Literature

Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot (1950)

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A few blogs back I wrote about the fan­ta­sy world of Ursu­la K Le Guin and recalled the appeal of brows­ing the array of sci­ence fic­tion book cov­ers on the shelves at WH Smith’s. One of the giants of that genre – and one that I actu­al­ly went to the trou­ble of read­ing – was Isaac Asi­mov.

Born in Smolen­sk in 1920, Asi­mov was the son of Jew­ish par­ents who emi­grat­ed to the US in 1923, and the young Isaac was brought up in Brook­lyn, New York, where he helped his father run a sweet shop (a “can­dy store”, I sup­pose). It was there that he was first exposed to the clas­sic Amaz­ing Sto­ries mag­a­zines that his father also stocked, and he was soon div­ing into the fan­tas­tic worlds of Jules Verne and Edgar Allan Poe, and writ­ing short sto­ries of his own.

Although Asimov’s writ­ing career for many years played sec­ond fid­dle to his pro­fes­sion­al sci­en­tif­ic career (he became a lec­tur­er and pro­fes­sor of bio­chem­istry at Boston Uni­ver­si­ty), his out­put of sci­ence fic­tion was nonethe­less prodi­gious, and even­tu­al­ly the glut of ideas and the suc­cess of his writ­ing encour­aged him to become a full-time author. My expo­sure to Isaac Asi­mov came in the form of his Robot series, notably I, Robot, which my mem­o­ry tells me I inher­it­ed, rather than bought, prob­a­bly from my Uncle Geoff.

Asi­mov wrote 37 short sto­ries and six nov­els about robots and in fact had coined the term “robot­ics” in a 1941 sto­ry. He also came up with his famous and influ­en­tial “Three Laws of Robot­ics”:

  1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inac­tion, allow a human being to come to harm.
  2. A robot must obey the orders giv­en to it by human beings, except where such orders would con­flict with the First Law.
  3. A robot must pro­tect its own exis­tence as long as such pro­tec­tion does not con­flict with the First or Sec­ond Laws.

These Three Laws of Robot­ics, which Asimov‘s robots were sup­posed to obey, have resound­ed down the ages to the present day when the mod­ern pre­oc­cu­pa­tion with arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence toys with the idea that those laws might be breached, as they clear­ly were in The Ter­mi­na­tor!

Here’s a selec­tion of book cov­ers that gave many an illus­tra­tor free rein to por­tray Asimov’s robot­ic world, and start­ing with the bril­liant Ter­mi­na­tor-like cov­er that I remem­ber hav­ing.

Isaac Asi­mov
Film, TV, and Theatre

Hugo Weaving in Bodyline (1984)

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A dra­ma about crick­et, at first sight, doesn’t smack too much of a great idea for tele­vi­sion. The des­per­ate pitch­ing of ideas by Alan Par­tridge to that pro­gram­ming com­mis­sion­er in I’m Alan Par­tridge springs to mind (“Mon­key Ten­nis”?). Well, how about a bril­liant, riv­et­ing TV dra­ma about crick­et that doesn’t even require you to be a crick­et fan to enjoy? If that sounds oxy­moron­ic, check out 1984’s Aus­tralian-made TV mini-series Body­line, telling the sto­ry of the 1932/33 Eng­lish Ash­es crick­et tour of Aus­tralia.

Stick with me.

First, the his­tor­i­cal set­ting: in 1932, the Eng­land crick­et team set sail to Aus­tralia to face an Aus­tralian team huge­ly bol­stered by one Don­ald Brad­man, who had come to Eng­land in the 1930 Ash­es and scored 974 runs with a bat­ting aver­age of 139.14. The Eng­land crick­et author­i­ties felt that some new tac­tics were need­ed to cur­tail Bradman’s extra­or­di­nary bat­ting abil­i­ty which threat­ened to be even more prodi­gious in the upcom­ing tour on his home turf.

