William Caesar Warfield (January 22, 1920 – August 25, 2002) was an American concert bass-baritone, known for his appearances in stage productions, Hollywood films, and television programs.

In 1938, as a senior at Washington High School in Rochester, he won the Music Educators National Song Competition in St. Louis and expressed an interest in pursuing a career on the concert stage.

It was an intelligence center where hundreds of Jewish recruits who fled Nazi Germany for the United States were trained to interrogate their one-time countrymen.

According to the exhibit at the Zekelman Holocaust Memorial Center in Farmington Hills, Michigan, Warfield was brought to the camp because of his strong German skills which he perfected while studying music.

Over the next three years he also appeared in "Set My People Free" and the opera Regina, while also studying with Yves Tinayre [fr] and Otto Herz of the veteran's training program of the American Theatre Wing.

In this production, he played opposite the opera star Leontyne Price, whom he soon married, but the demands of two separate careers left them little time together.

In March 1984 he was the winner of a Grammy Award in the "Spoken Word" category for his outstanding narration of Aaron Copland's Lincoln Portrait, accompanied by the Eastman Philharmonia [1].

Managed by Arthur White, this ensemble toured the United States giving full concerts of African-American spirituals and folk songs until Warfield's death in 2002.

By 1966 his voice had deepened from bass-baritone to a full-fledged bass, and he could not sing the climactic high note on Ol' Man River as easily as he had in the 1951 film version.

[9] He died in Chicago in August 2002, following treatment at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, succumbing to injuries he sustained in his neck from a fall a month prior.

After joining the Schiller Institute in 1996, he began to collaborate with acclaimed vocal coach Sylvia Olden Lee in a project to save the performance tradition of the Negro spiritual.

[11] During the final years of his life, from 1999 to 2002, he performed regularly at Schiller Institute biannual conferences, often with Olden Lee as his accompanist, and the two of them traveled the country conducting singing workshops for members of the LaRouche Youth Movement.

The William Warfield Scholarship Fund was formed in 1977 to support young African American classical singers at the Eastman School of Music.