Robert Kimball, a musical theater historian and champion of American popular song who unearthed hundreds of pieces long thought to be lost and helped rediscover the work of the seminal Black Broadway songwriting team of Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake, died on Wednesday in Manhattan. He was 86.
His death, at a hospital, was confirmed by his wife, Abigail Kimball, and his son, Philip.
Mr. Kimball often acted as a kind of Indiana Jones of song, as when he helped excavate a treasure trove of manuscripts by George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers and many others that was found in a warehouse in Secaucus, N.J., in 1982.
The hoard dated back to the advent of sound pictures, when Warner Bros., the movie studio responsible for the landmark 1927 talkie “The Jazz Singer,” bought a number of music publishing houses to handle its new soundtrack needs.
A half-century later, sitting largely untouched and forgotten in some 80 crates, the 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70 previously unknown songs by Gershwin, including missing scores to some of his briefer-lived musicals; more than 175 unpublished songs by Jerome Kern, including a half-hour of music cut from “Show Boat” immediately after its 1927 premiere; manuscripts by Vincent Youmans, Victor Herbert,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.
“The first envelope I opened, which had ‘Cole Porter’ written on it, had songs I’d never heard of — and I’m a Cole Porter scholar and biographer,” Mr. Kimball told The Los Angeles Times in 1987, when he and a team of specialists had finally finished cataloging the material. “I sat there quite stunned.”
Mr. Kimball had been in love with Broadway musicals ever since seeing “Annie Get Your Gun” as a child. Majoring in American studies at Yale, from which he graduated in 1961, he wrote his undergraduate thesis on musicals of the late 1920s.
After a stint in politics, he returned to Yale for law school, graduating in 1967, and in his last year was asked to help organize the papers that Cole Porter had left to the university. Mr. Kimball went on to serve as the curator of Yale’s American musical theater collection from 1967 to 1971.
“Instead of going to work for the Justice Department or some big law firm, that’s what I did,” he later told The Boston Globe. “A lot of people thought I was a little wacky.”
He was also a music and dance critic for The New York Post; an artistic adviser to the Cole Porter and Ira Gershwin estates; the writer, with collaborators, of lavishly illustrated biographies of Porter and the Gershwins; and the editor of volumes of the complete lyrics of Porter, Lorenz Hart, Ira Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Frank Loesser and Johnny Mercer.
In 1973, Mr. Kimball collaborated with the composer William Bolcom on “Reminiscing with Sissle and Blake,” a book that documented the songwriting team’s career and included interviews with both men. It helped bring their immense contributions — especially the hit 1921 musical “Shuffle Along,” a Black theater milestone that was adapted and revised on Broadway in 2016 — back into the spotlight.
When Mr. Kimball approached Mr. Sissle in the late 1960s, the Black composer and lyricist was about to throw out his old files and memorabilia; he didn’t think anyone was interested in them.
“And by this miracle we were able to get there in time,” Mr. Kimball recalled in a 2016 interview on the NPR show “Fresh Air.”
“We didn’t know how close we were to losing this extraordinary heritage,” he added. “‘Well, if this interests you fellas,’ Sissle said, ‘I’ll call my old pal up and we can go out and visit him in Brooklyn.’ Sissle drove us to 284A Stuyvesant Avenue, where Eubie and Marian Blake lived. And we were greeted there by Eubie, and the afternoon that I spent was one of the most memorable in my life.”
Robert Eric Kimball was born in New York City on Aug. 23, 1939, to Morris Kimball, who had his own plastics firm, and Eve (Schulman) Kimball.
In 1962, after graduating from Yale, he worked for Representative John V. Lindsay, the liberal Republican who later went on to serve as mayor of New York. In the fall of 1963, Mr. Kimball became director of the Republican Legislative Research Association, which had been formed to help draft and push for civil rights legislation. In 2021, he published a memoir about this period, “Crisis and Compromise: The Rescue of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.”
In 1972, he married Abigail Kuflik, a longtime writer and editor at Newsweek. In addition to her and their son, he is survived by their daughter, Miranda Swaffield, and three grandchildren.
In 1971, after the publication of “Cole,” the Porter biography he wrote with the New Yorker journalist Brendan Gill, Mr. Kimball received a phone call from Irving Berlin.
“I was a little stunned, I have to say,” Mr. Kimball told The Boston Globe. “He wanted to talk about Cole Porter with me. He probably talked for a couple of hours. It was the first of many phone conversations we had over the years.”
Of all the songwriters Mr. Kimball came to know, “Mr. Berlin,” as he always insisted on calling him, was perhaps his favorite. Every Christmas until the composer’s death in 1989, at 101, Mr. Kimball led a group of carolers to the Berlin home in Manhattan to sing “White Christmas” and other songs beneath his window.
Yet Mr. Kimball never abandoned his critical perspective entirely. “Irving Berlin,” he said, “also wrote some of the worst songs anyone ever published — as he himself said.”
Mr. Kimball recalled offering the great composer this consolation: “Well, Babe Ruth struck out a lot, too.”
Ash Wu contributed reporting.
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