Randy Newman Part 3: Love songs and ballads

Part 1 and Part 2 of this long article explored Randy Newman's political songs and discussed how Newman's use of irony and social and political satire, as a mode of expression, exemplifies how irony and satire can be a socio-political tool to illuminate complex social and political issues.  

This third instalment focuses on his more personal songs and the songs which tend to define his work- ballads and love songs. Many are breathtakingly  beautiful and tender songs, that unlike Newman’s other songs, offer no protective irony, but bear the weight of human experience, pathos and melancholia. However, in a 2003 interview in Uncut Magazine, Newman claims, 'every time I write one, it's somehow fudged'.

Losing You is a song inspired by a family’s loss of their 23 year old son to brain cancer.

Do you know how much you mean to me?/Should've told you 'cause it's true/I'd get over losing anything/But I'll never get over losing you/When you're young and there's time you forget the past/You don't think that you will but you do/But I know that I don't have time enough/And I'll never get over losing you
 

Listen to the beauty of the images in I Think it’s Going to Rain Today, written when Newman was just 22:

Broken windows and empty hallways/A pale dead moon in sky streaked with grey/ Human kindness is over flowing/ And I think its going to rain today/……./Lonely, lonely/Tin can at my feet/Think I’ll kick it down the street/That’s the way to treat a friend/Bright before me the signs implore me/Help the needy and show them the way/ Human kindness is overflowing/And I think its going to rain today'

In an interview in the music magazine Uncut, Newman is characteristically understated about  I Think its Going to Rain Today, one of his best known songs:

'You know I've changed my mind a little about that song. I used to think it was just sophomore college- boy romantic misery, sort of generalised young-man depression. I mean I was 21, 22. But it's not bad. You know 'Scarecrows dressed in the latest styles...' Just the fact that the song uses the word 'implore'-it's almost outside the vocabulary you use for pop music nowadays. So I have a higher opinion of that song than I used to.'

Feels like Home is a characteristically beautiful Newman piano ballad.  A love song.
 

With your embrace down a long dark street/And a sigh of wind in the night/But I'm alright 'cause I have you here with me/ And I can almost see the dark feels light/If you knew how much this moment means to me/And how long I've waited for your touch/If you knew how I wanted someone to come along/I never thought I'd love anyone so much/Feels like home to me, feels like home to me/Feels like I'm on my way to where I come from/Feels like home to me, feels like home to me/Feels like I'm on my way back to where I belong/Feels like I'm on my way back to where I belong

 

In Texas Girl at the Funeral of her Father, Newman creates a poignant and beautiful ballad of a daughter at her father’s funeral on the plains of Texas. In just 12 lines Newman crafts an environment of profound sadness, melancholia and humanity and a daughter's lament for her dead father.

 

Here I am lost in the wind/'Round in circles sailing/Like a ship that never comes in/Standing by myself/Sing a sad song for a good man/Sing a sad song for me/Sing a sad song for the sailor/A thousand miles from the sea/Here I am alone on the plain/Sun's going down/It's starting to rain/Papa, we'll go sailing

With a few exceptions-I Miss You and Dixie Flyer are examples-Newman rarely does autobiographical songs.

I Miss You is a regretful and wistful love song, written to his first wife whilst married to his second wife. 
 

Still in my heart after all these years/separated by time now by distance/I couldn't allow myself to feel the loss that I feel right now/you're far away and happy I know/it's a little bit late... twenty years or so/it's a little bit cold for all those concerned/but I'd sell my soul and your soul for a song/so I'll pour my heart out/ I miss you/ I miss you, I'm sorry but I do/I want to thank you for the good years/and apologize for the rough ones/you must be laughing yourself sick/but I wanted to write you one before I quit/and this one's it/I miss you, I wanted you to know/I miss you, and I still love you so.'

