Robert Kimball, whose devotion to the words of America's classic songwriters helped preserve a body of work that is central to the country's musical heritage, has died at the age of 86, according to The New York Times.
The lyric detective
Kimball's great subject was the lyric — the craft of writers who set words to the melodies of the American theater and popular song from the 1920s through mid-century. Where others collected recordings or sheet music, he pursued the words themselves, tracking down manuscripts, trunk songs and forgotten verses scattered across archives, estates and private collections.
His most enduring monuments are the exhaustive lyric collections he assembled and edited, among them "The Complete Lyrics of Cole Porter" and "The Complete Lyrics of Ira Gershwin." These volumes did more than reprint familiar standards; they gathered the full output of their subjects, including songs cut from shows, unpublished material and alternate versions, and set them out with the care of a scholarly edition. For performers, historians and enthusiasts, they became indispensable reference works.
Rescuing what was almost lost
Kimball had a particular gift for finding what had been given up for lost. His research repeatedly turned up material long thought to have vanished — manuscripts and songs recovered from the corners of the archive — and his work was credited with restoring pieces of the repertory to public knowledge. That detective's instinct earned him recognition within the theater world for the sheer scale of what he salvaged.
Born in New York in 1939 and educated at Yale, he served early in his career as a curator of the university's collection devoted to the American musical theater, a role that helped shape his life's work. He later wrote about music as a critic and worked closely with the estates and heirs of the songwriters he studied, becoming a trusted steward of their legacies.
Why his work mattered
The significance of Kimball's scholarship is easy to underestimate, because its results are so seamless. When a long-lost Cole Porter verse turns up in a cabaret set, or a complete edition allows a director to restore a number cut from a 1930s musical, it is often because of the groundwork he laid. Popular song, unlike literature bound between hard covers, is fragile: lyrics go unrecorded, manuscripts are discarded, and the words that once filled theaters can slip away within a generation.
By treating those lyrics as worthy of the same rigorous preservation given to poetry or drama, Kimball helped ensure that the American songbook survived not just as melodies but as language — the wit, craft and feeling of writers whose words are woven into the culture.
His death removes one of the field's most dedicated custodians. But the archive he helped build, and the many volumes bearing his editorial hand, remain — a lasting record of the songs, and the words, he spent a lifetime making sure would not be forgotten.
