Hostility to black people in Ireland would have dismayed Paul Robeson, the African-American star who thrilled concert-goers in the late 1930s with his “effortless” singing of black spirituals. During his visits to (non-fascist) Europe Robeson encountered less racism than in the US, where he had to be hustled into the elevator in hotels so that other guests would not see him. The bass singer, who made Ol’ Man River famous, so impressed Ireland’s music critics that they compared him to John McCormack, the great Irish tenor admired by James Joyce.
One reviewer wrote that Robeson was in “a class apart” in how he responded to the changing mood of his songs. “He simply stands there and pours out the melodies . . . Questions of range or pitch seem not to bother him at all; production, breathing, and phrasing all come to him as naturally as if he were speaking . . .”
Robeson argued that the folk music of the world was very much alike, but Ireland probably possessed “the richest” tradition. He identified the influence of the Irish language in the spoken English he heard from Cork to Belfast – it had a “musical quality” – but he felt he could not sing Irish songs “properly” because he could not speak the native language. As a musician he had one great ambition – to explore the origin of African-American songs and “give it its place in the folk music of the world”.
The son of an enslaved man, Robeson reiterated in newspaper interviews that black people were little better than slaves in the southern states of the US. For African-Americans, he explained, the difference between New York and Alabama was the same as the difference for a Jew between Britain and Hitler’s Germany.
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Keeping it lit – Frank McNally on attending the global premiere of Gloomsday
Robeson refused to sing in the South, because he would not be welcomed in his own right but despised because of his skin colour. He pointed out that “if someone were to bump into me in the street, and I lifted my hand, I would be knifed there and then and no questions asked”. A qualified lawyer, civil rights in the US remained his obsession. And, he admitted, “mere music” would never end segregation – “I feel almost in despair when I return to America”. But there was at least one positive political development in the southern states: black and white workers as members together in the same trade unions.
Robeson’s latest movie, Sanders of the River, opened in cinemas in February 1936, just after he finished his Irish tour. In the summer the singer visited the Soviet Union where, unlike the segregated South, he felt “free” walking on the street. His schedule on this trip included a discussion about another film, this time with the acclaimed director Sergei Eisenstein.
Europe’s fascist dictators, however, remained unchecked. On the question of Mussolini’s conquest of Abyssinia (Ethiopia) Robeson asked, sarcastically, was not the time past for “bringing civilisation” to the “backward” races with machine-guns? And, he might have added, “civilizing” Africans with poison gas. Believing, rightly, that they would get away with it, Hitler and Mussolini next targeted Spain by providing an overwhelming military advantage to its future dictator, Franco. Defending the Spanish Republic became the European cause célèbre, and Paul Robeson and Ernest Hemingway were among the many artists who supported it. Asked to offer a statement to “Writers Take Sides” – briefly, perhaps – Samuel Beckett memorably replied “¡UPTHEREPUBLIC”.
Hemingway went to the front, Jason Gurney remembered, to boost the morale of the volunteers in the International Brigades. He “sat himself down behind the bullet-proof shield of a machine-gun,” Gurney wrote, “and loosed off a whole belt of ammunition in the general direction of the enemy. This provoked a mortar bombardment for which he did not stay.” Hemingway should have stuck to his day job as an observer of war-ravaged Spain – he later wrote the powerful novel For Whom the Bell Tolls. Robeson, on the other hand, was a hit with the foreign soldiers, singing through the night in “Siberian conditions” during the Christmas of 1937. Fellow Americans, black and white, were playing their part in Spain’s anti-fascist struggle. They included Oliver Law, the African-American commander of the George Washington Battalion, who had been killed in action earlier that year.
Robeson continued to pursue his political agenda when the US joined the war against Hitler and he became one of the most popular performers in America. After the second World War, however, like so many other anti-fascists, he fell from grace when the Soviet Union and the US became bitter rivals. Blacklisted, his passport was taken from him. But he did record some Irish songs – “the saddest in the world” – such as Thomas Moore’s She is Far From the Land, which John McCormack also released. In 1957 Robeson recorded Kevin Barry; in the words of the ballad, “just a lad of 18 summers” who gave his life, in 1920, “for the cause of liberty”. As a student in Belvedere College Barry identified racism as the worst prejudice. Robeson would have agreed.