In Dixie Flyer, perhaps Newman's most autobiographical song, he describes his birth in Los Angeles during WW2 and his mother’s return to her family on the Dixie Flyer, the train from Los Angeles to New Orleans, where Newman lived till aged 11, when his family returned to Los Angeles:

I was born right here/November 43/Dad was a captain in the army/fighting the Germans in Sicily/My poor little mumma/Didn’t know a soul in LA/Went down to the Union Station made a getaway/got on the Dixie Flyer/bound for New Orleans/cross the State of Texas to the land of dreams/on the Dixie Flyer/bound for New Orleans/back to her friends and family/in the land of the dreams

 

Like Tom Waits, Newman has the gravitas and mastery of his craft to write songs with beautiful melodies that tell stories that shock. He conjures up lives that exist outside most songs. He creates characters unlike himself and gives these characters a voice, often to speak unpleasant things.

I Want You to Hurt Like I Do closes his 1988 album Land of Dreams  and is a ballad about a man who emotionally damages his family without meaning to:

I ran out on my children/And I ran out on my wife/Gonna run out on you too, baby/I done it all my life/Everybody cried the night I left/Well, almost everybody did/My little boy just hung his head/And I put my arm, put my arm around his little shoulder/And this is what I said:/"Sonny I just want you to hurt like I do/I just want you to hurt like I do/I just want you to hurt like I do/Honest I do, honest I do, honest I do'/If I had one wish/One dream I knew would come true/I'd want to speak to all the people of the world/I'd get up there, I'd get up there on that platform/First I'd sing a song or two you know I would/Then I'll tell you what I'd do/I'd talk to the people and I'd say/"It's a rough rough world, it's a tough tough world/Well, you know/And things don't always, things don't always go the way we plan/But there's one thing, one thing we all have in common/ And it's something everyone can understand/All over the world sing along/ I just want you to hurt like I do

 

 

In Germany Before the War, based on Fritz Lang's M, the song’s character is a child murderer:

In Germany before the war/There was a man who owned a store/And every day at five-o-nine/He’d cross the park down to the Rhine/And there he’ d sit by the shore……../A little girl has lost her way/With hair of gold and eyes of gray/Reflected in his glasses/As he watches her/A little girl has lost her way/

Then in the last three lines of the song Newman tells a shattering end to the story:
 

We lie beneath the autumn sky/My little golden girl and I/And she lies very still.

 

Randy Newman's website is here. Some informative articles about Newman are here, here, here, and here.

Remembering the work of music producer Bob Johnston (1932-2015)

photo courtesy of Rolling Stone/Al Clayton/Courtesy of Country Music Hall of Fame
 

Anyone who has a record (or CD) by Bob Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel, Leonard Cohen or Johnny Cash  is a beneficiary of the work of music producr Bob Johnston who died last week aged 83.

Johnston was a guiding force behind some of the best known records by those artists.

American singer-songwriter Joe Henry (who has appeared on this blog before) has written a fine tribute to Bob Johnston "Is it rolling Bob?': Remembering Bob Johnston".

Henry has written:

More than any other single practitioner of that post, Johnston helped give shape, heft and durability to some of the most transformative American music of the past five decades, framing the sounds and intentions of an era — when invention was valued on par with accessibility; lines were confused and maps were being redrawn — and helping to foster a culture of autonomy and liberation for visionary artists that remains vital to this day, and continues to evolve.

As a staff producer for Columbia Records (and then as a free agent) Bob Johnston was a guiding force behind the artists on his watch — playing priest and lifeguard, counselor and agitator to such standard-bearers and upstarts as Johnny Cash, Marty Robbins, Leonard Cohen, Simon and Garfunkel, and The Byrds, to name a scant few.

Joe Henry reminds us that it was Bob Johnston who stood up to music executives threatening Johnny Cash's career over his plans to make live albums at maximum security prisons Folsom and San Quentin. Both albums were ground-breaking and highly successful.

Johnston produced the early breakout albums for Simon & Garfunkel including Sounds of Silence and Parsley, Sage, Rosemary & Thyme

Johnston was instrumental in the early career of  Leonard Cohen, producing his breakout second album Songs of Love and Hate. Henry writes:

Once in the studio together, Johnston pushed Cohen's weary and soulful vocals far into the foreground, allowing each song's story and its teller to trump the weather of whatever else might musically be happening around it. He insisted that the guarded Cohen fully inhabit his own authority as a poetic songwriter and transcendent performer. Following the studio sessions, Johnston was charged with assembling a touring band that could conjure in concert the mystic quality of the recorded songs, and said simply of his criteria that he wanted only, "people who look up — I didn't want anybody looking down." 

