up, not to reprove Lomax, as Bridson expected, but to pick up the man and toss him out. The others asked Lomax what he had been up to, but he merely answered that the man had said something annoying...About five minutes later the man reappeared with a grin on his face. Waiters closed in on him, but he loudly explained that he'd merely returned to apologize. Lomax again stood up. The man said: "I'm sorry sir. I wasn't meaning to insult you ... All I said was, I didn't want to sit at the next table to a goddam nigger" Once again Lomax floored him, but this time Josh and everyone nearby heard what he said. Josh rose to his feet eyes blazing. Immediately, three or four women at neighboring tables jumped up, rushed over, and hung onto his arms. Then the waiters picked the man up and threw him into the street. Josh sat down again, and his female "bodyguards" quietly rejoined their friends. Bridson was impressed by this proof of Josh's popularity (Siegel, pp. 81–82). An even bigger boost to Josh's career was his presence as a performer on the nationally broadcast radio show, Back Where I Come From (1940–41), produced by Nicholas Ray (later famous as director of Rebel Without a Cause) and written by Alan Lomax. Other performers included The Golden Gates Quartet, Lead Belly, Woody Guthrie, Burl Ives, and Pete Seeger. Nicholas Ray insisted that Josh speak the lines written for Lead Belly on the show because he feared audiences wouldn't understand the latter's regional accent. The two subsequently performed together at Max Gordon's Village Vanguard, in New York City. Josh also appeared on Alan Lomax's daytime radio program, the Columbia School of the Air, which was broadcast three times a week and heard in schools. Lomax recalled that:   For the first time ever the country heard the best material done by the best folk artists on these programs. And Josh was right in the middle of it because he was a jewel of a performer. You could give him a song and it was just served up like strawberries with whipped cream! Josh became known to the whole country on these shows (Siegel, p. 66). Nicholas Ray was responsible for pairing Josh with the white torch singer Libby Holman, who had been scandalously linked to the 1932 murder of her much younger husband, the heir to the Reynolds tobacco fortune, and who was the model for Jean Harlow's character in Reckless. In the 40s she and Josh performed at Café Society and later toured together, transgressing racial barriers and giving rise to piquant, racially charged rumors.  On December 20, 1940, shortly after Roosevelt's reelection to a third term, Alan Lomax, then "Assistant in Charge" of the Library of Congress's folk music division produced a concert of black folk music by the Golden Gate Quartet and Josh White at the prestigious Coolidge Auditorium of the Library of Congress, narrated by himself and Harlem Renaissance poets Alain Locke and Sterling Brown. The event, sponsored by Eleanor Roosevelt, was part of a four-day festival (Dec 18?21, 1940) in celebration of the 75th Anniversary of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution. It also featured concert performances by classical singers, Dorothy Maynor and Roland Hayes; and by the Budapest Quartet, newly engaged as string quartet-in-residence, who performed works by the black composers Joseph Boulogne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. One month later Josh White and the Golden Gate Quartet performed at a special show at Constitution Hall for the Presidential Inaugural Ball in Washington, DC. M.c.'d by Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., it also featured Mickey Rooney, Charlie Chaplin, Nelson Eddy, Ethel Barrymore, and Irving Berlin ("An omnium gatherum of anti-fascist vaudeville," Time Magazine snidely called it). These celebrations, facilitated by Mrs. Roosevelt, took place at a time when Washington was still a segregated city; when, a year earlier, in 1939, the DAR had refused to allow the great Marian Anderson to sing in their Constitution Hall. Though most Americans still opposed U.S. entry into the war, isolationism had by this time moderated considerably. There was broad support both for beefing up the army and for Roosevelt's policy of helping Britain by all other means. September 1940 saw the introduction of the first peacetime draft, and both Roosevelt and Willkie had run on platforms emphasizing military preparedness. Josh White's brother Billy was one of those who had been drafted, and when Josh visited him at Fort Dix he found that black draftees had to sleep in pup tents, whereas whites were given wooden barracks. Restricted to service and supply duty, blacks were debarred from training to be pilots and from combat positions in general (this policy was reversed in 1944). They were also forbidden to work in civilian factories having defense contracts, a particular source of bitter resentment in the black community and among civil rights activists in general. The Presidential couple were folk music enthusiasts. Eleanor in particular felt that when you listened to folk music "you could hear the people speaking to you," while Franklin loved sea chanteys. On February 17, 1941, Eleanor arranged for Alan Lomax and Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish to present a command performance of folk music at the White House for the benefit of the military. The show, "An Evening of Songs for American Soldiers," featured a retired sailor singing