Having now recorded over one thousand videoed songs since I started my singing practice almost three years ago, even were I to die tomorrow or never be able to sing again, it would take over three years for my wife Sheila to post each song daily in rotation before enabling you to hear them again (that is unless you subscribe to my YouTube Video Customised Channel at no cost):
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxjICOAChRHvn9_M7aHPlQA
Having many followers who now listen in to my daily song, I am frequently messaged to sing favourite songs of theirs which I have previously sung on my daily Facebook page. Today’s song is one such song that I have had many dozens of requests to repeat. The song is ‘The Greatest Love of All’ that George Benson and the great Whitney Houston recorded. I cannot do this beautiful song justice as George or Whitney did, but in response to the numerous requests of Facebook contacts, here is my humble offering once more.
‘The Greatest Love of All’ was written by Michael Masser, who composed the music, and Linda Creed, who wrote the lyrics. It was originally recorded in 1977 by George Benson, who made the song a substantial hit, peaking at Number 2 on the ‘US Hot R&B/Hip Hop Songs’ chart that year, the first R&B chart top-ten hit for ‘Arista Records’.
The song was written and recorded to be the main theme of the 1977 film ‘The Greatest’, a biopic of the boxer Muhammad Ali. Eight years after Benson's original recording, the song became even more well known for a version by Whitney Houston, whose 1985 cover (with the slightly amended title ‘Greatest Love of All’) eventually topped the charts, peaking at Number 1 in the United States, Australia, Canada and on the ‘US Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs’ in early 1986.
The song was written about the world-famous boxer Muhammad Ali, Michael Masser wanted us to know that there was a man who wanted to change his name and religion. Ali hadn't believed in the war in Vietnam and had refused to fight in it. He won that battle through the legal system. Still, he lost everything else, including his title which was forfeited. But Ali retained the most important thing of all; ‘his dignity’.
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I could, if I so wished, write volumes upon the subject of ‘Dignity’ which I have always believed as being part of a value system that I was raised with. My father was a relatively uneducated man who had to leave school at the age of 12 years to join the workforce because of his family’s poverty, and I can count on one hand the quotations/sayings he pronounced to me as a child and growing adult. Dad’s quotations included, “Billy, never believe any type of work to be too good for you and always keep your word. Never surrender your dignity. Die first! The only thing a poor man has to give is his word and his dignity. Give these two things up and you might as well be dead as you will be left with nothing of worth to live for!” These few quotations from my father represent the only quotations he told me throughout my life.
In this respect, I know my father to have been correct in his beliefs. I have always believed ‘dignity’ to be as essential to the wellbeing of human life as water, food, and oxygen. Dignity knows no compromise and the stubborn retention of it, even in the face of extreme physical hardship, can hold a man's soul in his body long past the point at which the body should have surrendered it to baser forces. Dignity signifies not the possession of status and honour but the deserving of such acknowledgment.
I will leave the final word on the matter to a man that Mohammed Ali and myself idolised as representing ‘the best of mankind’, the late President of South Africa, Nelson Mandela who once wrote: “Any man or institution that tries to rob me of my dignity will lose”.
Love and peace Bill xxx