But it was Bob Dylan where Johnston had his greatest impact. Johnston produced 7 albums for Dylan from the mid 1960's including Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde on Blonde, John Wesley Harding, Nashville Skyline, Self Portrait, and New Morning. 

Remembering Ken Sprague (1927-204) and his powerful images

image by Ken Sprague

"In essence, the leitmotif of his work is about power and the abuse of power as well as the resilience of ordinary working people to this abuse... It is an art of engagement – engagement for change."

(John Green, from the Introduction to Ken Sprague – People’s Artist.)

People continue to ask about this powerful image that appears on this site. (It it also continues to appear in its original or modified form elsewhere).

The image is a drawing by Ken Sprague. I have written before here and here about Ken Sprague who I had the privilege to know during the 1980's. You can read more about Ken's life, his work and legacy here

Ken Sprague's remarkable image captures the recent zeitgeist of uprisings and revolts happening around the world, in which ordinary people are standing up and fighting against state and corporate power and political and financial plundering.

Ken's image was created decades ago but reflects his profound and lifelong commitment to  human rights, justice, peace and socialism.

Ken was a renowned artist, cartoonist, illustrator, poster designer , print maker, educator and filmmaker  who believed profoundly that art should  always serve social justice, peace, human rights and political struggle.

 The obituary for Ken was written by John Green and appeared in the Guardian newspaper. John wrote a book on Ken's life titled Ken Sprague: People's Artist.

 Ken Sprague: Radical artist in pursuit of Socialism
By John Green ( from The Guardian 6th August 2004)

 The aim of Ken Sprague, who has died of a stroke aged 77  was, he said, “to build a picture road to socialism, to the Golden City, or as Blake called it, Jerusalem”. A painter, sculptor, muralist, banner-maker and sometime television presenter, Ken was, for half a century a regular, but dissenting cartoonist for the Daily Worker and its successor the Morning Star, and for papers like Tribune and Peace News.

As a posterman his work included material for Martin Luther King, and the women of Greenham Common — and against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslavakia, and Edward Heath’s Industrial Relations Bill. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, he was designing scenery and backdrops for Unity Theatre and was involved in the Centre 42 trade union arts project.

All round talents
His linocuts for the radical collective Cinema Action’s Kill The Bill film (1971) began an involvement in moving images. I made a film about him in 1972 which led to Jeff Perks’s 1976 BBC Omnibus documentary The Posterman. This led to a series of Channel 4 films, devised with Jeff Perks and presented by Ken, called Everyone A Special Kind Of Artist (1986). There was also a BBC South West series, The Moving Line with Joan Bakewell. In later life, he taught and practised as a  psychodrama specialist. Ken was born in Bournemouth , his father was a train driver and his mother worked in a cardboard box factory. His first work of art, in 1937, was a linocut made from linoleum, torn from the kitchen floor in response to the Spanish civil war.

Early life
He was educated at Alma Road Elementary School — until it was bombed — and Porchester Road Secondary Modern School. There the headmaster, noticing his talent, recommended that he apply to the local art college. He won a scholarship to Bournemouth Municipal  College and, from 13 and a half, studied graphics — in those days students of his background were hardly considered for fine arts courses. One morning in 1944 he volunteered, aged 17 for the Royal Marines — and that afternoon, in Southampton, he joined the Communist Party. After basic military training he was transferred to Vickers-Supermarine as a technical artist, work which took him to wartime Yugoslavia. Postwar, and after a summer stint in a circus, he completed his college diploma course in design and illustration. The CP, he told me, was his university, but after the Bournemouth Daily Echo had labelled him a college revolutionary, local job prospects dwindled. He briefly worked for a volunteer labour battalion in Yugoslavia, was employed  by the Boy Scouts and then, between 1950 to 1954 he worked in a Carlisle mining company design office — doubling as a cartoonist for the local Conservative, and Liberal newspapers. Then came a move to London as the Daily Worker’s publicity manager, which also had him working as a journalist and cartoonist. Devastated by the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, in 1959 Ken left to set up, with Ray Barnard, the publicity company, Mountain & Molehill. Yet he continued producing cartoons for the Worker, and its successor the Morning Star into the 21st century.