sea chanteys for the President's benefit, Josh White and the Golden Gate Quartet and other members of the integrated cast of Back Where I Come From, along with local draftees performing country music. Alan Lomax recalled: I went out into the local boot camps and after a few days found two or three marvelous country and western groups who could really sing and play up a storm. At this point there was a problem about American morale. Many people wished we weren't in the war [sic] and many people didn't understand fascism and how dangerous it was. I'd say that perhaps the biggest thing that was accomplished by the people of this century was to defeat world fascism. — Folk Music in the Roosevelt Era, Commemorative Program, 1982 Folk Music in the Roosevelt Era, Commemorative Program, 1982 In the audience were the Secretaries of War, Navy, and Treasury, the Commandants of Marine Corps and Coast Guard, and the head of procurement and their wives. For Alan Lomax, the grass roots musicians were as important as the radio performers, if not more so. He had hoped the army brass would be inspired to encourage more grass-roots folk music-making among the troops: "When the young recruits came on with all their energy — most of the audience had never heard hillbilly music — it was a revelation to them. Fiddles, banjos, guitars and good country songs. They couldn't get enough of that. They applauded and stamped . . . but we didn't get our program of folk music into the camps. The Pentagon considered the morale of the armed forces a strictly military matter." Indeed, one wonders what the Pentagon brass, many of them undoubtedly quite conservative, really thought of this evening. It is a sign of the compartmentalization of the times that the following month, White also lent his talents that spring to the Almanac Singers' anti-draft album, Songs for John Doe (May, 1941), which contained such verses as the verses "No desire do I feel to defend Republic Steel" and "It wouldn't be much thrill to die for DuPont in Brazil"). On June 22, 1941, Hitler invaded Soviet Russia, and the Hitler-Stalin pact-inspired anti-militarism of Songs for John Doe was forgotten. In the meantime, A. Philip Randolph and other black union leaders began organizing a massive march on Washington to protest segregation in the Armed Forces and the ban on hiring blacks in defense work. In response, Roosevelt gave the following speech: No nation combating the increasing threat of totalitarianism can afford arbitrarily to exclude large segments of its population from its defense industries. Even more important is it for us to strengthen our unity and morale by refuting at home the very theories which we are fighting abroad. Our Government cannot countenance continued discrimination against American citizens in defense production. Industry must take the initiative in opening the doors of employment to all loyal and qualified workers regardless of race, national origin, religion, or color" (PPA, 1941, 216) —quoted in Mario Einaudi's The Roosevelt Revolution (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1959), p. 275. On June 25, 1941, the President made this official policy by signing Executive Order 8802 establishing the Committee on Fair Employment Practices to receive and investigate complaints of discrimination. Union leaders were mollified and the threatened march was cancelled, although the armed forced remained segregated. In September 1941, Keynote released Josh's album Southern Exposure: An Album of Jim Crow Blues, comprising six songs protesting segregation in the military, co-written by Josh White and Harlem Renaissance poet Waring Cuney, with liner notes by Richard Wright. The album was acclaimed by the black intelligentsia. Celebrities attending the release party included representatives from Fisk and Union Universities; painter Romaire Beardon; and W.C. Handy, who proclaimed the album a worthy expression of the blues spirit. President Roosevelt obtained a copy and was especially struck by the song: "Uncle Sam Says [we've got to end Jim Crow]." He invited Josh to perform all six songs from the album at a special White House concert in front an audience of distinguished guests. After the show Roosevelt asked Josh point blank if "Uncle Same Says" referred to himself (perhaps thinking of his actions earlier that year to end discrimination in civilian federal defense contracts.) When Josh answered yes, the President invited him to talk things over for several hours over coffee and brandy in the White House living quarters. Thus began a warm personal friendship between the Roosevelts and the White family, who thereafter were frequent guests at Hyde Park at Christmas and Thanksgiving. In the lean years of Josh's blacklisting, the memory of the first family's kindness was to be a great comfort. The War Department, however, concluded that the military itself was not place the place for "social experimentation" and declined to desegregate, though when manpower became short in 1943, it did allow blacks to volunteer for combat duty. After Pearl Harbor, Josh also appeared on broadcasts for the Office of War Information as well as performing again with Paul Robeson in Langston Hughes's 1944 radio operetta, The Man Who Went to War, which was broadcast overseas on BBC's home radio service (but not in the U.S.A.) He also performed on the 1944 Asch album Union Boys: Songs for Victory, Music for Political Action, with Tom Glazer, Burl Ives, Alan