Het is al weer een paar weken terug dat ik een deeltje in dit feuilleton heb geplaatst. dat is niet omdat ik de terugblikken van Bill Clifton minder interessant begin te vinden, in tegendeel. Ik ben nog steeds trots op dit project en maak elk deeltje met veel plezier. Soms heb ik een tijdje wat andere dingen dan gebruikelijk aan m’n hoofd. Maar als je dan weer lekker ‘aan het pielen’ bent met een nieuw stukje, dan stel ik me voor dat m’n lezers (jullie dus) er ook van genieten. Dat dat zo is mag blijken uit de aantallen lezers. Gezamenlijk zijn alle deeltjes in dit Bill Clifton feuilleton op dit moment al meer dan 50.000 keer gelezen. Soms spreek ik daarover met m’n oude vrienden Bert Nobbe en Kees Jansen (mijn ‘partners in crime’ van destijds). Indertijd heeft de Amerikaanse historicus Bill Malone dit materiaal ook gebruikt voor een biografie over Bill Clifton. ‘Zou onze vriend Bill Malone ook zo veel lezers hebben gehad?’ Dat hebben we ons stiekem al wel eens afgevraagd…

Beginnings in England

Transcriptie:

I told him about this and so we went to see Geoff Stevens, who was a songwriter at Southern Music in Denmark Street, in London. And Geoff said: ‘What shall I write?’ I said: ‘I don’t have a band here, it has to something very simple that I can… well, maybe a talking blues, you know’. Well, what’s a talking blues? I said: ‘Well I have a songbook, I’ll bring you my songbook and I have several talking blues in there. It’s all done in that same way’. So he went to work on it and he wrote two that were not very funny and then the third one was getting funnier’.

Was that ‘Beatle Crazy’, or not? That was ‘Beatle Crazy’. I said to Pat, I said: ‘I think it can be funnier’. And he said: ‘Look, if we wait any longer somebody else is gonna do this. So, we need to get this out now!’ Ok. ‘Well, since you’ve been here a month you need to… you know, have a release’. Well, I’d been there six weeks I guess. So it came out in November. I’d been there about six or seven weeks when it came out. And it immediately opened up all kinds of radio and television with the BBC, which was important, radio and television. I didn’t realize how important it was at the time but ‘Oh, well pay you twenty pounds if you go on ‘Easy Beat’ next Sunday’. And I said: ‘Well, I know what ‘Easy Beat’ is’. ‘There’s one other American on with it, B.B. King is on the same program, and do you know him?’ Well, ok. I still didn’t know what to expect but I found out that across the country people were finding out I was there that wouldn’t have known otherwise. And therefore it was being very helpful and …

Easy Beat was a BBC Radio program broadcast nationally in the United Kingdom on the Light Program on Sunday mornings, between January 1960 and September 1967. It was one of the earliest BBC programs to broadcast pop music. Like the contemporary Saturday Club, it was initially presented by Brian Matthew, later by Keith Fordyce and, finally, David Symonds. Both Matthew and Fordyce would later go on to host the long-running Sounds of the 60s, on the Light Program’s successor, BBC Radio 2. It was scheduled between 10:30 – 11:30 on Sunday mornings, and regularly featured Kenny Ball’s Jazzmen, and recorded sessions by featured guests in front of a studio audience. The Beatles appeared on four Easy Beat shows in 1963.

So the tactics paid off? Oh absolutely. The only thing that probably would have paid off. Otherwise I’d a probably been there for six or eight months and I would have come and gone and nobody really would have known, one way or the other. Maybe a handful of people. Through the ‘Country & Western Express’ magazine I might have made a few contacts.

What kind of venues did you play in England? Well, I started off by playing, the first thing that I did was folk clubs. And I didn’t know how folk clubs worked. I’d never worked in a folk club before and I didn’t know what it meant, really. I knew a little bit about folk clubs in America. Not firsthand but second hand through Mike Seeger and some other friends of mine that had played in folk clubs. And I didn’t think that it was a place that I’d feel comfortable in, that people would really listen to what I had to sing. So I thought: ‘Well, I’m not sure I can do this, you know, but I’ll try’. ‘Oh you can do it, yeah, you can do it’, I was told by one or two people, one of which was Reg Cooper, up at Nottingham.

