Then There Was the Time James Earl Jones Couldn’t Find His Voice
It was four days after Christmas 1993 and James Earl Jones was saying he couldn’t get his voice to do what he wanted it to do.
Timeout.
James Earl Jones was saying this about James Earl Jones’s voice?
It’s like Springsteen saying he can’t find Thunder Road. Like Colonel Sanders saying he couldn’t figure out what to do with a chicken. Like Taylor Swift saying she’s lost control of Instagram.
This was James Earl Jones, owner of arguably the most distinctive voice of his generation, a rich and resonant instrument that brought Darth Vader to life as effortlessly as it animated Othello.
Yet apparently there were moments when that voice was only human.
Jones, who died Monday at the age of 93, lent his singular sound to dozens of memorable productions, from Fences to The Lion King to Field of Dreams. In 1993 he was talking about playing the title role in Road to Freedom: The Vernon Johns Story, a television movie about an enigmatic and frequently overlooked pioneer of the modern Civil Rights movement.
The Rev. Johns was the pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, from 1947 to 1952. That made him the immediate predecessor to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who used that pulpit as a megaphone to help place his campaign for civil and human rights on the national agenda.
What King was saying closely echoed what Vernon Johns had been saying five years earlier, underscoring the fact that the roots of the Civil Rights movement run far deeper than Rosa Parks and the 1963 March on Washington. They go back at least to 1619, when the first shipload of slaves arrived in the New World. Vernon Johns was one of the moral compasses King followed at his many crossroads.
Jones noted that Johns was, however, a very different person from King, starting with his physical presence. “He was a lean, very handsome man,” Jones said. “Sometimes he could also look like a bum. Like a hobo.”
Despite the fact he wrote fierce and eloquent sermons decrying inequality and the evils of segregation, he did not share King’s instinct to head for the center of every ring.
“He stood by himself,” said Jones. “He did not like the leadership mantle. He didn’t want to lead. He blazed a trail and he wanted others to decide to follow. General Patton’s challenge was that he was too far ahead of his troops. Vernon Johns had the same problem.”
While American injustice was increasingly acknowledged in the late 1940s, Jones explained, there was no consensus strategy for addressing it and therefore no army for the necessary battle.
“Once an act of oppression becomes a privilege, it will not fall of its own weight,” Jones said. “It has to be pulled down.”
That was a lesson long in the learning. “If segregation didn’t hit you personally,” Jones said, “it was tolerable. White people profited by it. Middle-class black people felt they could live with it.”
Vernon Johns was fired from the Dexter Avenue pulpit because the church council feared he would stir up too much racial trouble, even though he didn’t hesitate to call out people of any race who were violating Christian ethics or the Ten Commandments.
“If the bodies of Negroes lynched by white mobs were piled together and, beside these, the bodies of Negroes murdered by other Negroes,” Johns wrote in a March 1940 newspaper column, “the former would make a hill and the latter a mountain.”
Jones said he was disappointed that the producers of Road to Freedom sold a narrow view of Johns in their promotion for the movie.
“The clips suggest he was one more black firebrand,” Jones said. “Another angry black man. I didn’t want to contribute to that. He had a great sense of humor, which you can see in his sermons.”
He also wrote and preached about the big questions that affect all of humanity. “We should not see everything he said in racial terms,” said Jones. “He thought of Christianity in a way that the guys on TV today don’t have a clue about.”
Jones admitted he knew little of Johns before he signed on to the film. “I was not at all familiar with him,” Jones said. “In terms of audience awareness, too, he was not one of the people we all know, like King or Malcolm X.”
Studying up on Johns proved less simple than it might sound. While Johns had been a prolific writer, fires destroyed many of his papers and his life had not been extensively chronicled. What Jones found most helpful, he said, were Johns’s sermons, which from the early days of his pastoral career drew widespread attention. A 1926 sermon he delivered at the Court Street Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Va., became the first by a “colored pastor” to be included in the annual published compilation of the year’s best 25 sermons.
Titled “Transfigured Moments,” that 1926 sermon offers an optimistic reading of theological history, suggesting that the lessons of Christ forged a chain that ran from Moses to Abraham Lincoln and were guiding humanity toward that “one far off, divine event to which the whole creation moves.”
That’s where James Earl Jones’s voice dilemma came in.
“I had a problem with his cadence in everyday conversation,” Jones said. “I didn’t sound like he did. I couldn’t get that Afro-American Virginia accent. So I ended up talking as I talk.
“Then I listened to some of his sermons, including one on dying and death, and he held you spellbound. I thought, I want to capture some of that charisma — and with the sermons, I think I was able to. It was only in the sermons that I felt I knew what he sounded like.”
“It’s always a great challenge that you can never take for granted,” Jones said of his vocal gift. “And sometimes it’s a pleasure.”
