If you have ever heard a recording of William Warfield singing “Ol’ Man River,” from the musical Showboat by Jerome Kern, you will not have forgotten his deep, rich, bass-baritone voice. Warfield’s emotional rendering of this song about the hardship and despair of black laborers in the late nineteenth century makes my heart ache every time I hear it. Imagine my surprise when I learned that Warfield, the Arkansas-born son of African-American sharecroppers, was a Ritchie Boy. I immediately wanted to know how he came to be at Camp Ritchie and what he had done there.
Here is a link to an excerpt from the movie with William Warfield singing “Ol’ Man River.”
After a Google search and a quick trip to Amazon.com, I soon had in my hands the operatic singer’s very personal memoir, My Music & My Life, which, happily, did not skim over the war years in a rush to tell of his later musical success. Like other Ritchie Boys, it was Warfield’s command of the German language that landed him at the Intelligence Training Center in Maryland. A scholarship student at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, he had been required to take Italian, German, and French as part of his course of study because these were the languages of the operas he hoped to be singing in his future career.
Soon after the attack on Pearl Harbor and just short of his graduation from Eastman, Warfield, who had spent most of his life in upstate New York, found himself in the racially segregated world of the US Army of that time. Though he qualified as a sharpshooter with the M-1 rifle in basic training, Warfield knew the chances were slim that he would be sent into combat but that he would probably spend four years laboring in a service battalion. At best, his future in the military might have led to driving an army truck with the Red Ball Express that Herman admired so much. Indeed, Warfield was assigned to ordnance duties, a job that he says in his memoir meant the army “wanted to use me as a human mule, handling carts of ammunition for artillery training.” But the young music student had fully absorbed the lessons of growing up in the North. He protested his assignment at company headquarters and emphasized his fluency in the languages of two of the nation’s enemies, Italy and Germany. Within days, he was on a train to Maryland.
Warfield arrived in Camp Ritchie as a private, but it wasn’t long before he was promoted to sergeant and given the job of theater manager. Though used as a classroom during the day, at night the theater came alive as a recreation center and cinema. There were also practice performances of the work of Section 9, a unit composed of actors, playwrights, and other men from the entertainment industry. This group was tasked with writing and producing plays with an educational or propaganda purpose—work with such titles as “She Can’t Repeat What You Don’t Tell” and “Do Not Do Something Stupid.” No doubt these short dramas were tested at the Ritchie Theater before being taken on tour to US military bases around the country. Section 9 also used live theater to help train the students in, among other things, interrogation methods. And, most likely, the realistic Nazi Rally that Herman experiences in Immigrant Soldier was put on by Section 9 with William Warfield as the theater manager.
Working with all the experienced actors and other entertainment professionals of Section 9 turned out to be a great networking advantage for the young singer. They introduced him to the life of the entertainment world and became valuable contacts when he began his career after the war. In fact, one of them, Larney Goodkind, became a close friend and his trusted agent. Sergeant Warfield served at Camp Ritchie as the theater manager until he was mustered out of the army in March 1946. He was the only African-American Ritchie Boy.
If you are interested in learning more about William Warfield and his later, very successful career as a concert singer and actor, I recommend his memoir, My Music & My Life, written with Alton Miller.
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