Jacques Leon Wolfe (1896-1973) was a Romanian Jew who emigrated to the United States and became fascinated by African-American music.
Trained at Juillard, Wolfe did extensive research into the history of Black music in the United States, both as folk song and spiritual, and started to incorporate it into his own compositions. This led to a collaboration with Langston Hughes, in which Wolfe set to music Hughes’s poem Homesick Blues (1927) as ‘Sad Song in De Air’.
Wolfe is credited with Herbert Stothart and Howard Johnson at the beginning of The Prodigal. Three songs are performed by Lawrence Tibbett and unidentified Black singers in the nighttime party sequence. Given that these are in Black dialect, it is likely that Wolfe made a significant contribution to the lyrics and music. Some online sources credit only Stothart and Johnson. What is certain is that Tibbett recorded Wolfe’s ‘The Glory Road’, but the number was not included in the final version of the film.
