In deze aflevering vertelt Bill Clifton ons over zijn jarenlange inzet om erkenning om erkenning te krijgen voor The Carter Family. De IBMA wilde The Carter Family (die natuurlijk geen bluegrass maakten) niet zonder meer toelaten tot de Bluegrass Hall of Fame. Verder leest u over Bill’s pogingen om een song van The Carter Family tot State song van de staat Virginia te laten verkiezen. Vooral dat laatste bleek aanzienlijk moeilijker dan gedacht want countryster Jimmy Dean liet zijn invloed gelden…

IBMA and State song

Transcriptie

Do you thing that The Carter Family conference made any difference to the music of The Carter Family in the last two years? Well, I think that the main thing that that does, for me at least, it gives credibility to what you’ve been doing with your life. Not just me but also to Janette and Joe and all the other members of The Carters who were still alive. Which were, at that time June and Helen and Anita were still alive. And it gives them reassurance that this is not only good music. It’s a credible thing that everybody can look at and say: ‘This is important’. And yeah, we’ve been honored, I mean, The Carter Family had been honored in The Country Music Hall Of Fame. But it took me ten years to get them honored by the IBMA. I put them up. I was on that little panel of ten back in the early days of the IBMA. The first four or five years of the IBMA existence. For three years, each person that was put on that panel was put on for three years. And there were ten people sitting around a table saying: ‘who needs to be put into the Hall Of Honor?’ And the first year I was on that I said: ‘The Carter Family’. ‘Yeah, but they’re not bluegrass, you know’. And I said: ‘The material. Just the material alone. There was no bluegrass when they were playing but they need to be recognized’. ‘No. Yeah, well, maybe in time’. So for three years I put them up. And of course they never were elected by the general membership. But they finally were put in, after ten years of trying. And I was just so glad to be able to give that to Janette and to remind her: ‘Yeah, this is one more thing’. I still think ‘Longing for old Virginia’ should be the State song. I don’t know how much you know about the state Song of Virginia. Do you know about that?

You mentioned it the last time you were here. They were looking for a new song. Well, they had a lot of meetings. Well, not a lot of meetings, but they had a number of meetings in Richmond. Which nobody from The Carter Family attended. I wasn’t able to go to them. When I put ‘Longing for old Virginia’ up I had been over here, in Europe. And I came back to the States and found out that nobody had put up a Carter Family song. And here, you know, what better representatives for the state of Virginia do we have? So, I had written a handwritten letter to the head of the committee on this search for a new state song saying that I understand that I’m late, that the deadline had passed. But I was out of the country and unable to submit the song until now. And I gave the reasons why I thought a Carter Family song should be included in the search. Well, the committee went about searching and I had a letter back from the chairman of the committee saying that, yes, they had accepted my entry and they would keep in touch. They had 347 or 348 entries and this was number 348, or something and that they were considering that along with the other 347. Well, OK. Then the next letter I got from them was that they had now narrowed it down to 8. They had only 8 songs and this was one of them. OK, that’s promising. So, who were the other songwriters? Well, Jimmy Dean was one of them.

Jimmy Dean of ‘Big Bad John’ fame? Yeah, ‘Big, Bad John’ Jimmy Dean or ‘Jimmy Dean Sausages’. And so I realized that Jimmy could have written a good song because he’s a decent songwriter. And I hadn’t seen him for years but I figured he probably still knows how to write a song and he probably has written a decent song. And I didn’t know who any of the others were but of course they could have written good songs too. Well, time went on and finally the big selection was to come. And there was to be a final meeting in Richmond when the chairman of the committee would announce the winner, the State song. Well, I couldn’t go to Richmond. Janette could but she couldn’t drive. Well, I was also on the board of the BCMA in Bristol, which is the Bristol Country Music Alliance and on that board was Fred… his name doesn’t come to mind right now. But Fred said that he could drive her and that he would drive Janette to the meeting. I said that would be wonderful, you know. When I talked to Fred about it, afterwards, he said: ‘You wouldn’t have believed it’. He said: ‘Everybody was gathered in that room. Jimmy Dean was in his cowboy outfit, with all the glitter. The television cameras were there. Jimmy had his ten-gallon hat and his guitar. And we walked in and everybody turned around. They couldn’t believe that Janette Carter was there’. So they postponed their decision. They weren’t gonna make a final decision that night. Well, then it came to light that Jimmy Dean had…. There were five members on the committee. Jimmy Dean had given two of them $10.000,- to help them get reelected in their district so they could stay on the committee. And so the newspaper, The Richmond Times Dispatch, got a hold of that story and said that if the state song had not been selected. That it had turned out that one of the songwriters, who was considered to be the main person by the committee, two of the members, of the five, had been given a substantial amount of money from the songwriter. The Times Dispatch, they went to Jimmy Dean and he said: ‘Well, that was my personal money. That wasn’t sausage money’. As if that made a difference. So then the committee decided not to select a state song for a while and it’s still somewhere…

Naschrift Harry Vogel: Bill praat in deze aflevering over het feit dat hij The Carter Family heeft voorgedragen om opgenomen te worden in The Bluegrass Hall of Honor van de IBMA. Daar heeft Bill zich meerdere jaren achtereen voor ingezet. In 2001 was het zo ver. In 2008 werd Bill Clifton zelf opgenomen in The Bluegrass Hall of Honor van de IBMA. En hoe ging dat nu verder, dat verhaal over de State song of Virginia? Dat is hier te lezen…

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