Mountain & Molehill
M&M — later The Working Arts — was responsible for some of the most innovative trade union campaigns of the 1960s and 1970s. Ken told union leaders they had to (TO) use publicity to win hearts and minds and to see it as an integral part of union work. And it was Sprague and Barnard who initiated the sensational 1961 visit to Britain of the first man in space Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin. M&M also worked for the Indian High Commission — which led to a meeting with Jawaharlarl Nehru In the late 1960s Ken began editing the Transport and General Workers Union’s the Record, transforming it into a lively newspaper, — and illustrating it with his own cartoons. As a poster and print-maker he worked with a number of leading progressive organisations and individuals, including Pete Seeger.

New life in Devon
In 1971 he moved with his wife, Sheila, a talented potter, to Holwell, a farmhouse in Devon, and converted it into an artistic centre. Sheila died of cancer in 1973, but with his second wife, Marcia he set up the Holwell International Centre For Psychodrama and Sociodrama which continued until 1998. There Ken combined his artistic talents with pedagogic expertise, using them in this new field in which he became a leading practitioner.

It is his posters and prints that will remain his true epitaph. His innovative and prolific creativity, his recalcitrant questioning, determination and belief in others’ potential was an inspiring beacon for everyone who met him, young and old. His images remain etched in the mind, they unsettle, provoke, discomfort but also amuse. Ken was concerned about how politics impact on the ordinary person. In essence the leitmotif of his work is about power and the abuse of power as well as the resilience of ordinary people. He depicted the world as changeable. His work is imbued with unfashionable optimism, depicting a world where ethics and values still have relevance. It is the antithesis of post-modern fragmentation and its disdain of value systems. Every morning, he drew a political cartoon to assuage his anger and frustration at the state of the world. And only a few weeks before he died, he was excitedly telling me about plans for an artistic project in Cuba and a book he was determined to publish of anti-war drawings. He left the Communist Party, after the acrimonious split in 1988. He continued to call himself a communist, however, saying “The party left me, I didn’t leave the party”. He won several prestigious awards, including poster of the year award from the National Council of Industrial Design on two occasions.

He is survived by Marcia, from whom he recently separated, his five children and seven grandchildren.

John Green

Remembering Mike Marqusee (1953-2015)

"Go back to his books and rediscover the potency and the appeal – and, often, the joie d’esprit – of his writings: on cricket, on Muhammad Ali, on his own journey as an anti-Zionist Jew and, of course, on Bob Dylan."

Anne Beech, Pluto Press




"The crowd reminds me that I only put myself
in other people’s shoes
because I couldn’t find my own
and the common locker was so near at hand.”
Mike Marqusee

Mike Marqusee, who died in London last week aged just 61, was a man of immense talents and a beautiful writer who combined a career and life of writing with a profound lifelong commitment to political activism.

One of many things that I appreciated about Mike Marqusee was that he was a living example of the ways that popular culture and writing could be harnessed as a vehicle for radical political analysis and protest without becoming ideological dogma. 

His work also reminded us of the essential importance of art and culture- past and present- to radical political struggles. In a piece in Red Pepper he once wrote:

"The art of the past, is a precious, irreplaceable resource, and one that can be a powerful stimulant in the struggle for that other world we insist is possible. Listening to the voices of the dead is a necessary aspect of ‘contending for the living’..... 

