Photo by Howard Smith-Imagn Images, from SI.com
James Earl Jones died on Monday at the age of 93, after a career filled with iconic performances, including in Star Wars, The Lion King, Roots, The Great White Hope, and a movie I’m always recommending, Matewan, about the famous 1920 coal miners strike.
Jones was an incredible actor, but what stood out in many of his performances was his deep and powerful voice. It took Jones years to master his speaking voice; as a kid, he struggled with a stutter, which was often so bad that he would feign being mute. This experience shifted his relationship to language and to his voice, as he wrote in his memoir Voices and Silences quoted in The Times:
Because of my muteness… I approached language in a different way from most actors. I came at language standing on my head, turning words inside out in search of meaning, making a mess of it sometimes, but seeing truth from a very different viewpoint.
That attentiveness to language, combined with his deep voice, made Jones a captivating reader. Here are a few of his best performances.
In 1973, he read selections from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” at the 92nd Street Y. It’s a moving reading of this great American poem.
Also at the 92nd Street Y, Jones read from Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”
At a performance for the collection Voices of a People’s History of the United States edited by Howard Zinn, Jones read Frederick Douglass’ castigating 1852 speech, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”
The rhyming Edgar Allen Poe poem “The Raven” and its tense repetition of “Nevermore” is particularly satisfying in Jones’ timbre.
This is a silly one, but one of my favorite uses of the gravitas of Jones voice is in this great Letterman bit.
And finally, Jones was a consummate Shakespearean actor, and his reading of Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 55” is fitting as a memorial to his career — an ode to poetry and the memory of its performance, and how it will outlast even the sturdiest monuments and statues.
