STREET SINGER ATTRACTS NOTICE

Shannon News, 29 June 1926, Page 4

STREET SINGER ATTRACTS NOTICE

BLIND NEWS VENDOR BROADCASTS FROM SYDNEY.

SYDNEY, May 30

The notes cf a sweet but totally untrained youthful tenor voice steal out over the surging roar of the crow r ded streets in operatic melodies of love and romance, of despair, and all the the passions that course through song. /The crowds stop, extol the beauty of the mysterious voice, and pass by. The singer is forgotten, as a great city of feverish unrest can forgeit.

Will this neglected voice waft out some day from the Olympian heights? Will .this street singer sit with, the muses whom he now worships tvithin the shadows of shop doors?

There are few more remarkable life stories than that of this young singer, whose voice will be broadcast, for the public to judge of it, by 2FC station on Monday night, at 9.30 o’clock. He will be allov’ed to sing simply as the mood impels him. He will be unaccompanied, and will be placed in front of the microphone, and asked to carry his voice out on to tlie air just as he sings in the street. For years now Clarence Dunbar Mansfield —or, as he is more' familiar!ly known, “Dan” Mansfield—has been singing in the city in the the doorways of shops. Partially blind, without any pension to fall back upon each week, and with the added disability of being unable either to read or write well, he sings, not merely because it has been a passion with him all his life, but because it attracts the crowd, and creates for him a bigger clientele for his magazines and other wares. ' He sings and sells. If people start to bombard him with cui-ious questions, he adopts a sturdy independence, and moves along to some other point of vantage. In the

surging roar of the streets his voice is uplifted, and then mystei'iously disappears.

He is the mystery singer of Sydney's crowded strcejts. Since he was four yeai-s of age he has been an orphan. For twleve years he was in an orphange, and when he closed its dooi's behind him there was life’s battle, for which, ordinarily, he was quite unfitted. Thus we see “Dan” Mansfield to-day, in his twenty-fourth year. About his story, as he tells ilt in his own words .there is a poignant touch He feels that he is destined for something better than the calling of an itinerant canvasser. If, he says, a j movement was organised to enable him to devote his time to education and music, he knows of many people j who would subscribe to it. “Halfliour lessons,” lie says, “arc useless especially in the midst of a tiring day’s canvassing. Given the opportunity, I feel that I can. be of some use in the woi-ld.” "

For the little that he knows about music he has fallen back upon phonograph records, which he has obtained at no small sacrifice. He paid 12s for instance, for a record by Caruso, with violin obligato by Mischa Elman. For two months he was saving up for the precious record. Borrowing a machine, he took the record home to his lodging, where, he sorrowfully confesses, he is not in the right musical environment. The fact, thait he paid 12s for a record when •he could have got one of the latest Ame-l-ican numbers for Very much less staggered them.

Not less romantic than the story of his life’s struggles, and of his passion t'oif an art of which he knows so very litltl,e that he merely improvises vocally, is the story of how he found his way to the 2FC studio, and put his feet possibly on the threshold of fame. Mr. James Brash, the wellknown teacher of singing, heard % hlm singing in the "street one day, and ad- . vised the manager of Farmer’s broadcasting situdio (Mr. Oswald Anderson) to listen to him, and then try him out in the studio. Mr. Anderson spoke to him in one of the shopdoor recesses, and later took him along to the studio, where he sang a bit of “La Boheme” and gave snaxtehes from a.medley of operatic airs. Mr -Alfred O’Shea also heard Mansfield’s voice, and was no less impressed; Mr. Bi-ash, it is stated, is so convinced of the possibilities of this neglected and at present uncultured voice that he has offered to give Mansfield lessons, provided that he is enabled to devote proper time to a musical education.