Under capitalism, art is treated as a commodity, but there is something in art of any value that resists that status, breaks out of that dimension. There’s always a disconnection between its market value and its artistic value – whose very nature resists quantification. Each work of art has a claim of its own that cannot be measured in terms of another and thus cannot be reduced to exchange value. This was what William Blake had in mind when he declared: ‘Where any view of Money exists Art cannot be carried on, but War only"

 Marqusee was a writer, a radical journalist, poet, Marxist writer, commentator and political activist. He wrote arguably the finest book on Bob Dylan Wicked Messenger: Bob Dylan and the 60s (2005), in which he explored the political, cultural and historical significance and legacy of Dylan’s 1960’s music.

His book on Muhammad Ali Redemption Song: Muhammad Ali and the Spirit of the Sixties is considered one of the great sporting books of all time. In it Marqusee restores Ali as an exemplar and symbol of radical conviction, and explores the ways that popular culture can be simultaneously a vehicle of protest and a vehicle of incorporation.

His political memoir and family history In If I Am Not for Myself: Journey of an anti-Zionist Jew combined his own family history, with political theory and analysis of religious texts, to distinguish Jewishness from its co-option by the state of Israel.

Marqusee who described himself as a 'deracintaed Marxist, American Jew" was of Lithuanian-Jewish background and was born in the US, but had lived and worked in the UK since 1971.

Marqusee combined writing and journalism with a lifelong commitment to political activism for left and progressive causes. He was a dedicated political campaigner and activist and for many years, he was the Press Officer for the Stop the War Coalition that organized the over a million people march in London against the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. 

He wrote books and articles on a remarkable and eclectic range of topics as diverse as history, cricket, India, sport, leftist and labor politics, poetry music and arts, popular culture, UK and world politics, anti-Zionism and his own experiences with cancer. He wrote a regular column for the Indian publication The Hindu, and was a regular columnist for the left-wing magazine Red Pepper (his columns are here). 

His last book the Price of Experience: Writings on Living with Cancer was published in 2014 and explores the politics of cancer and his own experience of cancer treatment under the UK National Health Service. Marqusee wrote about the connection and interplay between neoliberal and market fundamentalism and the politics of cancer and the suffering experienced by people living with cancer.

Marqusee was also a published poet. His last book of poetry Street Music included poems written between 2009-2012, including this one.

THIS MORNING’S SURPRISE

This morning’s surprise is how much I’ll miss rail travel.
The green fields looming up and falling behind,
the milky tea wobbling in a plastic cup,
the engine’s steady vibration.

This afternoon’s surprise is how many shades of red there are,
each one sitting in a room of its own, dense in meditation.
Each one a field of conflict, a medium of conciliation.

This evening’s surprise is not that the novel ends
in a desultory return to the working week –
loose ends trimmed and tucked out of sight –
but the ferocity of my recoil
at the author’s glib contrivance.

Midnight’s surprise is Lorca’s moon floating over Hackney
full-faced, round-eyed and speaking Spanish.

An obituary in the Guardian is here  and personal tributes from his colleagues and comrades on the British left are here, here, here, here and here. The Red Pepper Magazine has published these tributes. 

The American sports writer Dave Zirin has written this heartfelt tribute to Mike Marqusee. 

Saturday's poem in musical mode: Alfred Noyes The Highwayman

Alfred Noyes long narrative poem The Highwayman has long fascinated me.  

Like many others I learned to recite the poem at primary school and remain captivated by the poems rhythmic cadences and vivid imagery.  

The poem was written by Noyes at the turn of the 20th Century and is set in 18th century England. The poem  tells the story of a highwayman and his lover Bess, the landlord's (innkeeper) daughter. The Highwayman is betrayed to the authorities who take Bess hostage and wait in ambush for him. Bess sacrifices her life to warn him. 

Learning of her death he dies in a futile attempt at revenge, shot down on the highway. The final stanza tells us that the ghosts of the lovers meet again on winter nights.

The poem has also been turned into song, most notably (and successfully) by Loreena McKennitt and Andy Irvine.