Lomax, Brownie McGhee, Pete Seeger, and Sonny Terry, singing "We Shall Not Be Moved," "Hold On," "UAW-CIO," "Sally Don't You Grieve," "A Dollar Ain't a Dollar Anymore," and "Jim Crow." (The CIO was the only union which insisted on racial non-discrimination clauses in its contracts.) But what meant the most to Josh White and his family was undoubtedly their relationship with Franklin and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. On Josh's recommendation Bill White went to work at Hyde Park after the war and ultimately became the manager of Eleanor Roosevelt estate. Also after the war, Eleanor engaged Josh to perform for the Wiltshire School for Boys, a charity in which she was interested. It may be because of this he added to his repertoire comic and other songs beloved of children, such as "Cockles and Mussels" (a Victorian parody), "One Meat Ball." and "The Riddle Song" collected by Cecil Sharp (and also a favorite of Burl Ives). "One Meat Ball," about a man so poor he could only afford to order one meat ball in a restaurant, was especially associated with Josh, and became a hit as covered by the Andrews Sisters. In the 1947 movie The Red Canary (a convoluted mystery in which Josh cameo-ed briefly as a cabaret singer), one of the characters is made to say, "We're all strictly 'one meatball' kind of guys here." Another song associated with Josh was "The House I Live In," by Earl Robinson with lyrics by "Lewis Allan" a pseudonym of Abel Meeropol (who later adopted the orphaned Rosenberg boys after their parents were executed). This song, a statement against racial and religious bias, was made into a short film by Frank Sinatra that won an academy award and also caused him later to be briefly blacklisted. (He later sang it at Ronald Reagan's inauguration.) Meeropol also wrote the anti-lynching song "Strange Fruit," another Josh White staple, made famous by Billie Holiday. In the liner notes for this song on Josh White's 1949 LP for Decca, Alan Lomax wrote: "Mix misery with ignorance and the product is bound to be hate and blind prejudice. . . . It happened in Jerusalem and it happened in Germany. And it happens in America." Langston Hughes wrote in his the liner notes to Josh White's album of 78s, Josh White Sings Easy (Asch, 1944): You could call [Josh White] the minstrel of the Blues, except that he is more than a minstrel of the Blues... Josh is a fine folksinger of anybody's songs — southern Negro or southern white, plantation work songs or modern union songs, English or Irish ballads — any songs that come from the heart of the people...Josh White sings with such ease that you never feel like he is trying. This is the secret of true folk singing — for the folk song never tries to get itself sung. If it doesn't ease itself into your soul and then out of your mouth spontaneously, to stay singing around your head forever, then it isn't a folk song. And if the singer tries too hard and gets nowhere with such a song, that singer isn't a folksinger. . . . From Blind Lemon to Burl Ives, from Bessie Smith to Aunt Molly Jackson, there runs a wave of singing easy. Josh White also sings easy. As an actor, Josh acted several more times on Broadway in the late forties. In 1947 he appeared in German artist and avant-garde filmmaker Hans Richter's Dreams that Money Can Buy, co-starring Libby Holman (with the participation of Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, Alexander Calder, Darius Milhaud and Ferdinand Léger). It won an award at that year's Venice Film Festival. He also appeared in John Sturges' 1949 western The Walking Hills(with Randolph Scott, Ella Raines, Edgar Buchanan, and Arthur Kennedy), in which his character, an itinerant musician, was not a stereotype but on an equal footing with the white characters. He was still young and very handsome and it hard not to speculate on what might have been had the blacklist not put an end to his budding movie career. In 1950 while traveling in England on a goodwill tour with Eleanor Roosevelt, then United Nations Ambassador in charge of War Relief, Josh learned that he was listed in the blacklist publication Red Channels: the Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television (along with Orson Wells, Aaron Copeland, Leonard Bernstein, Judy Holiday, Zero Mostel, Lena Horne, Langston Hughes, Edward G. Robinson, and Alan Lomax, among other luminaries.) When he arrived home F.B.I. agents detained him for six hours in a customs holding room and threatened him with deportation. The Korean War had started and they wanted Josh to publicly repudiate a statement supposedly made by Paul Robeson that the American Negro would never fight in a war against the Soviet Union. Thereafter they repeatedly harassed him at home and called him in for meetings in their offices. They assured him that if he testified "voluntarily," nothing further would happen to him. Baseball star Jackie Robinson had also been pressured to distance himself from Robeson in this way, and he did so, saying that of course he didn't agree with Robeson's statement, which he characterized as "silly" but adding the qualifier: "if Robeson actually made it." Some believe that Josh, whose appeal to women well known, was threatened with having scandalous information revealed about his sex life. Whatever the case, he was soon convinced that he had no choice but to go to Washington voluntarily and read a prepared statement explaining himself