The Voice

Today I think about The Voice.

You know The Voice. You don’t have to imagine it. It is immediate. It is iconic. It is the voice of some of the most impactful lines in modern storytelling.

But The Voice is more than just the sound. It is the symbol of the man who produced it. It is a piece of his legacy that will live with us forever.

If you have never had the pleasure of listening to James Earl Jones talk about finding his voice, do yourself a favor, and go listen.

In brief summary, Jones had a stammer. A petrification of speech that silenced him for years. And while I will not pretend to be the same as him, or have had the same amount or types of trials in my young life as he may have had in his, where I do connect to him is in the way he found his voice: Through poetry. Through performance. Through art.

Jones experienced the liberation of the voice through the speaking of the written word. With an invested educator and the passion for the passion of art, Jones put in the work, gave the necessary effort, and became who we know him to be.

It is such a beautiful strangeness, a sweet irony for the boy unable to speak that his memory will live on by the feature he is most immediately identified with being his incredible voice. The voice of many of our childhoods. The voice of kings, and dark lords, and every manner of legend. A voice that could make someone with no interest in sports whatsoever believe that the greatest invention man has ever conceived is baseball.

As a man whose day to day involves constant speaking in front of crowds, a man whose passion is for art and performance and beautiful language being used to engage and entertain, a man who was once a boy paralyzed in front of any audience, whether one or twenty, a boy who had a good teacher that saw my voice buried beneath things I did not know how to get past and gave me the tools to dig it out and let it breathe, James Earl Jones is more than a celebrity. He is an icon. He is a goalpost. He is a legend.

He is the kind of person that reminds me to think of where I’ve come from, of what I can achieve, of what is within all of us to overcome and grow beyond and develop into. And the kind of person that reminds me how desperately important a need are art, poetry, theater, film, storytelling — all the things we can so easily take for granted.

And so here’s to you, Mr. Jones.

Be at peace in the great circle of life.

And may the Force be with you.

Thank you for your voice.

It will be with us always.