A live version by Loreena McKennit is here

The Highwayman 
Alfred Noyes (1880-1958) 
                                   
                       PART ONE 
                                                 I 
    THE wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees,
    The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas,
    The road was a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor,
    And the highwayman came riding—
                      Riding—riding—
    The highwayman came riding, up to the old inn-door. 
                                                 II 
    He'd a French cocked-hat on his forehead, a bunch of lace at his chin,
    A coat of the claret velvet, and breeches of brown doe-skin;
    They fitted with never a wrinkle: his boots were up to the thigh!
    And he rode with a jewelled twinkle,
                      His pistol butts a-twinkle,
    His rapier hilt a-twinkle, under the jewelled sky. 
                                                 III 
    Over the cobbles he clattered and clashed in the dark inn-yard,
    And he tapped with his whip on the shutters, but all was locked and barred;
    He whistled a tune to the window, and who should be waiting there
    But the landlord's black-eyed daughter,
                      Bess, the landlord's daughter,
    Plaiting a dark red love-knot into her long black hair. 
                                                 IV 
    And dark in the dark old inn-yard a stable-wicket creaked
    Where Tim the ostler listened; his face was white and peaked;
    His eyes were hollows of madness, his hair like mouldy hay,
    But he loved the landlord's daughter,
                      The landlord's red-lipped daughter,
    Dumb as a dog he listened, and he heard the robber say— 
                                                 V 
    "One kiss, my bonny sweetheart, I'm after a prize to-night,
    But I shall be back with the yellow gold before the morning light;
    Yet, if they press me sharply, and harry me through the day,
    Then look for me by moonlight,
                      Watch for me by moonlight,
    I'll come to thee by moonlight, though hell should bar the way." 
                                                 VI 
    He rose upright in the stirrups; he scarce could reach her hand,
    But she loosened her hair i' the casement! His face burnt like a brand
    As the black cascade of perfume came tumbling over his breast;
    And he kissed its waves in the moonlight,
                      (Oh, sweet, black waves in the moonlight!)
    Then he tugged at his rein in the moonliglt, and galloped away to the West. 
  
                                        PART TWO 
                                                 I 
    He did not come in the dawning; he did not come at noon;
    And out o' the tawny sunset, before the rise o' the moon,
    When the road was a gypsy's ribbon, looping the purple moor,
    A red-coat troop came marching—
                      Marching—marching—
    King George's men came matching, up to the old inn-door. 
                                                 II 
    They said no word to the landlord, they drank his ale instead,
    But they gagged his daughter and bound her to the foot of her narrow bed;
    Two of them knelt at her casement, with muskets at their side!
    There was death at every window;
                      And hell at one dark window;
    For Bess could see, through her casement, the road that he would ride. 
                                                 III 
    They had tied her up to attention, with many a sniggering jest;
    They had bound a musket beside her, with the barrel beneath her breast!
    "Now, keep good watch!" and they kissed her.
                      She heard the dead man say—
    Look for me by moonlight;
                      Watch for me by moonlight;
    I'll come to thee by moonlight, though hell should bar the way! 
                                                 IV 
    She twisted her hands behind her; but all the knots held good!
    She writhed her hands till her fingers were wet with sweat or blood!
    They stretched and strained in the darkness, and the hours crawled by like years,
    Till, now, on the stroke of midnight,
                      Cold, on the stroke of midnight,
    The tip of one finger touched it! The trigger at least was hers! 
                                                 V 
    The tip of one finger touched it; she strove no more for the rest!
    Up, she stood up to attention, with the barrel beneath her breast,
    She would not risk their hearing; she would not strive again;
    For the road lay bare in the moonlight;
                      Blank and bare in the moonlight;
    And the blood of her veins in the moonlight throbbed to her love's refrain . 
                                                 VI 
        Tlot-tlot; tlot-tlot! Had they heard it? The horse-hoofs ringing clear;
    Tlot-tlot, tlot-tlot, in the distance? Were they deaf that they did not hear?
    Down the ribbon of moonlight, over the brow of the hill,
    The highwayman came riding,
                      Riding, riding!
    The red-coats looked to their priming! She stood up, straight and still! 
                                                 VII 
    Tlot-tlot, in the frosty silence! Tlot-tlot, in the echoing night!
    Nearer he came and nearer! Her face was like a light!
    Her eyes grew wide for a moment; she drew one last deep breath,
    Then her finger moved in the moonlight,
                      Her musket shattered the moonlight,
    Shattered her breast in the moonlight and warned him—with her death. 
                                                 VIII 
    He turned; he spurred to the West; he did not know who stood
    Bowed, with her head o'er the musket, drenched with her own red blood!
    Not till the dawn he heard it, his face grew grey to hear
    How Bess, the landlord's daughter,
                      The landlord's black-eyed daughter,
    Had watched for her love in the moonlight, and died in the darkness there. 
                                                 IX 
    Back, he spurred like a madman, shrieking a curse to the sky,
    With the white road smoking behind him and his rapier brandished high!
    Blood-red were his spurs i' the golden noon; wine-red was his velvet coat,
    When they shot him down on the highway,
                      Down like a dog on the highway,
    And he lay in his blood on the highway, with the bunch of lace at his throat. 
                  *           *           *           *           *           * 
                                                 X 
    And still of a winter's night, they say, when the wind is in the trees,
    When the moon is a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas,
    When the road is a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor,
    A highwayman comes riding—
                      Riding—riding—
    A highwayman comes riding, up to the old inn-door. 
                                                 XI 
    Over the cobbles he clatters and clangs in the dark inn-yard;
    He taps with his whip on the shutters, but all is locked and barred;
    He whistles a tune to the window, and who should be waiting there
    But the landlord's black-eyed daughter,
                      Bess, the landlord's daughter,
    Plaiting a dark red love-knot into her long black hair. 
  

