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The Great Paul...

Posted by Ed <iframe src='https://members5.boardhost.com/xxxxx/info/user=Ed' width='330' height='300' border=0 style='border:none;'> on July 22, 2024, 6:30 pm

?si=2aoSNI98JiZcmNsN

Peerless. Nobody can sing it like him. Absolute bliss. nm

Posted by Der <iframe src='https://members5.boardhost.com/xxxxx/info/user=Der' width='330' height='300' border=0 style='border:none;'> on July 22, 2024, 10:10 pm, in reply to "The Great Paul..."

Re: The Great Paul Robeson - a personal anecdote

Posted by John Monro <iframe src='https://members5.boardhost.com/xxxxx/info/user=John+Monro' width='330' height='300' border=0 style='border:none;'> on July 22, 2024, 11:24 pm, in reply to "The Great Paul..."

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. .

Re: The Great Paul Robeson - a personal anecdote

Posted by Ed <iframe src='https://members5.boardhost.com/xxxxx/info/user=Ed' width='330' height='300' border=0 style='border:none;'> on July 22, 2024, 11:31 pm, in reply to "Re: The Great Paul Robeson - a personal anecdote"

Thanks for the story, John.
I am not religious but just so love "My Lord, what a morning"
Have a great sing song for your Gaza appeal...they so need it!

Re: The Great Paul Robeson - a personal anecdote

Posted by Ken Waldron <iframe src='https://members5.boardhost.com/xxxxx/info/user=Ken+Waldron' width='330' height='300' border=0 style='border:none;'> on July 22, 2024, 11:53 pm, in reply to "Re: The Great Paul Robeson - a personal anecdote"

My old man was a fan...we had a number of Paul Robeson 78's: those big heavy pre vinyl things...

-good luck with the singing!

Re: The Great Paul Robeson - a personal anecdote

Posted by Ed <iframe src='https://members5.boardhost.com/xxxxx/info/user=Ed' width='330' height='300' border=0 style='border:none;'> on July 23, 2024, 1:06 am, in reply to "Re: The Great Paul Robeson - a personal anecdote"

Ken, my dad had them too...big country music fan too...big heavy pre vinly things...all the Hanks.

Ploughshares to Swords ....Music to Munitions....

Posted by Ken Waldron <iframe src='https://members5.boardhost.com/xxxxx/info/user=Ken+Waldron' width='330' height='300' border=0 style='border:none;'> on July 23, 2024, 11:45 am, in reply to "Re: The Great Paul Robeson - a personal anecdote"

Converation sparked off a line of enquiry in my head...what exactly were those old heavy 78's made with?
I was thinking it was Bakelite but Googled it to check. Turns out it was Shellac...and:

"...During the early years of World War II, the War Production Board ordered a 70 percent cut in the production of new phonograph records. Record production consumed about 30 percent of the nation’s supply of shellac, a resin desperately needed by the armed forces. Shellac was used in the making of signal flares and explosives, and it was applied as a coating on artillery shells."

So...a campaign was started to recycle old shellac records "...urging people to donate their cracked, broken and worn out dance records so the materials in the discs could be recycled."

Photos here:

https://newsinteractive.post-gazette.com/thedigs/2013/11/18/breaking-records-for-the-war-effort/

As a second aside anyone who has used Shellac as a varnish will know that quite fascinatingly it's made from the secreted resin from the Shellac Bug or Beetle...

I thought surely not....but it's true: I checked the Beatles output and indeed they were also produced in the 78 format...in Shellac!!

- The Early Beatles were made... on Beatles!!

Who knew?

Re: The Great Paul...

Posted by RaskolnikovX <iframe src='https://members5.boardhost.com/xxxxx/info/user=Raskolnikov' width='330' height='300' border=0 style='border:none;'> on July 23, 2024, 12:43 pm, in reply to "The Great Paul..."

always worth having this around too.

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...no amount of cajolery, and no attempts at ethical or social seduction, can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party...So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin.

Re: The Great Paul...

Posted by Ed <iframe src='https://members5.boardhost.com/xxxxx/info/user=Ed' width='330' height='300' border=0 style='border:none;'> on July 23, 2024, 1:48 pm, in reply to "Re: The Great Paul..."

"I never died said he".

Thanks Rask. for the reminder...struck home with those miners!

Re: The Great Paul...

Thanks for that.

This report is from the very same locality as the pit Robeson visited:

"One of these villages, whose foundations can no longer be traced, occurred in the immediate vicinity of Niddry Mill. It was a wretched assemblage of dingy, low-roofed, tile-covered hovels, each of which perfectly resembled all the others, and was inhabited by a rude and ignorant race of men, that still bore about them the soil and stain of recent slavery. Curious as the fact may seem, all the older men of that village, though situated little more than four miles from Edinburgh, had been born slaves. Nay, eighteen years later (in 1842), when Parliament issued a Commission to inquire into the nature and results of female labour in the coal-pits of Scotland, there was a collier still living that had never been twenty miles from the Scottish capital, who could state to the Commissioners that both his father and grandfather had been slaves, that he himself had been born a slave, and that he had wrought for years in a pit in the neighbourhood of Musselburgh ere the colliers got their freedom... "

https://randomscottishhistory.com/2019/05/09/iv-serfs-colliers-and-salters/

Re: The Great Paul...

Posted by Ed <iframe src='https://members5.boardhost.com/xxxxx/info/user=Ed' width='330' height='300' border=0 style='border:none;'> on July 24, 2024, 12:03 am, in reply to "Re: The Great Paul..."

Big bloke too...always helps.
What a voice!

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