Sadly, the only person who could bring enough magnitude and gravitas to announcing the news of James Earl Jones’s death is James Earl Jones.

As distinctive as a ring tone, Jones’s orotund voice became not just a trademark but an institution; not just an institution but an in-joke. Jones was tops on the list of voices people reflexively cited when asked who they’d like to have narrate the audiobook of their life. He showed up on The Simpsons multiple times, wringing knowing humor from the earnest sobriety of his stentorian rumble, fully enjoying the comedy inherent in taking an instrument trained to bellow fiery Shakespearean poetry and turning it to lines like “So, the children learned to function as a society, and eventually they were rescued by… oh, let’s say Moe.”

Unlike some of his Black contemporaries, Jones was not overtly political in his off-camera activities. He contributed to the civil rights conversation through cultural ubiquity, bringing a tireless work ethic to a truly prolific body of work. Tall and barrel-chested with a visage that could toggle from gentle kindness to incandescent rage, he performed in soap operas and Broadway plays, blockbuster movies and intimate dramas and the Star Wars Christmas TV special. He reportedly did eighteen plays within a thirty-month span; it’s exhausting just typing that sentence. He won Tonys and Emmys and an honorary Oscar and in 2022 a Broadway theatre was named after him. Not bad for a farm kid from Mississippi.