And Reg Cooper is a songwriter also who’s written, I think, probably some well-known songs in recent years although I don’t know which ones they are at this point. When I first met him, he’s legally blind, and he was working as a telephone operator, switchboard, where you put the wire where the light goes on. He could see the light. And so he could do that and he was earning next to nothing, I mean, like five pounds and ten shillings a week, or something you know, back when wages were fifteen pounds at least, you know. You could have been doing that or you could have been making brooms, I guess. But that was what he was doing. But he was also writing songs and singing. And he loved to sing and he played guitar. And he was writing some songs that I liked. I didn’t sing any of them but I thought they were pretty good songs. He had a little folk club venue in Nottingham and he asked me to do that. He would pay a sum of like fifteen pounds or something, I can’t remember what it was but it was enough to make it worthwhile. And I thought I’d try it, you know, and see how it goes. Well, it was not a typical folk club, they had a stage. So it was more comfortable for me, in a way, because I was used to working from a stage. So it was ok. But then other folk clubs began to book me and they were different. I was standing with the audience, most of the time, and trying to sing to the back of the room. And they were, any place depending where it was in the country, in England, in the south of England there are very few what they call ‘music rooms’. The old music hall in England, and I’m talking about the nineteenth century or early twentieth century, music halls were built either as part of the pub or next to the pub. Well, in the Midlands and the north of England, well particularly in the Midlands, where you have the large industrial areas or the lower part of the north where you have Leeds and Sheffield and the big industrial cities. Manchester and so forth, those places built very large music halls because they had big pubs and they had big audiences. In the south of England you might have a music room that held 25 people, or 30 people. Depending if, I mean in Sussex or Kent it was usually 25, 30, maybe 50 people. Except in Brighton where you might have a few more, you know some place where they had more people. But you get down to the West Country and you’re talking about fifteen or twenty people, you know, if you can squeeze them in. Rooms got smaller and smaller down there.

Op een bepaald moment kocht Bill een Dennis bus (een diesel) waarmee hij onder andere ook naar het Europese vasteland reisde. Deze foto staat ook in het boek dat Bill Malone schreef. Ik heb de foto met behulp van de software van MyHeritage ingekleurd.

You mean Devon and Cornwall? Yeah, Devon and Cornwall there’d be nothing, you know. It just depends where you are. But I did tours all over the country but obviously the tours in Devon and Cornwall never paid very well because they can’t get many people in. Unless you do concerts and I didn’t do concerts the first year. Well, I might have done one or two concerts but I didn’t do many. I did one for a country music group in Liverpool that had about 2000 people. And it was not the festival hall there. It was just a huge like gymnasium type place. I don’t know what it was but it was enormous. And there were about 2000 paid people in there.

Op 9 augustus 1967 werd Bill Clifton geinterviewd door Dick Spottswood voor de Bluegrass Unlimited. Dit stukje komt uit dat interview. Bill geeft extra informatie over zijn periode in Engeland. Het hele interview is trouwens hier te lezen. I don’t know how much influence I’ve had on it, but I’ve certainly watched it grow. It has been a really rewarding experience to be in Briton over the last four years. When we first went to England in 1963 there was very little country music or old time American country music in Briton. There were several reasons for this: Number one, the records are very expensive over there in terms of not only dollar exchange but also in terms of working man’s take home pay. They sell for about the equivalent of $4.50 and the working man takes home about $50 a week so $4.50 represents a pretty good bite out of his weekly wage. So a lot of people couldn’t afford records, couldn’t buy them. Secondly, of course, radio is a tremendous drawback. They don’t play any. BBC is a monopoly and state run and if they choose not to play any music then they just don’t play any, that’s all. They would go for long periods of time where they wouldn’t have any country music on at all – for six months, eights months, a year – and then they would have Murray Cash on again for 13 weeks, a half hour program once a week, and then after 13 weeks they’d cancel the contract and that would be the last for another year. So you just had to be listening at the right moment or you’d miss it. Third, there wasn’t any place for them to play. That was another thing, there just weren’t any outdoor parks in Briton. There just weren’t any places for them to play, that’s all. Then shortly after we got over there the folk clubs began to grow. When we got there, there were about 75 folk clubs in all of Great Briton and then when we left there this year there were about 500, so it multiplied by about eight times in that period of time. There’s a lot more clubs now than there were then and they’re all on pretty solid ground. The average attendance in the clubs is about 100-125 people and they pay anywhere from the equivalent of 50 cents to $1 to come in. They would run once every week on the same night of the week. With this $50-$125 that the average club took in they could have a guest every now and then, not every week but once in a while, so this gave an opportunity for those people who wanted to play old time music and country music a place to play, and they could get their expenses out of it and maybe a little money on the side. So it’s been a terrific shot in the arm for it. Also, we’ve seen it come on the radio over there in stronger form. The last three months that I was in Briton I did a Saturday afternoon program for BBC in which we had quite a bit of country music – not a lot, it was just a half hour program. I would have one guest or sometimes two guests on a program. A typical program was one where we’d have a female singer like Shirley Collins who plays 5-string banjo and the Echo Mountain Boys who are the only full five piece bluegrass band in Great Briton. At least they were the only full five piece bluegrass band in Great Brittain until a little bit ago. There is now another group in Tunbridge Wells and there are other groups springing up from time to time now, but the Echo Mountain Boys are the only ones who have had national coverage on the radio and played at the Albert Hall in London and pretty major concerts. This sort of program would be three quarters bluegrass and old time music.
Shirley Collins rehearsing with sister Dolly Collins (seated) for their album The Sweet Primrose, probably in 1966. Ik heb deze foto met behulp van de software van MyHeritage ingekleurd.