Enter Dou­glas Jar­dine. Oxford Uni­ver­si­ty-edu­cat­ed, and from the upper ech­e­lons of British soci­ety, Jar­dine had been mould­ed to be Eng­land cap­tain from an ear­ly age. He had already toured Aus­tralia and had devel­oped an antipa­thy to the crowds there who had jeered him. And now he was lead tac­ti­cian on how to defuse Brad­man. With his fast bowlers Harold Lar­wood and Bill Voce, he devised “fast leg the­o­ry” bowl­ing – lat­er called “body­line” – which entailed deliv­er­ing the ball short and fast so that it bounced dan­ger­ous­ly towards the batsman’s body. When the bats­man defend­ed him­self with his bat a result­ing deflec­tion could be caught by one of sev­er­al field­ers stand­ing close by on the leg side.

The tac­tic turned out to be effec­tive: it seri­ous­ly dis­com­fit­ed the bats­men and Eng­land won by four Tests to one, but it cre­at­ed a furore that threat­ened to turn into a diplo­mat­ic inci­dent. The watch­ing crowds were out­raged and most com­men­ta­tors thought the tac­tics unsports­man­like, intim­i­dat­ing and down­right dan­ger­ous (who thought that it would be the Eng­lish to employ tac­tics that were “just not crick­et”?).

In the TV series, Dou­glas Jar­dine is played mes­mer­iz­ing­ly by a young Hugo Weav­ing (best known lat­er for his por­tray­als of Agent Smith in The Matrix and Elrond in The Lord of the Rings), who admirably cap­tures the arro­gance and cer­tain­ty of a born leader, and one who dogged­ly pur­sues his strat­e­gy against mount­ing crit­i­cism.

Let’s watch the self-assured Jar­dine dis­cussing Brad­man with his Sur­rey team­mate Per­cy Fend­er and oth­ers pri­or to the tour. He’s great to watch, and note also the love­ly cam­era work cir­cling him as he talks. One last word for the writer of the theme music for the series; the music is so emo­tion­al­ly mov­ing (see the sec­ond clip of the open­ing cred­its) that I thought at first they had bor­rowed a clas­si­cal piece from some­one like Pachel­bel but not so: cred­it to Aussie com­pos­er Chris Neal.

Hugo Weav­ing as Dou­glas Jar­dine
Poetry

Edwin Muir’s The Horses (1956)

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Despite being a nat­ur­al opti­mist, I have for some rea­son always been attract­ed by the genre of dystopi­an fic­tion, although I’m not the only one judg­ing by the endur­ing pop­u­lar­i­ty of dystopi­an clas­sics such as Orwell’s sem­i­nal 1984, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Ray Bradbury’s Fahren­heit 451, Mar­garet Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids. The inspi­ra­tion inform­ing this genre comes from many and var­ied sources, includ­ing, just for starters, the rise of indus­tri­al-scale war­fare in the World Wars, the devel­op­ment of the atom bomb, total­i­tar­i­an­ism, AI and Big Tech, genet­ic engi­neer­ing, dead­ly virus­es, the sur­veil­lance soci­ety and cli­mate change. It seems we have a per­pet­u­al col­lec­tive curios­i­ty, and fear, about where our soci­ety might be going.

The genre extends to poet­ry, too; at school I became aware of this enig­mat­ic poem called The Hors­es, by Scot­tish poet Edwin Muir (1887–1959). Muir was born on the island of Orkney and had an idyl­lic child­hood which was cur­tailed in 1901 when his father lost the fam­i­ly farm and they had to move to Glas­gow. For Muir, this was a move from Eden to Hell: with­in a few short years, his father, two broth­ers, and final­ly his moth­er died in quick suc­ces­sion, and mean­while he had to endure a series of mun­dane jobs in fac­to­ries and offices.

Such a change in his life must have had pro­found effects on his future poet­ic works, although bal­anced by the hap­pi­ness that he even­tu­al­ly found when he met his wife, the trans­la­tor and writer Willa Ander­sen. He found great pur­pose with Willa and teamed up with her to trans­late the works of many notable Ger­man-speak­ing authors like Franz Kaf­ka. Any­way, although I haven’t read much else of Muir’s work, the poem that found its way into my school­boy hands nonethe­less stayed with me as a slight­ly dis­turb­ing piece of weird and prophet­ic dystopia right up to the present day.

