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"Earl Robinson was a composer, arranger and folk music singer-songwriter from Seattle, Washington. Robinson is remembered for his music, including the cantata ""Ballad for Americans"" and songs such as ""Joe Hill"" and ""Black and White"", which expressed his left-leaning political views. He wrote many popular songs and music for Hollywood films, including his collaboration with Lewis Allan on the 1940's hit ""The House We live in"" from the academy award winning film by the same name. He was a member of the Communist Party from the 1930s to the 1950s. Robinson's musical influences began with both classical music and American folk music and included individuals such as Carl Sandburg, Woody Guthrie and Lead Belly, Paul Robeson and Pete Seeger. He composed ""Ballad for Americans"" (lyrics by John Latouche), which became a signature song for Robeson after it was broadcast on CBS in November 1939. It was also recorded by Bing Crosby, Lawrence Tibbett and Odetta. In 1936, Robinson wrote and performed ""Joe Hill"", also known as ""I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night"", a setting of a poem by Alfred Hayes, a fellow staff member at Camp Unity. The song became a popular labour anthem and was recorded by Robeson, Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, and Phil Ochs, among others. It was used in the 1971 film Joe Hill, directed by Bo Widerberg. In 1942, Robinson wrote the music for a cantata (or ""ballad opera"") on the life and death of Abraham Lincoln entitled The Lonesome Train (text by Millard Lampell). It was recorded in 1944 by Burl Ives, and performed live in 2009 for the first time since the spring of 1974, when it was performed publicly at Mesabi Community College in Virginia, Minnesota as the headliner for the Mesabi Creative Arts Festival. The 2009 performance was in celebration of the 200th anniversary of Lincoln's birth. Also with Lampell, he wrote the ongoing ballad that accompanied the 1945 Lewis Milestone film A Walk in the Sun. With Lewis Allan, in 1942 Robinson wrote ""The House I Live In"", a hit recorded by Frank Sinatra in 1945 and later by others. During the blacklist period, Robinson wrote the music for and sang in the short documentary film Muscle Beach (1948), directed by Joseph Strick and Irving Lerner. Robinson co-wrote the folk musical Sandhog with blacklisted screenwriter Waldo Salt. It is based on ""St. Columbia and the River,"" a story by Theodore Dreiser about the tunnel workers, known as ""sandhogs,"" who built the first tunnel under the Hudson River. The musical debuted at the Phoenix Theater in New York on November 23, 1954. In 1954, Robinson also wrote ""Black and White"", with David I. Arkin, the late father of actor Alan Arkin, a celebration of that year's Brown v. Board of Education decision. The song was first recorded by Sammy Davis Jr. in 1957 and later by Pete Seeger, the folk-rock group Three Dog Night, the Jamaican reggae band The Maytones, and the UK reggae band Greyhound. Robinson's late works included a concerto for banjo, as well as a piano concerto entitled The New Human. His cantata ""Preamble to Peace"", based on the preamble to the United Nations Charter, was first performed in October 1960 by the Greater Trenton Symphony Orchestra and a chorus, with Eleanor Roosevelt in attendance; it was also performed by the Elisabeth Irwin High School Chorus and the Greenwich Village Orchestra. Eric A. Gordon, a Los Angeles resident since 1990, is a native of New Haven, Connecticut. His undergraduate degree is from Yale University, where he majored in Latin American Studies. He studied Spanish five years and Portuguese two years. He also took a summer residency in Portuguese at New York University. He went on to Tulane University, where he continued studying Portuguese and wrote a master's thesis on the opera in Rio de Janeiro in the 19th century, using original sources uncovered in the Arquivo Nacional. He earned a doctorate in history, also from Tulane, writing his dissertation about the anarchist movement in Brazil in the pre-World War I era. He also studied Portuguese language and culture under a Gulbenkian Foundation fellowship in Lisbon. Eric is the author of Mark the Music: The Life and Work of Marc Blitzstein, and co-author of Ballad of an American: The Autobiography of Earl Robinson. A memoir in short story form that he translated from Portuguese, Waving to the Train and Other Stories, by Hadasa Cytrynowicz, appeared in 2013 from Blue Thread Press. In 2015 he executive produced the compact disk City of the Future: Yiddish Songs from the Former Soviet Union, a collection of songs composed in 1931 by Samuel Polonski to the lyrics of major Soviet Yiddish poets. He is the author of a currently unpublished political autobiography. From 1995 to 2010, Eric was Director of the Workmen's Circle/Arbeter Ring in Southern California. He previously worked at Social and Public Art Resource Center, helping to produce murals all around the city of Los Angeles, which gave him the experience to commission a mural at the Workmen's Circle building. He was Southern California Chapter Chair of the National Writers Union (Local 1981 UAW/AFL-CIO) for two terms. He has written for dozens of local, national, and international publications, mostly about art, music, culture, and politics. From 2014 onward, he has been a staff writer and editor for People's World online newspaper. From 2006-09 Eric took coursework toward certification as a Secular Jewish Leader, referred to in Yiddish as a vegvayzer. Upon graduation, he became a legal officiant certified to conduct weddings and other ceremonial functions, a role equivalent in law to a minister, priest, or rabbi. He has a similar endorsement as a Humanist celebrant for people of any background. For five years he served as a Deputy Commissioner of Civil Marriage for the County of Los Angeles, where he conducted 1500 marriages. Eric Gordon can be contacted at ericarthurgo@gmail.com."

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