to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). In it he affirmed both his patriotism and his friendship for Robeson. Though some of his associates in the 1930s and 40s had undoubtedly been Party members, he named no one except Ben Davis, the Congressional candidate from Harlem who had run for office as an overt Communist. Josh maintained that he had lent his talents to worthy causes he that he believed in deeply because he was a Christian and he would do it again if necessary. He and Paul Robeson had never discussed Communism, though Robeson had a right to his opinions. In Josh's view, however, the statement "that the Negroes would not fight for their country against Soviet Russia or any other enemy is not only wrong but an insult, because I stand ready to fight Russia or any enemy of America." He even had the song "Strange Fruit" entered into the Congressional record. Josh had fallen into a well-laid trap. Ignoring the liberal sentiments of his prepared statement, the press instead focused on his remarks expressing distaste for Communist tactics (a sentiment not limited to those on the right) and portrayed him as a regretful dupe. The New York Daily Mirror ran the headline, "Josh White hits Robeson for Aiding Foes of U.S." and the Amsterdam News wrote: "Singer Repudiates Robeson. " Josh's progressive fan base was led to believe that White had informed on his former friends. Nor was the blacklist lifted. He lost his contracts and his radio show, and there were no more movie offers. Eleanor Roosevelt may have liked folk music, but President Truman decidedly did not. Josh's former repertoire was anathema, and he was not invited to perform it on the new medium of television, whose rigidly conformist programming in any case featured few black faces apart from servants like Jack Benny's Rochester. Record companies also gave him the cold shoulder. He was too associated with the interracial hangout Café Society, reviled in the press as a notorious den of Communists. His career derailed, the Whites relocated to London, where Josh was still a star. He had his own BBC radio show, My Guitar Is Old As Father Time. From there, he made many tours through England, Sweden, France, Italy, and Australia. When he returned to the U.S. in 1954, the F.B.I. interrogated him again for three hours. As late as 1963, Oscar Brand, himself blacklisted but permitted to work behind the scenes at NBC signing up entertainers, recalled that though he could hire Phil Ochs, Josh White still was strictly off limits. According to Brand, Josh was too proud," too outspoken, too "big" for network censors: and they were determined to consign him to the memory hole. Nevertheless, his fortunes gradually improved. In 1955, Jac Holzman, of the newly established Elektra Records, in New York, issued the LP Josh White 25th Anniversary Album. Josh secured bookings at colleges and concert halls, sometimes sharing the stage with his children, Josh White, Jr. and his daughter Beverley. But touring was arduous. With ulcers diagnosed in the 40s, severe psoriasis, chronic calcium deficiency, and emphysema from a lifelong cigarette habit, his health deteriorated as did his strength. He suffered his first of three heart attacks in 1961, the year when he appeared in the Josh White Show on the UK's Granada Television network. In 1963, President John F. Kennedy, a long-time fan, finally did what television network executives would not when he broke the TV blacklist by inviting Josh to appear on the CBS-TV civil rights special, Dinner with the President. This was followed that year by a national TV appearance at the Lincoln Memorial, where Josh performed as part of Martin Luther King's historic March on Washington, and then in the 1963–64 ABC-TV series Hootenanny. In the mid 60s he returned to protest songs and performed with Odetta, Judy Collins, and the Clancy brothers, and made several albums. In 1965 Josh performed at President Johnson's inauguration. An invitation to appear at the Newport Folk Festival that year signaled that the rift between Josh and his former fans appeared to be mending, although tastes in folk music in many quarters were turning away from the sophisticated cabaret-style jazz-folk approach that Josh had pioneered. No doubt he could have overcome this as well had his health held up. After an automobile accident in 1966, he rallied sufficiently to appear as a guest star in 1967 on Canada's CBC-TV program, Let's Sing Out With Oscar Brand. His final appearance was in May 1969, on the Canadian TV variety show One More Time. He died on September 5, 1969, while undergoing heart-valve replacement surgery in a Manhasset, Long Island, hospital. He was fifty-four. In 1964, new anti-segregationist laws made it possible for the Whites to purchase a new home in Rosedale, Queens. Carol continued to live there, working as manager of a clothing store, then as a social worker for the elderly in a nursing home, until her death in 1998 from a heart attack, just one week after learning that the US Postal Service would release a memorial stamp honoring Josh White. In 1982 Alan Lomax produced a concert in Hyde Park, New York, commemorating the White House folk music concerts of the 1930s and 40s. Taped interviews of reminiscences of Josh White that he made in preparation for the occasion with Carol, Beverly and Josh White, Jr. are in the Alan Lomax Collection and are being prepared for streaming on the web.

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