The poem gets stuck in from the start:

Bare­ly a twelve­month after
The sev­en days war that put the world to sleep

So no mess­ing: we know where we are, we’re in a bleak, post-apoc­a­lyp­tic world…and then the very next line of the poem wastes no time by intro­duc­ing the hors­es of the title:

Late in the evening the strange hors­es came

There­after, fifty lines of an imag­i­na­tive con­cep­tion of what it might be like to be in a post-apoc­a­lyp­tic world…but with added “strange hors­es”! Of course, inter­pre­ta­tion of the poem and what the hors­es rep­re­sent, is entire­ly up to the read­er. A few years ago I wrote an elec­tron­ic sound­scape to catch the poem’s atmos­phere and to accom­pa­ny a read­ing of the poem. More recent­ly, I revis­it­ed this record­ing and noo­dled about with some images and footage and have set it to video, which I’d like to share with you here. I like to think I have cap­tured the mood of Muir’s poem and I hope he would approve!

Edwin Muir
Art

George Seurat’s Bathers at Asnières (1884)

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One of the great trea­sures in the trove that is London’s Nation­al Gallery is this mas­ter­piece of Neo-Impres­sion­ism, George Seurat’s Bathers at Asnières. It’s actu­al­ly one of a pair of Seu­rat mas­ter­pieces, along­side A Sun­day After­noon on the Island of La Grande Jat­te (held at the Art Insti­tute of Chica­go), with each sis­ter paint­ing depict­ing one side of the Seine riv­er and por­tray­ing the dif­fer­ent lev­els of French soci­ety that fre­quent­ed them in their leisure time: the wealthy soci­ety relax­ing at La Grande Jat­te and the work­ing-class res­i­dents hang­ing out on the left bank at Asnières.

The two paint­ings are lead­ing exam­ples of the tech­nique devel­oped by Seu­rat and known as pointil­lism, involv­ing the use of thou­sands of small, dis­tinct dots of colour and rely­ing on the abil­i­ty of the eye and the mind of the view­er to blend the indi­vid­ual dots into a fuller range of tones. The term was actu­al­ly first used in a pejo­ra­tive sense to mock Seu­rat (a reac­tion com­mon­ly expe­ri­enced by art pio­neers of course) but it stuck, and the tech­nique is rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the hunt by artists in the 1880s for inter­est­ing new meth­ods.

Here, we’re focus­ing on the work­ing-class res­i­dents of the city. They line this pic­turesque spot by the riv­er as they enjoy the sun­shine. There are around five fig­ures in the fore­ground and down the bank we see oth­er peo­ple and boats in the back­ground, plus a cityscape behind that. All of the build­ings are low lev­el and don’t take too much atten­tion from the fig­ures near­est us. There are no trees (unlike at La Grande Jat­te where the bour­geoisie enjoy the shade) and the char­ac­ters are flood­ed with sun­light.

Seu­rat was just 24 when Bathes at Asnières marked his arrival into the art world. The paint­ings are mon­u­men­tal­ly sized (15 by 6.5 feet) and Seu­rat knew that size would need to be met with tech­ni­cal bril­liance and so he pre­pared very care­ful­ly with thir­teen oil sketch­es and ten draw­ings before embark­ing on the real thing. In the end, he achieved a stun­ning lumi­nos­i­ty and plen­ty of inter­est to hold the view­er’s atten­tion. Sad­ly, Seu­rat died at just 31 and so we will nev­er know what sort of direc­tion his style might have tak­en in the next decades.

