This is another number from Parade, a musical the critics loved but the public didn't. This song is a soliloquy sung by Leo Frank and based on his testimony at his trial for the murder of thirteen year old Mary Phagan. Basically, it amounts to "Not me, guv". Unfortunately for Frank but fortunately for justice, the jury didn't believe him; regrettable though his subsequent abduction and lynching may have been, no thoughtful person who has read Tom Watson's lengthy article in the August 1915 issue of Watson's Magazine can have serious misgivings about their guilty verdict.
Like the rest of the score of Parade, "It's Hard To Speak My Heart" was written by Jason Robert Brown. >>