William Warfield
1920 — 2002 · Arkansas-born bass-baritone; principal American concert bass-baritone of the post-war period; Joe in the 1951 MGM film of Show Boat
William Caesar Warfield was born on January 22, 1920, in West Helena, Phillips County, Arkansas, the eldest of five sons of Robert Warfield and Bertha McCamery Warfield. His father earned his living in the meat-packing trade in those first Arkansas years; the pulpit came later. When William was two the family moved to St. Joseph, Missouri, and in 1925 they settled in Rochester, New York, where Robert Warfield entered the Baptist ministry and became a pastor.
Rochester shaped the artist. At Washington High School he won a national vocal competition, and he went on to the Eastman School of Music, earning his bachelor's degree in 1942 and a master's in 1946. After wartime service he built a career on the concert stage, making a celebrated Town Hall debut in New York on March 19, 1950 that announced a bass-baritone of rare warmth and command.
Fame arrived in 1951, when he sang Joe in MGM's Technicolor film of Jerome Kern's Show Boat, giving "Ol' Man River" a dignity that carried the song around the world. He became one of the foremost American concert bass-baritones of his generation, a distinguished interpreter of Porgy in Porgy and Bess, and a cultural envoy on State Department tours abroad. In 1952 he married the soprano Leontyne Price; they later parted and divorced. From 1975 he gave himself to teaching, and in 1984 he won a Grammy for narrating Copland's A Lincoln Portrait.
He died on August 25, 2002, in Chicago, of injuries from a fall. Calling himself "an Arkansas boy from tip to toe," William Warfield lent his voice to the highest stages and never let a song forget its soul. May his deep and honored voice go on resounding.
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