Bathers at Asnières
Literature

Jack Kerouac’s On The Road (1957)

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Back in late 1987 I set off back­pack­ing around the world for sev­er­al months, a most amaz­ing expe­ri­ence that I could write a lot about but won’t as the point I want­ed to make was that trav­el­ling presents a mul­ti­tude of oppor­tu­ni­ties to read books. In the back of the jour­nal I was keep­ing, I list­ed all the books that I had been read­ing along the way, on bus­es, in hotel rooms, and on the beach, and it’s inter­est­ing to me to review that list as I peruse it now. I’m quite impressed: I see some clas­sics of the dystopi­an genre (Orwell, Hux­ley, Kaf­ka), some great Amer­i­can lit­er­a­ture (Hem­ing­way, John Irv­ing, Joseph Heller, Kurt Von­negut), some stars of Brit Lit (Gra­ham Greene, G K Chester­ton, John Fowles, William Gold­ing), and of course there had to be a clas­sic about trav­el and freedom…and that clas­sic was Jack Kerouac’s On The Road.

On the Road was based on Kerouac’s trav­els with his bud­dies across the Unit­ed States in the late 1940s. Being a vora­cious writer, Ker­ouac had chan­nelled reams of stream-of-con­scious­ness nar­ra­tive (he called it “spon­ta­neous prose”) into mul­ti­ple note­books and then spent a three-week peri­od in April 1951 copy­ing them all out into one long reel of writ­ing; it would even­tu­al­ly be pub­lished in 1957 and become one of the great Amer­i­can nov­els of the 20th cen­tu­ry, the crown­ing glo­ry of the bur­geon­ing Beat move­ment.

The nov­el is a roman à clef, mean­ing that, whilst its sto­ry and char­ac­ters rep­re­sent real events and peo­ple, it is writ­ten with a façade of fic­tion, and his bud­dies (William S. Bur­roughs, Allen Gins­berg, Neal Cas­sady, them­selves key fig­ures of the Beat Gen­er­a­tion) appear as fic­tion­al char­ac­ters, with Ker­ouac him­self cast as the novel’s nar­ra­tor Sal Par­adise. The plot is cen­tred around sev­er­al road trips that the pro­tag­o­nists under­go, and the chaot­ic adven­tures they expe­ri­ence.

The nar­ra­tive is full of Amer­i­cana which appeals to my roman­tic side (indeed, it was the image of the Wichi­ta lines­man in my last blog that got me think­ing about On The Road in the first place). We read about long roads and high­ways, Cadil­lacs and Ford Sedans, cheap motels and Skid Row, night­clubs and bars, jazz and poet­ry, drugs and bor­del­los, and along the way get acquaint­ed with for­ties New York, San Fran­cis­co, New Orleans, Chica­go and St Louis and a myr­i­ad oth­er towns and cities of Amer­i­ca.

Although my own trav­el jour­nal remains lit­tle more than a log of events, of inter­est only to me, Kerouac’s jour­nals turned into a tour de force of lit­er­a­ture and a fas­ci­nat­ing insight into Amer­i­ca’s coun­ter­cul­ture.

Jack Ker­ouac
Music

Glen Campbell’s Wichita Lineman (1968)

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Glen Camp­bell start­ed his career as a gui­tarist with the Wreck­ing Crew, that loose col­lec­tive of ses­sion musi­cians that con­tributed to thou­sands of stu­dio record­ings in the 1960s and 1970s (and who were also Phil Spector’s de fac­to house band). The list of artists whose record­ings he played on is a who’s who of the Amer­i­can six­ties music scene (he was best mates with Elvis, too), and all this was before he became a suc­cess­ful solo artist in his own right. His first real hit, in 1965, was a ver­sion of Buffy Saint-Marie’s Uni­ver­sal Sol­dier, and in 1967 he scored hits with Gen­tle On My Mind and By The Time I Get To Phoenix.

