Putting Paul back on the wall

Philadelphia is a city rich in murals - there's scarcely a bare wall that doesn't sport some colourful depiction of historical or cultural significance. Many are a little garish and naive or overly earnest in their attempt to reinforce community values but others are inspiring and informative.

This one, in the process of being repainted after repairs to the wall, I find especially engaging. It shows the singer and actor Paul Robeson, who lived for a time, and died, in Philadelphia, and whose career came to involve him far more in radical politics and civil right activism than in show business. He was the son of a former slave and fought racial prejudice all his life (in 1930 his appearance as Othello opposite Peggy Ashcroft was ground-breaking.) He flirted with anarchism and with communism, raised money for the Spanish republicans and, not unsurprisingly, was blacklisted in the McCarthy era, losing his right to work and to travel for several years. Robeson had long been taken to the hearts of miners in Wales, both because of his support for workers' rights and for his great singing voice. He had performed for them and emphasized his solidarity with them over the years. In 1957, unable to accept their invitation to sing at the Miners' Eisteddfod (a traditional songfest) because his passport had been revoked, he performed a memorable concert via a transatlantic telephone link for the 5000 assembled miners - thus attracting far more publicity than if he had gone himself.

On a personal note, my parents left London early in World War 2 to live, on very limited means, in rural isolation just over the Welsh border. My mother would occasionally travel back to London to see her family there, returning with news of the devastation of her native city. The trains would always be filled with soldiers going home on leave and singing, as Welsh people do, all the while. As they approached Wales, the singing would reach a crescendo with the sentimental ballad "We'll Keep a Welcome."

We'll keep a welcome in the hillsides,
We'll keep a welcome in the vales.
This land you knew will still be singing,
When you come home again to Wales.

This land of song will keep a welcome,
And with a love that never fails.
We'll kiss away each hour of hiraeth*,
When you come home again to Wales.

The song's inevitably a tear-jerker and for the rest of her life, my mother would well up whenever she heard it. It always sends a thrill down my spine. It was a song that Paul Robeson sang with intense feeling whenever he was in Wales, and during that famous transatlantic concert. I couldn't find a recording of him but here's the Treorchy Male Voice Choir with whom he sang it.

Diolch yn fawr Paul!

*Hiraeth means the profound nostalgia that the Welsh feel when absent from their homeland.