Robert Kimball: 1939-2026

Robert Kimball, the musical theater historian who in 1982 uncovered long-buried scores by Gershwin, Porter, Richard Rodgers, et al. in a New Jersey warehouse, died in a Manhattan hospital on July 1. He was 86 and had been ill for several years.

As described in Barry Singer’s excellent New York Times obituary, what Kimball stumbled upon in that Secaucus warehouse was a stunning addition to the American Songbook, dating back to 1929.

”A half-century later, sitting largely untouched and forgotten in some 80 crates, the [Warner Bros.] holdings encompassed nearly 70 previously unknown songs by Gershwin, including missing scores to some of his briefer-lived musicals; more than 175 unpublished songs by Jerome Kern, including a half-hour of music cut from Show Boat immediately after its 1927 premiere; manuscripts by Vincent Youmans, Victor Herbert, Sigmund Romberg, Rudolf Friml and other masters; and original orchestrations by pioneering Broadway orchestrators like Frank Saddler, Hans Spialek and Robert Russell Bennett.”

Kimball, with degrees in music theater and law from Yale, was artistic advisor to the Porter and the Gershwin estates and wrote biographies of both. He also edited much-valued complete-lyric volumes of Porter, Lorenz Hart, Ira Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Frank Loesser, and Johnny Mercer and was the curator of Yale’s American musical theater collection.

He produced, as financed by the Indiana (Porter’s home state) Historical Society and culled from the Yale University archive—where Cole Porter’s and Kimball’s complete archives reside—two three-CD boxed sets: You're the Top: Cole Porter in the 1930's (Koch International Classics), nominated for a 1993 Grammy award for Best Historical Collection, and another three-CD follow-up set in 1995 representing the 40s and 50s. (Full disclosure, I was a collaborating producer on these two, along with Robert and jazz critic Richard Suldhalter. We spent countless hours in the Yale recordings library “auditioning” different renderings often of the same song; these were all recordings--from Walt Whitman to Ella Fitzgerald--that Porter had deemed worthy of adding to his extensive recordings library—which Kimball had organized for Yale.) 

Author of the Civil Rights Act

What is less known—and less heralded—about Kimball, is that he worked as a Congressional aide to Representative John Lindsay in 1962 and a year later was named director of the Republican Legislative Research Association. It was that group that came up with the language for the bipartisan 1963 Civil Rights compromise that led to the passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964. Kimball wrote a memoir about the experience that was published in 2021. Crisis and Compromise: The Rescue of the 1964 Civil Rights Act is described on Amazon thusly:

“In a vivid narrative, Robert Kimball provides a comprehensive, first-hand account of the largely overlooked role House Republicans—chiefly Representatives John V. Lindsay, Charles Halleck, and William McCulloch—played in the successful enactment of the Civil Rights Act.”

The book was self-published; it seems that this monumental time in history, as recounted some 60 years later by the only living eyewitness, was of no interest to commercial publishers.

Kimball worked with Ira Gershwin’s widow to get the librettist/lyricist’s papers to the Library of Congress. He was a music critic for the New York Post; an advisor to and occasional commentator for the New York City Center’s “Encores!” series; and can take full credit for reviving the legacy of the Black songwriting team Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake (“The Dixie Duo”) whose1921 Broadway musical Shuffle Along, was revived on Broadway in 2016. Together with composer William Bolcom, Kimball in 1973 authored Reminiscing with Sissle and Blake, which contained interviews with both men and documented their career together.

The world of music theater owes the Brooklyn-born and raised Kimball a great debt—for his research, his advocacy, and his generosity in sharing his copious knowledge of a very special era with the world. He is survived by his wife, Abigail Kimball, son Philip (who attended the Metropolitan Opera with his father from the age of eight), daughter Miranda Swaffield, and three grandchildren. A celebration of his life is in the planning stages.

The New York Times