That last song was writ­ten by Jim­my Webb and, buoyed by its suc­cess, Glen Camp­bell had phoned Webb and asked him if he had any oth­er “geo­graph­i­cal” songs to fol­low it up. He hadn’t, but he wrote one any­way: Wichi­ta Line­man. Web­b’s inspi­ra­tion for the lyrics came while dri­ving west­ward on a straight road through Washita Coun­ty in rur­al south-west­ern Okla­homa. Dri­ving past a seem­ing­ly end­less line of tele­phone poles, he noticed in the dis­tance the sil­hou­ette of a soli­tary line­man atop a pole. In Webb’s own words:

It was a splen­did­ly vivid, cin­e­mat­ic image that I lift­ed out of my deep mem­o­ry while I was writ­ing this song. I thought, I won­der if I can write some­thing about that? A blue col­lar, every­man guy we all see every­where – work­ing on the rail­road or work­ing on the tele­phone wires or dig­ging holes in the street. I just tried to take an ordi­nary guy and open him up and say, ‘Look there’s this great soul, and there’s this great aching, and this great lone­li­ness inside this per­son and we’re all like that. We all have this capac­i­ty for these huge feel­ings’.

Webb deliv­ered what he regard­ed and labelled as an incom­plete ver­sion of the song, warn­ing that he had not com­plet­ed a third verse or a mid­dle eight. Camp­bell soon nailed the lack of a mid­dle eight sec­tion with some of his Wreck­ing Crew pals (adding a bari­tone gui­tar inter­lude as well as the orches­tral­ly arranged out­ro known to British Radio 2 lis­ten­ers as DJ Steve Wright’s theme music!). Webb was sur­prised to hear that Camp­bell had record­ed the song when he ran into him:

‘I guess you guys did­n’t like the song.’

‘Oh, we cut that’

‘But it was­n’t done! I was just hum­ming the last bit!’

‘Well, it’s done now!’ ”

And what a love­ly song it was, too!

Glen Camp­bell
Art

William-Adolphe Bouguereau’s Bacchante (1894)

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The art world is a fun­ny old fish when it comes to “what’s hot and what’s not” and it was ever thus; unless you’re a bolt­ed-on, world-renowned big name like your Rem­brandts and your Van Goghs, you might find your­self in or out of fash­ion. Take William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825–1905). Many peo­ple out­side (and prob­a­bly inside) of France have nev­er heard of him, and yet he was one of France’s pre­em­i­nent aca­d­e­m­ic painters in the lat­ter half of the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry.

Bouguereau exe­cut­ed some 822 known paint­ings dur­ing his career, often por­tray­ing quin­tes­sen­tial­ly clas­si­cal and mytho­log­i­cal sub­jects: Cupid and Psy­che, the Birth of Venus, nymphs and satyrs and so on, as well as a large body of slick reli­gious works, pas­torals, and coy­ly erot­ic nudes. His por­traits were ren­dered with near-pho­to­graph­ic verisimil­i­tude and with a con­sum­mate lev­el of skill and craft. Giv­en that a high per­cent­age of his works are life-size, it is one of the largest bod­ies of work ever pro­duced by any artist. So what went wrong?

Well, Bouguereau rep­re­sent­ed the “old guard”, an uphold­er of tra­di­tion­al val­ues and indeed one who con­trived to exclude avant-garde work from the Salon ( the offi­cial art exhi­bi­tion of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris). Cézanne once expressed regret at being reject­ed by the ‘Salon de Mon­sieur Bouguereau’. In oth­er words, he was a dinosaur and des­tined to be over­shad­owed by the Impres­sion­ists and the mod­ernists of the dawn­ing new cen­tu­ry; his rep­u­ta­tion sank after his death and for many years his work was regard­ed as irre­deemably passé. He has, how­ev­er, recent­ly achieved some­thing of a reha­bil­i­ta­tion, and these days his works fetch huge prices at the auc­tion room. Quite right too, he was bril­liant.

A rep­re­sen­ta­tive work is this 1894 piece, Bac­cha­nte. A bac­cha­nte was a priest­ess or fol­low­er of Bac­chus, the god of wine and intox­i­fi­ca­tion, and, whilst in the Greek myths they are often depict­ed as wild women, run­ning through the for­est, tear­ing ani­mals to pieces, and engag­ing in oth­er acts of fren­zied debauch­ery, Bouguereau here choos­es to por­tray his Bac­cha­nte ‘before the par­ty’!

