And When I Die - The Last Long Mile Sung By John Goss Baritone Rare 78 rpm

Here's And When I Die - The Last Long Mile Sung By John Goss Baritone Rare from a rare 78 rpm shellac record released around 1926.

John Goss (1894-1953) was an English singer who revived interest in traditional folk music, which he orchestrated and sang in his beautiful baritone voice, and thus inspired people like Paul Robeson and Pete Seeger.

John Goss was born in Birmingham, England in 1894, the son of a labourer. He worked in a variety of factory jobs, and once led a protest of electrical apprentices. He might have spent his life on the shop-floor, but his fine singing won him a scholarship to Ruskin College, Oxford, and by great perseverance he succeeded in building a career for himself; he spent some years studying in Germany, the musical centre at that time, and acquired a broad, humanitarian outlook.

His family was fiercely working class, and be had difficulty explaining his decision to go into something so refined as music. Thus he determined to devote himself to the revival of folk songs, the music of the people, and to perform these in the factories and union-halls, where working people tended to gather. He was a close friend of the composer Peter Warlock, and on good terms with Benjamin Britten.

After performing far and wide, he came to Canada around 1940; and started giving concerts in Vancouver then. He started a summer school of music on Galiano Island in 1947, at the property known as Lyons. This was at the same time that there was a thriving artistic scene at Arbutus Point Resort, frequented by painters like Molly Lamb Bobak and Jack Shadbolt, so the island must have been a hive of creativity. This was also about the time that Nigel Morgan, head of the B.C. Communist Party, established his Communist retreat and study centre near Retreat Cove.

John Goss, with his pacifist, working-class leanings was also suspected of being a communist. He addressed a peace conference in New York in 1949, in company with other musical figures like Aaron Copland, Dimitri Shostakovich, Paul Robeson, Benjamin Britten and many others. Just as the event was ending, he was approached by the police: they told him he could leave the country immediately or suffer the indignity of being deported.

He left the United States quietly but that was not the end of his problems. There was as much nastiness in Canada; the Vancouver Parks Board terminated his contract "in the interest of good public relations", and he had to close the summer-school on Galiano Island. Broken in health he returned to Birmingham, where he died in 1953.[1]

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