Hard as it is to believe, one of the richest baritones and most recognizable voices in the history of screen and stage spent his childhood voiceless: James Earl Jones grew up in rural Michigan with a stutter so debilitating that he almost didn’t speak at all, to anyone, for eight years.
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“As a small child, I would communicate to my family, or at least those who didn’t mind being embarrassed by my stutter or my being embarrassed,” Jones told The Daily Mail. “I did communicate with the animals quite freely, but then that’s calling the hogs, the cows, the chickens. They don’t care how you sound…they just want to hear your voice.”
Jones — who died Monday in New York at 93, his agent confirmed – eventually stopped speaking to just the animals and ultimately became the voice — likely rivaled only by Morgan Freeman as the most famous voice of any human, from any race, from any generation.
Baby Boomers remember Jones best as the menacing Darth Vader — arguably the greatest movie villain of all time — in the original “Star Wars” saga; Gen-Xers remember him best as the booming monarch King Jaffe Joffer in the 1988 classic “Coming to America;” Millennials remember him best as the voice of Mufasa in 1994’s seminal “The Lion King.”
Considering the multi-generational impact of Jones’ oeuvre, it’s reasonable to suggest that no English-speaking human has not mimicked his voice or his lines at some point. But just 10 years ago, well into the latter part of a distinguished career, he admitted to NPR that he still stutters: “I don’t say I was ‘cured,’ “ he said. “I just work with it.”
Fortunately, Jones – whose long-estranged father Robert Earl Jones was one of America’s first Black stage and screen stars — learned how to manage that stutter thanks to high school English teacher Donald Crouch, whom he called “the father of my voice.” Crouch once questioned whether he plagiarized a poem he wrote and insisted that he perform it in front of the class.
“If you want to prove you wrote it, you must stand in front of the class and recite it by memory. Which I did. As they were my own words, I got through it,” Jones told The Daily Mail, adding that Crouch pushed him to continue working on public speaking to combat his stutter.
He took the mindset of improving his speech to the University of Michigan, where a failed pre-med exam pushed him to study drama, planting the seeds for a career as a stage actor in the late 1950s. His career-making role as a fictionalized version of boxer Jack Johnson – the first Black heavyweight boxing champion – in the 1967 play “The Great White Hope” earned him a Tony.
Jones was in the rarefied air of Black actors prominent on television and screen in the Jim Crow-polluted 1960s — an air he shares with the late Sidney Poitier and the disgraced Bill Cosby. He died having achieved one letter short of an EGOT and with a body of work that spans more than 60 years. Though Jones famously stayed away from the political arena – a path many expected of a 6-foot-2 man with that voice to take – his legacy is borne of a man who knew exactly what to do with his talents.
“I realized early on…that you cannot change anybody’s mind, no matter what you do,” he told the Associated Press. “As a preacher, as a scholar, you cannot change their mind. But you can change the way they feel.”
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