 

Art

Raphael’s The School Of Athens (1511)

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Back in 2006 I went to Rome, vis­it­ed the tombs of Keats and Shel­ley, sat on the Span­ish Steps, had my cam­era stolen on the sub­way (hol­i­days are often mixed affairs, after all), dis­cov­ered a pen­chant for liquorice liqueur, mar­velled at the Col­i­se­um, got a sore neck look­ing up at St Mark’s Cathe­dral and the glo­ri­ous Sis­tine Chapel…and spent some time in con­tem­pla­tion of the famous fres­co that is the sub­ject of today’s blog. The School of Athens is one of four wall fres­coes in the Stan­za del­la Seg­natu­ra, the apart­ment in the Vat­i­can palace whose walls and ceil­ing were paint­ed by Raphael between 1508 and 1511.

Raphael (Raf­fael­lo Sanzio da Urbino) was com­mis­sioned by Pope Julius II, the same man who also com­mis­sioned Michelan­ge­lo to paint the near­by Sis­tine Chapel (this Pope clear­ly knew his painters), and, like that work, the Stan­za del­la Seg­natu­ra is an embod­i­ment of all that was great about the clas­si­cal spir­it of the Renais­sance. It’s hard to think of a bet­ter sym­bol for the mar­riage of art, phi­los­o­phy, and sci­ence that was the hall­mark of the Ital­ian Renais­sance than The School of Athens.

The fres­coes depict the themes of phi­los­o­phy, the­ol­o­gy, lit­er­a­ture and jus­tice, and per­son­i­fi­ca­tions of the same four themes dec­o­rate the ceil­ing. The School of Athens, rep­re­sent­ing phi­los­o­phy, is notable for its accu­rate per­spec­ti­val pro­jec­tion, which Raphael learned from Leonar­do da Vin­ci (whose like­ness Raphael used for the cen­tral fig­ure of this paint­ing, Pla­to). The two cen­tral fig­ures are Pla­to and Aris­to­tle, each hold­ing a copy of one of their books (Plato’s Timaeus and Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics), and around them is an assort­ment of fig­ures from the worlds of phi­los­o­phy and the nat­ur­al sci­ences, includ­ing Socrates, Pythago­ras, Euclid and Ptole­my. If you’re ever in Rome, be sure to vis­it the Stan­za del­la Seg­natu­ra, but do look after your cam­era!

Music

Aaron Copland’s Fanfare For The Common Man (1942)

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In May 1942, soon after the Unit­ed States had entered World War II after Pearl Har­bor, F D Roosevelt’s Vice Pres­i­dent James A Wal­lace deliv­ered the speech of his life, in which he cast a future world peace as mean­ing “a bet­ter stan­dard of liv­ing for the com­mon man, not mere­ly in the Unit­ed States and Eng­land, but also in India, Rus­sia, Chi­na, and Latin America–not mere­ly in the Unit­ed Nations, but also in Ger­many and Italy and Japan”

“Some have spo­ken of the “Amer­i­can Cen­tu­ry”. I say that the cen­tu­ry on which we are entering—the cen­tu­ry which will come into being after this war—can be and must be the cen­tu­ry of the com­mon man.”

As well as being trans­lat­ed into 20 lan­guages and mil­lions of copies being dis­trib­uted around the world, the speech also inspired the leader of the Cincin­nati Sym­pho­ny Orches­tra, Eugene Goossens, to com­mis­sion a fan­fare. He asked Amer­i­can com­posers to sub­mit patri­ot­ic pieces to sup­port the war effort, repris­ing a sim­i­lar ini­tia­tive dur­ing World War I and each one to pre­cede the CSO’s orches­tral con­certs. A total of eigh­teen fan­fares were sub­mit­ted, includ­ing Fan­fare for Para­troop­ers, Fan­fare for the Med­ical Corp, Fan­fare for Air­men, and one that became very famous, Aaron Copland’s Fan­fare for the Com­mon Man.

