ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how actors’ race was (and was not) musicalised in the 1950s, focusing on the late part of Ethel Waters’ career and the beginning of Sidney Poitier’s. Waters starred in The Member of the Wedding (1952), a delicate film with a delicate Alex North score, but it is really Waters’s singing in this and her other films that sets her music apart. Poitier also sings on occasion, notably in The Defiant Ones (1958), but his intensely physical acting style in his early films presented composers with a difficult task, met especially interestingly by Leonard Rosenman in Edge of the City (1957) and by Duke Ellington in Paris Blues (1961). Both films are interracial ‘buddy’ pictures (with John Cassavetes and Paul Newman, respectively), offering their composers a challenge to avoid and/or question musical stereotypes.