Remembering the vision of Tom Wills

"I'm shunned and ignored
by the mighty who preside
I'll not curry for their favour
I'll not bootlick at their side
I'll be gone with those who knew me well
My dark friends have died in their own sad hours"
Neil Murray song Tom Wills Would

"I think the answer lies in the fact that his story contains such a broad range of factors from our collective past"
Martin Flangan on Tom Wills

"I often think that, although he was a cricketer and created this Aboriginal cricket team, that this act of his creating the team, was one of our first great acts of national healing between white and black Australians"
Greg de Moore on Tom Wills

The juggernaut of the commercialized and corporatised version of AFL Foootball is thankfully coming to a close after 8 months. Next week is the Grand Final and large swathes of the nation will stop for a couple of hours to watch that game.  Australian Rules Football is a uniquely Australian sport, played no where else in the world.

For the millions watching the AFL Finals the name Tom Wills (1835-1880) won't mean much. Which is a pity. Wills was one of the founders of the game and perhaps its first superstar. Wills also understood and lived with the consequences of the profundity of this country's history of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal relations, an experience embedded in the Australian psyche.

The Australian writer Martin Flanagan calls Tom Wills a uniquely Australian legend whose story draws together many elements of our national and collective past.  Greg de Moore (who wrote a biography of Wills) and Martin Flanagan both note that Wills was one of the early pioneers who acted to heal the wounds caused by Australia's racist history.

Tom Wills was born in Western Victoria and went to the UK for schooling. There he played first class cricket and on his return to the colonies in 1857 captained Victoria in cricket. Wills was the leading cricketer in the colony and was instrumental in establishing cricket matches between the colonies.

In 1858 Wills proposed an "activity" to keep cricketers fit off-season, and in 1859 called a meeting to form football teams. Wills was instrumental in writing the rules of  what become Australian rules football and was coach, umpire and one of the leading players in the competition. He was instrumental in forming teams all over Melbourne and Geelong. Wills was also one of the dominant players in the competition.

In 1861 Wills moved to Northern Queensland to work on his father's property. Wills had been there just three weeks when a party of Aboriginals killed nineteen of the group, including Tom's father in one of the biggest massacre of whites by blacks in Australian history. Tom was away from the property at the time.

Martin Flangan writes that in the retributive raids that followed, three times as many blacks were killed.

The events left a profound legacy. Despite the massacre of his father and friends Wills had a deep relationship with Aboriginal people in Queensland and Melbourne. He spoke the language of the Tjapwurrung people from west Victoria where he grew up.