The fan­fare is writ­ten for four horns, three trum­pets, three trom­bones, tuba, tim­pani, bass drum, and tam-tam, and is as stir­ring a piece of brass sound­scape as one can imag­ine. It cap­tures won­der­ful­ly the spir­it of Wallace’s opti­mistic theme of ush­er­ing in a just future world. Below, let’s watch this dra­mat­ic ren­der­ing by the Dutch Radio Phil­har­mon­ic Orches­tra, and then lis­ten to the bril­liant prog rock ver­sion released in 1977 by Emer­son Lake and Palmer (and which was my first expo­sure to Copland’s music).

Aaron Cop­land
Music

Paul Robeson’s I’m Goin’ To Tell God All O’ My Troubles (1927)

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The injus­tices endured by enslaved African Amer­i­cans in the Unit­ed States between the 17th cen­tu­ry right up until the Thir­teenth Amend­ment abol­ish­ing slav­ery in 1865, but then also the resid­ual racism and seg­re­ga­tion that sim­mered after its abo­li­tion well into the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, makes for dif­fi­cult read­ing. A pod­cast I have been lis­ten­ing to about the his­to­ry of slav­ery in the US opens with a slave song, I’m Goin’ To Tell God All O’ My Trou­bles, sung by Paul Robe­son in that famous bari­tone of his, and it’s worth look­ing at the life of the man Paul Robe­son, whose sto­ry is real­ly about how you can’t keep a good man down, against all the odds.

Robe­son was both an aca­d­e­m­ic and an ath­lete, and won a schol­ar­ship to Rut­gers Col­lege in 1915, the only black man there at the time. He excelled for the Rut­gers foot­ball team, the Scar­let Knights, although at one point he was benched because a South­ern foot­ball team refused to take the field because the Scar­let Knights were field­ing a negro. But he kept going and flour­ished both ath­let­i­cal­ly and aca­d­e­m­i­cal­ly, end­ing up fin­ish­ing uni­ver­si­ty with fly­ing colours and accept­ed into the pres­ti­gious hon­our soci­eties Phi Beta Kap­pa and Cap and Skull.

He went on to study law at Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty, whilst simul­ta­ne­ous­ly play­ing pro­fes­sion­al Amer­i­can foot­ball for the Mil­wau­kee Bad­gers and pro­mot­ing his fine singing by act­ing in off-cam­pus pro­duc­tions. After grad­u­at­ing, he became a fig­ure in the Harlem Renais­sance with per­for­mances in the Eugene O’Neill plays The Emper­or Jones and All God’s Chillun Got Wings, and gave up both his foot­ball and his fledg­ling law career. He was lat­er to find world­wide fame from per­for­mances such as his “Joe” in Show Boat at London’s Drury Lane The­atre, fea­tur­ing the bench­mark song Ol’ Man Riv­er, and as Oth­el­lo in three sep­a­rate pro­duc­tions of that play.

Robe­son soon found him­self wel­comed and court­ed by elite social cir­cles, but this did not turn his head, and he was to become a pro­lif­ic polit­i­cal activist for civ­il rights and oth­er social jus­tice cam­paigns through­out his life, as well as sup­port­ing the Repub­li­can cause in the Span­ish Civ­il War. His sym­pa­thies for the Sovi­et Union and com­mu­nism caused him to be black­list­ed dur­ing the McCarthy era, but his rep­u­ta­tion as a strong and respect­ed voice for jus­tice had already been sealed, and he nev­er gave up.

Between 1925 and 1961, Robe­son record­ed and released some 276 dis­tinct songs, span­ning many styles, includ­ing spir­i­tu­als, pop­u­lar stan­dards, Euro­pean folk songs, polit­i­cal songs and poet­ry. I’m Goin’ To Tell God All O’ My Trou­bles was released as the B‑side to Deep Riv­er in 1927, and is a deeply felt expres­sion of life under the yoke.

Paul Robe­son

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