Show tune in the context of "Make Believe (Jerome Kern song)"

Hamilton: An American Musical is a sung-and-rapped-through biographical musical with music, lyrics, and a book by Lin-Manuel Miranda. Based on the 2004 biography Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow, the musical covers the life of American Founding Father Alexander Hamilton and his involvement in the American Revolution and the political history of the early United States. Composed from 2008 to 2015, the music draws heavily from hip hop, as well as R&B, pop, soul, and traditional-style show tunes. It casts non-white actors as the Founding Fathers of the United States and other historical figures. Miranda described Hamilton as about "America then, as told by America now".

From its opening, Hamilton received near-universal acclaim. It premiered off-Broadway on February 17, 2015, at the Public Theater in Lower Manhattan, with Miranda playing the role of Alexander Hamilton, where its several-month engagement was sold out. The musical won eight Drama Desk Awards, including Outstanding Musical. It then transferred to the Richard Rodgers Theatre on Broadway, opening on August 6, 2015, where it received uniformly positive reviews and high box office sales. At the 70th Tony Awards, Hamilton received a record-breaking 16 nominations and won 11 awards, including Best Musical. It received the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. In 2020, a filmed version of the Broadway production was released on Disney+, followed by a theatrical release in 2025 by Walt Disney Pictures.

Jazz standards are musical compositions that are an important part of the musical repertoire of jazz musicians, in that they are widely known, performed, and recorded by jazz musicians, and widely known by listeners. There is no definitive list of jazz standards, and the list of songs deemed to be standards changes over time. Songs included in major fake book publications (lead sheet collections of popular tunes) and jazz reference works offer a rough guide to which songs are considered standards.

Not all jazz standards were written by jazz composers. Many are originally Tin Pan Alley popular songs, Broadway show tunes or songs from Hollywood musicals – the Great American Songbook. In Europe, jazz standards and "fake books" may even include some traditional folk songs (such as in Scandinavia) or pieces of a minority ethnic group's music (such as Romani music) that have been played with a jazz feel by well known jazz players. A commonly played song can only be considered a jazz standard if it is widely played among jazz musicians. The jazz standard repertoire has some overlap with blues and pop standards.

The Great American Songbook is the loosely defined canon of significant 20th-century American jazz standards, popular songs, and show tunes.

Judith Marjorie Collins (born May 1, 1939) is an American singer-songwriter and musician with a career spanning nearly seven decades. An Academy Award-nominated documentary director and a Grammy Award-winning recording artist, she is known for her eclectic tastes in the material she records (which has included folk music, country, show tunes, pop music, rock and roll and standards), for her social activism, and for the clarity of her voice. Her discography consists of 36 studio albums, nine live albums, numerous compilation albums, four holiday albums, and 21 singles.

Collins' debut studio album, A Maid of Constant Sorrow, was released in 1961 and consisted of traditional folk songs. She had her first charting single with "Hard Lovin' Loser" (No. 97) from her fifth studio album In My Life (1966), but it was the lead single from her sixth studio album Wildflowers (1967), "Both Sides, Now" – written by Joni Mitchell – that gave her international prominence. The single reached No. 8 on the Billboard Pop Singles chart and won Collins her first Grammy Award for Best Folk Performance. She enjoyed further success with her recordings of "Someday Soon", "Chelsea Morning" (also written by Mitchell), "Amazing Grace", "Turn! Turn! Turn!", and "Cook with Honey".

"Ol' Man River" is a show tune from the 1927 musical Show Boat with music by Jerome Kern and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II, who wrote the song in 1925. The song contrasts the struggles and hardships of African Americans with the endless, uncaring flow of the Mississippi River. It is sung from the point of view of a black stevedore on a showboat, and is the most famous song from the show. The song is meant to be performed in a slow tempo; it is sung complete once in the musical's lengthy first scene by the stevedore "Joe" who travels with the boat, and, in the stage version, is heard four more times in brief reprises. Joe serves as a sort of musical one-man Greek chorus, and the song, when reprised, comments on the action, as if saying, "This has happened, but the river keeps rolling on anyway."

The song is notable for several aspects: the lyrical pentatonic-scale melody, the subjects of toil and social class, the metaphor to the Mississippi, and as a bass solo (rare in musicals, solos for baritones or tenors being more common).