Lovely clip. A great film/musical. I was about ten years old when my mother bought a "new fangled" LP record of Paul Robeson singing negro spirituals - I remember one particular song - "Waterboy", and although I never deliberately learned the song, it somehow stuck with me all these years and I can remember every word and note still. And I recall too saying to my mother, "I wish when I get older I could have a voice like him!". And funnily enough, now I'm 77 years old, I'll be singing "Waterboy" for the very first time in public at a local fund raising concert for Médicins sans Frontièrs for the Gaza Palestinian victims of Israel's continue savagery on 1st Aug. . Of course Waterboy isn't a spiritual, it's a convict song from the chain gangs splitting rocks for roads, and the waterboy is the youngster charged with getting water to the sweating convicts in the searing summer heat. I'll also be singing a proper Robeson spiritual "My Lord, What a Morning", plus some Schubert and Brahms, and three Scottish Burns songs, including appropriately for the evening "A Man's a Man for A' That" - his ode to egalitarianism and the brotherhood of man. Something two hundred and near fifty years later we might wish to remember. Wish me luck - though with Waterboy I've had nearly seventy years to get it right!!.

And of course we should be remembering Paul Robeson for much more than his singing as one of America's outstanding historical moral figures - God, we could do with someone like this now. .