Robert Todd Duncan was born in Danville, Kentucky in 1903 and was George Gershwin’s personal choice to create the role of Porgy in the 1935 premiere of Porgy and Bess — a part he went on to play many hundreds of times. He taught voice at Howard University and, during the 1936 Washington run of Porgy and Bess, led the cast in a protest against the National Theatre’s segregated seating, refusing to perform in a house that barred him from buying certain seats. Film work was a sideline; he appeared in only two pictures, Syncopation and Unchained. It is the second of those that made him, almost incidentally, the first voice ever heard singing “Unchained Melody.”