John McWhorter revisits Fats Waller’s lost Broadway musical Early to Bed

John McWhorter, long known as a combative public intellectual, is now building toward a very different kind of argument: the recovery of a lost Broadway score. The New York Times columnist, bestselling author, linguist and Columbia University professor has turned his attention to Early to Bed, the 1940s musical comedy that paired music by Fats Waller with a book and lyrics by George Marion Jr.

A television interview that aired May 24, 2026, put McWhorter’s latest project alongside the book that made him a lightning rod two decades ago, Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America. Published in 2000, the book drew sharp backlash because many readers believed McWhorter was saying Black people were responsible for Black people’s problems. That controversy helped define his public reputation, one shaped by arguments about Black identity, language and institutional failure. His work on Early to Bed suggests a different kind of intervention, one rooted in cultural memory rather than provocation.

Early to Bed opened on Broadway at the Broadhurst Theatre in New York City on June 17, 1943, and ran until May 13, 1944. Waller’s score made history on its own terms: he was the first Black composer to write music for a Broadway book musical with a mostly white cast, and the only one to do so with commercial success. The production, McWhorter has argued, has been largely ignored by musical-theater historians, and no actual score survives. That absence is central to why the work has remained obscure, even as it occupies a singular place in both Broadway and jazz history.

McWhorter first showcased his reconstruction effort publicly at the Triad Theatre in New York City on January 9, 2026. The project has since taken on the shape of a family affair, reflecting not only his scholarly interests but also a broader effort to reclaim work that fell out of the canon. For McWhorter, the restoration of Early to Bed is more than an archive exercise. It is a test of whether Black cultural achievement can be remembered on its own terms, without being reduced to old fights over blame, respectability or who gets to define the story.