Shirley Elizabeth Collins (Hastings, Sussex, 5 juli 1935) is een Engelse folkzangeres. Ze heeft belangrijke bijdragen geleverd aan het English folk revival van de jaren vijftig en zestig van de twintigste eeuw. Zij trad vaak op met haar zuster Dolly (geboren 5 maart 1933, Hastings, Sussex, overleden in 1995), die haar ondersteunde op de piano en het orgel. Van haar muzikale familie stak zij ook veel op. Na van school te zijn gekomen, kwam Collins terecht op een opleiding voor onderwijzers in Londen en maakte zij kennis met de folk revival op een feest, in 1954 georganiseerd door Ewan MacColl. Ook Alan Lomax, de bekende Amerikaanse verzamelaar van volksliederen, was daar aanwezig. Zij raakte bevriend met Lomax en de twee gingen toeren in de Verenigde Staten tot november 1959, wat resulteerde in enkele albums die werden uitgebracht onder de noemer Sounds of the South. Terug in Engeland ging zij verder met haar zangloopbaan en in 1964 werkte zij aan de Zuid-Engelse zangcollectie The Sweet Primeroses, begeleid door haar zuster op orgel. In 1969 had zij een ander project, deze keer met The Young Tradition (met Peter Bellamy, Heather Wood en Royston Wood) en Dolly Collins genaamd The Holly Bears a Crown. Collins trouwde met Ashley Hutchings in 1971. Hij verliet Steeleye Span en het stel vormde de akoestische Etchingham Steam Band. Daarna volgde een indrukwekkende productie van albums. Billy Bragg zei over haar: ‘Shirley Collins is ongetwijfeld een van Engelands grootste culturele bezittingen’.

Amplified I hope? That was amplified with one microphone. And I had to work with… but I was working by myself. But even so, when I took a guitar break I had to make sure the guitar was up next to the microphone. And feedback is always a problem when you change from vocal to instrument, you know, and stuff like that. But they wouldn’t have known. They were making so much noise you wouldn’t have, they were all having a…

Bill Clifton in een Londense TV-studio (UTV) in de periode dat ‘Beatle crazy’ een grotere hit bleek te zijn dan werd verwacht. Deze foto staat ook in het boek dat Bill Malone schreef. Ik heb de foto met behulp van de software van MyHeritage ingekleurd.

Did you play any of the working man’s clubs? Yeah, I also did some working man’s clubs. But the country music audience in Liverpool is a working man’s audience. And it’s very noisy, very loud. Or it was then. I don’t know what it is now. And people used to dress up, you know, they wore cowboy hats and western gear and carry a cap gun or something in their holster. And I didn’t understand that at first. I was there for a long time before I began to understand it. I was up in the north one time, and I don’t remember which city it was. It was in that industrial area around Leeds and Sheffield. It wasn’t either one of those cities but it was in that same area. And it was the most depressing city I’ve ever seen. Everything was grey. All the houses were grey, nobody painted a house. And the weather was foggy and rainy all the time (typical British weather). Yeah. It was just a really difficult place to be in and I thought: ‘You know, I’m beginning to understand it. Now these people they have to be lan or Richard or whatever all week long. But by gosh, on Saturday night they can be Slim or Hank or whatever they want to be. And carry a six-gun and wear a Stetson. A break. Finally a break from this humdum, dismal life’ The factorylife that they lead, you know. So I understand it better now but I didn’t understand it then at all. I just thought they were just a big, noisy, lousy crowd. And also people from Liverpool speak different than anybody else. And I had the hardest time.

Go up to Yorkshire… Yeah, Yorkshire can be the same way, Glasgow, of course, can be the same way and Aberdeen even if you get into different parts of Scotland. But if you get to Liverpool the first time and you’ve never heard that accent and you say ‘pardon?’ And they just speak louder. They don’t speak slower or try to change the way they speak but they just get louder and louder.

Een bijkomstigheid van het feit dat Bill Clifton in die periode ook optrad op het Europese vaste land was dat hij als een soort actieve bluegrass ambassadeur ging functioneren. Ik heb vaak horen vertellen dat Bill Clifton een van de eerste ‘echte’ Amerikaanse artiesten was die mensen in het ‘echie’ op het podium (hier trouwens bij A.G. & Kate thuis) gezien hadden…

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