So am I!!!

Hi t-p, nice to bump into you! How's your piano?

Hi again t-p you beat me to it - I was about to post Caius (pronounced keys) College, Cambridge - and had several attempts to spell it correctly!

Oh I think MJ almost certainly does know his work. He was probably held in higher regard in this the UK (especially in Wales) than in his native America during his lifetime. When he was refused an exit visa from the other side of The Pond during the McCarthy era, he sang to a capacity audience at the Royal Albert Hall via a telephone link! His Othello was pretty damned good, too.

Thanks Bryn, not a lot of people know that

Paul Robeson was one of the foremost African-Americans of the twentieth century. He was a world renowned singer and actor and a leading civil rights activist.

Robeson’s association with South Wales dates from 1928 when, whilst performing in ‘Show Boat’ in London’s West End, he met a group of unemployed miners who had walked to London to draw attention to the hardship and suffering endured by thousands of unemployed miners and their families in South Wales.

Robeson visited South Wales many times between 1929 and 1939, singing in various towns including Cardiff, Neath and Swansea. In 1938, he sang to the 7,000 people who attended the Welsh International Brigades Memorial at Mountain Ash to commemorate the 33 Welshmen who had died in Spain. He told the audience “I am here because I know that these fellows fought not only for me but for the whole world. I feel it is my duty to be here."

Robeson’s links with South Wales were reinforced when in 1939, he starred in The Proud Valley, a film about life in a mining community in the Rhondda.

Every year between 1952 and 1957, Robeson was invited to sing at the Miners’ Eisteddfod in Porthcawl but he was unable to travel because his passport had been withdrawn by the US Government because of his outspoken left wing and anti-racist views. In October 1957 however, Robeson was able to participate in the Miners’ Eisteddfod by means of a transatlantic telephone link to a secret recording studio in New York.

The South Wales miners added their voice and signatures to the international petitions that eventually forced the US Supreme Court to reinstate his passport in 1958.

At a reception given in his honour by the South Wales Area NUM in 1958, he told the audience, “You have shaped my life – I have learnt a lot from you. I am part of the working class. Of all the films I have made the one I will preserve is The Proud Valley.”





  

 

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