irock
4x Platinum Member
Joined: September 2003
Posts: 4,470
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Post by irock on May 29, 2006 20:54:43 GMT -5
I thought we had done a thread on this about a year ago, but I searched back 999 days and I couldn't find anything. I wanted to bump it because, in the course of looking up something else, I learned and re-learned a couple interesting things about this classic tune.
One fact I did know already but had pretty much forgotten about was that Earl Robinson was one of the writers. Earl Robinson had been blacklisted during the McCarthy witchhunts of the 1950s. He wrote this song with David Arkin, father of actor Alan Arkin, in 1955, not too many months after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling demanded the desegregation of the public schools.
Earl Robinson had made a name for himself in the late 1930s by writing the enormously popular Ballad for Americans, performed by Paul Robson for a prime-time CBS radio program. He became a well-known composer of popular songs and of music for theater and cinema. He was blacklisted in the early '50s for refusing to talk to the House Un-American Committee. It's nice to know that Robinson managed to defy those who had blacklisted him by penning one the most seductive and blatantly leftist mega-hit records of all time.
One thing I had somehow never realized was that this song had already been a massive hit in Great Britain, as performed by a reggae band called Greyhound. That version has a very interesting sound to it, and clearly Three Dog Night borrowed a few ideas from it. You can hear a clip of it at iTunes.
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cartman2002
5x Platinum Member
Joined: November 2006
Posts: 5,717
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Post by cartman2002 on Apr 14, 2007 12:37:02 GMT -5
Black And White was #1 for one week on the Hot 100 but only spend 9 weeks on the top 40 during its chart run
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