Great story and pictures, I grew up listening to country music courtesy of my Dad and the older I get, the more I like it. Looking forward to the Ken Burns doco. Desert Hearts has one of my favourite movie quotes: “He reached in and put a string of lights around my heart.”
Thanks David. Poignant start to the day. Was great to share some of that with our dear Adrian If ever ended up at a karaoke Crazy was always my go to song 🙂
thanks David, for todays column.. americana/ country/ blues lover from way back.. you know Gary Harvey of course, in your parish... Hank 3 is keeping up the shitkicking tradition of his da and grand da.
Loved this column. In 1981, when I was 21, my girlfriend and I spent three months travelling across the USA (they wouldn't give us a visa for longer than that because we had almost no money and only a Pan Am standby ticket from New York to London). We had four weeks in California and then bought a 30 day Greyhound bus pass and zig zagged up and down the country as far up as Cheyenne Wyoming and as south as New Orleans, in the middle of summer. We took 13 night buses to save on accommodation and otherwise stayed in hostels and occasionally with friend of friends of friends. The pass got us as far as North Carolina. We were naïve at the start about what we were doing and considerably less so at the end. An amazing eye-opener and I have been fascinated (often in a horrified way) by the US since.
'Country music is the white man's soul music' or something like that said Bobby Womack. Maybe in an attempt to heal the racial divide aaahh simpler days. He even attempted a country music album, never heard it. It flopped commercially. I always check a country artists( living that is) politics nowadays, nothing happens in isolation, especially in the USof A including, of course, Texass
"But one of the series’ central tenets is that country music has always been home to African-American artists. Burns shows that, just like in rock, jazz and pop, every facet of country — from its instrumentation to repertoire to vocal and instrumental techniques — is indebted to African and African-American traditions, but commercial decisions by white industry executives led to their exclusion from the genre for decades."
Poignant. A sad-glad start to Sunday. Now I have to go down the Country rabbit hole on Youtube. Hope it rains, I'll feel less guilty.
Alice? Dallas? Little Feat? Seriously?
I know. But they’re all the real names.
Ken Burns’ interview in Hollywood Masters (Netflix) with Stephen Galloway is worth a watch
Great story and pictures, I grew up listening to country music courtesy of my Dad and the older I get, the more I like it. Looking forward to the Ken Burns doco. Desert Hearts has one of my favourite movie quotes: “He reached in and put a string of lights around my heart.”
Very cool David, so glad you didn’t cough the clogs back then
Lovely piece.
Thanks David. Poignant start to the day. Was great to share some of that with our dear Adrian If ever ended up at a karaoke Crazy was always my go to song 🙂
thanks David, for todays column.. americana/ country/ blues lover from way back.. you know Gary Harvey of course, in your parish... Hank 3 is keeping up the shitkicking tradition of his da and grand da.
Loved this column. In 1981, when I was 21, my girlfriend and I spent three months travelling across the USA (they wouldn't give us a visa for longer than that because we had almost no money and only a Pan Am standby ticket from New York to London). We had four weeks in California and then bought a 30 day Greyhound bus pass and zig zagged up and down the country as far up as Cheyenne Wyoming and as south as New Orleans, in the middle of summer. We took 13 night buses to save on accommodation and otherwise stayed in hostels and occasionally with friend of friends of friends. The pass got us as far as North Carolina. We were naïve at the start about what we were doing and considerably less so at the end. An amazing eye-opener and I have been fascinated (often in a horrified way) by the US since.
'Country music is the white man's soul music' or something like that said Bobby Womack. Maybe in an attempt to heal the racial divide aaahh simpler days. He even attempted a country music album, never heard it. It flopped commercially. I always check a country artists( living that is) politics nowadays, nothing happens in isolation, especially in the USof A including, of course, Texass
Interesting perspective in this LRB review: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n19/alex-abramovich/even-when-it-s-a-big-fat-lie
Thanks Helen. That’s very interesting for sure. Maybe it’s better to treat a Burns series as a rich immersion more than an authoritative take.
This is an interesting counter to that piece, not with as much detail but interesting that the writer draws a rather different conclusion.
https://time.com/5673476/ken-burns-country-music-black-artists/
"But one of the series’ central tenets is that country music has always been home to African-American artists. Burns shows that, just like in rock, jazz and pop, every facet of country — from its instrumentation to repertoire to vocal and instrumental techniques — is indebted to African and African-American traditions, but commercial decisions by white industry executives led to their exclusion from the genre for decades."