Upon his return to Melbourne Wills  continued to play football and cricket playing his last first-class match in 1876, at the age of 40. 

Six years after the massacre, Tom Wills captained the Aboriginal cricket team that became the first Australian cricket team to tour England. Most of the Aboriginal cricketers were Jardwadjali men from western Victoria. Their language was almost the same as the Tjapwurrung people which Wills spoke. On Boxing Day 1866, Tom Wills captained the Australian Native XI at the MCG. 

However, psychological trauma from the massacre combined with his alcoholism took its toll  and Wills developed delirium tremors from alcoholism, extreme delusions and night terrors. After a stay in the Kew Asylum he was admitted to Royal Melbourne Hospital in May 1880 and shortly afterwards escaped. Within days Wills committed suicide by stabbing a pair of scissors through his heart. He was just 44.

The Australian singer songwriter Neil Murray has written a fine tribute titled Tom Wills Would.

Greg de Moore's biography of Tom Wills is titled Tom Wills: His spectacular rise and fall.

The rising voice of Paul Robeson

“All that Paul Robeson stood for had enormous impact on American and global history. The combination of his art, intellect and humanity was rarely paralleled. The cruelties visited upon him by the power of the State stands as a great blemish on the pages of American history.”
Harry Belafonte

"..while Robeson’s reputation and name recognition will gradually grow, he will remain a marginal figure, greatly admired by the relatively few Americans who understand his giant accomplishments and his remarkable courage, but otherwise eclipsed by one of the ugliest episodes in our country’s history, one of the lasting legacies of McCarthyism and the Cold War'
Peter Dreier

We are witnessing a growing recognition of the remarkable life and achievements of Paul Robeson, who is unquestionably one of the towering figures of the twentieth century.

There are few people whose achievements can match those of Paul Robeson.

In an article in the Los Angeles Review of Books titled, We are long overdue for a Paul Robeson revival, Peter Dreier writes that Paul Robeson was the most talented man of the twentieth century.

Dreier writes:

He was an internationally renowned concert and opera singer, film star and stage actor, college football star and professional athlete, writer, linguist (he sang in 25 languages), scholar, orator, lawyer, and activist in the civil rights, labor, and peace movements. In the 1930s and 1940s, Robeson was one of the best-known, and most admired, Americans in the world. Today, however, he is almost a forgotten figure. Few Americans know his name or accomplishments.

We are familiar with authoritarian governments that seek to “erase” the memory of prominent critics, but how can it happen in a democracy like the United States? Starting in the late 1940s, as the Cold War escalated, America’s political establishment began an assault on Robeson’s career and reputation because of his political activism and outspoken radicalism. He was blacklisted, his concerts and recording contracts canceled, and his passport revoked. By the mid-1950s, he had become a marginal figure — emotionally depressed, physically exhausted, and politically isolated.

As Dreier points out, other public figures who challenged the status quo retained their reputation, but not Robeson. Dreier writes:

He is, at best, a footnote in history textbooks, little known outside a small circle of Americans with a special interest in the history of the civil rights and left-wing movements, although somewhat better known among African Americans than white Americans.

But as Dreire and others have noted, Robeson's outstanding achievements are at last being recognized. 

A range of factors are at work;

• the death of his son Paul Robeson jr who had spent his life promoting and protecting his father's reputation has focused greater attention on Robeson.
• growing interest in and recognition of Robeson's achievements and legacy, including artistic events, public forums and press and media reports (here here, here, here, here).
• the publication of Jordan Goodman's new book "Paul Robeson A Watched Man", which tells of his political awakening and political engagement and his relentless persecution by the US Government.
• the publication of "Eslanda: The Large and Unconventional Life of Mrs. Paul Robeson, Barbara Ransby's biography of Eslanda Robeson, Paul Robeson's wife.

Here in Australia Robeson is remembered for his famous 1960 visit, which is the subject of recent historical investigation (described in this article by Ann Curthoys and this piece in The Australian), recent ABC Radio programs (here) and his famous concert on the building site of the Sydney Opera House, which at the time was under construction.