Het is al bijna weer ruim twee maanden geleden dat ik een deeltje uit deze reeks op Birdeyes had gezet. Te veel andere leuke dingen om over te schrijven zullen we maar zeggen. Ondertussen is het natuurlijk al lang weer tijd geworden voor een nieuw deeltje in deze reeks. Bill Clifton praat in deze aflevering onder andere over Brian Golbey (die ook meerdere keren in Nederland heeft opgetreden), maar ook over een reis naar de toenmalige Soviet Unie. Sinds deze reis van Bill is de wereld natuurlijk behoorlijk veranderd, maar destijds (we hebben het over bijna 70 jaar geleden) waren dergelijke reizen nog goed mogelijk. Veel plezier met luisteren en lezen…

BACM and camping trip to the Soviet Union

Transcriptie:

This reminds me of a story Brian Golbey used to teil. I think his parents, they ran a campsite. And they couldn’t imagine anybody not speaking English. So, when somebody would say ‘Huh?’ they would just shout more loudly. I can imagine. I knew Brian’s father. When I first moved there I met him and they came to places I was playing in the South. And I cannot think of exactly where they lived but I do remember them living down there long before Brian moved up to the Midlands, where he lives now. Well, he lives in Nottingham now, right outside of Nottingham in Beesten. I haven’t, I’ve seen him… well, of course he was at the conference.

Bill Clifton had het over ’the conference’. Hij bedoelde daar natuurlijk deze conferentie mee. Kees Jansen en ik waren er destijds bij. Ik beschouw deze conferentie nog steeds als één van de meest indrukwekkende gebeurtenissen die ik binnen ‘onze muziek’ mee heb gemaakt. Bill was een van degenen met een (terechte) zeer prominente rol tijdens deze conferentie. De interviews die we destijds met Bill Clifton hebben gedaan werden twee jaar na ’the conference’ opgenomen.
Iets meer informatie over Brian Golbey...
Brian James Golbey, 5 February 1939, Pyecombe, Sussex, England. Golbey inherited a love of early American country music from his father, who had also taught him to play harmonica and melodeon, by the time he was given a guitar for his eleventh birthday. He was soon playing along with Jimmie Rodgers recordings and in 1953, he earned his first money singing ‘Little Joe The Wrangler’ at a Coronation celebration party. He next learned to play a fiddle that his grandfather had brought back from France in World War I and began to entertain during National Service in the army. Golbey played clubs during the folk revival of the early 60s and around 1965, and helped to start what was probably one of the first country music clubs in the UK. In 1966, he turned professional and made his recording debut playing fiddle on Paul Jones’ first solo album. In 1967, he teamed up with banjoist Pete Stanley. They toured, made radio and television appearances and during 1969/70 played residencies in Florence and Rome. In 1970, Golbey became a solo act on the emerging British country scene and made his own first recordings. He also made his first visit to America, appearing in Nashville as the British representative on the International Show and on the Midnight Jamboree. He also appeared on the noted Wheeling Jamboree and the Renfro Valley Barn Dance. He toured the UK with Patsy Montana and Mac Wiseman, and in 1972, won the Billboard/Record Mirror award as Top UK Solo Performer and the Male Vocalist Of The Year award from the British Country Music Association. A further trip to America followed. In 1975, Golbey and Allan Taylor formed the folk-orientated band Cajun Moon, but various problems and differences of opinion arose and after recording a single album, the band broke up. In 1977, Golbey again began to work partly with Stanley and until the mid-80s, when for personal reasons he decided to reduce travelling commitments, they toured on a regular basis. Over the years, Golbey has done voice-overs for radio and television commercials and also appeared in a film, The American Way (although he stresses it is through no fault of his own that the film sank without trace). He has played in locations ranging from the Shetland Islands to Lands End and Berne to Belfast and in venues that vary from small school halls to the Albert Hall and from pubs to the Palladium. Working as a session musician, he has played on countless recordings. Apart from his albums, other Golbey recordings appear on various compilation albums. In 1993, the BCMA (GB) honored Golbey with an award for his long and continuing service to country music. A pioneer of British country music and a knowledgeable expert on early country music artists, he regularly contributes to the UK magazine Country Music People.

Brian Golbey is one of the most convincing performers in the UK of old country material. This song about the tragic flight of Amelia Earhart written by ‘Red River Dave’ McEnery is from a BBC radio broadcast in London recorded back in 1986. Accompanists are Pete Stanley banjo & vocal and Pete Cooper on fiddle and Graham Johns bass.

I had a small interview with him after the moming sessions, before everybody went out to lunch. We had the whole hall to ourselves so we had a short interview for radio there. Well, I teil you I think Brian is one of the real champions of traditional country music in Britain and in Europe. And you and I were talking just before we started this interview about this BACM, the British Archives Of Country Music. All of these recordings, if it weren’t for Brian, I don’t think any of them would be there. I like Dave Barnes tremendously, I’ve known him for almost fifty, well forty some years now, and Dave came into the music through listening to modem country music in the sixties and late fifties, early sixties. And his interest was in the Faron Youngs and the modern country singers of the time. And he doesn’t really know much about, or didn’t know much about bluegrass or old-time when he started his magazine, ‘Country Music Review’, I think it was called. It might have been called something else. Anyhow, he ran the magazine for a number of years while he was also working in his father’s art shop. He and his father took the train every day from Dover to London to work in a studio touching up old oil paintings and things like that, cleaning up old oil paintings and trading paintings. And so the music was strictly a hobby and I just don’t think for a minute that he would have been able to do this, this whole project here that they’ve done, with the number of CD’s that they’ve put out, (they’ve brought out a whole lot) a lot, a lot of wonderful music that has never seen the light of day since it was on a 78 and never done in digital style, certainly. And, you know, to have that come out the way it has. I haven’t talked to Brian about it but, I haven’t stayed with him for years, but it seems to if it hadn’t been for Brian that wouldn’t exist at all. Much less be the quantity and quality that it is. And this has nothing to do with, I mean, I have great respect for Dave Barnes but I just know that he couldn’t do all that if it weren’t for Brian.

Well, Brian has the background, doesn’t he,  because of his father’s interest in country music? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, he sure does. And he’s a fine singer (oh yeah) and musician himself. (I like his voice). Yeah he’s got a lovely voice.

Vladimir Pozner Senior

Going back to England. How long were you over in England? Moved there in the autumn of ’63, September of ’63, end of September and at some point in ’66, three years later almost, I took my family to Russia, or what was then the Soviet Union. And it included Georgia and the Ukraine. And I just did a camping trip. And we didn’t know anybody who had been to the Soviet Union at that time. It was still pretty hardcore, it was very difficult to get a visa and I didn’t have a visa until two  days before I left. And I’d asked for it months ahead. I called the embassy in London two days, or three days before and said: ‘I’m gonna be in London tomorrow and if I don’t get a visa from y’all tomorrow obviously I can’t visit the Soviet Union. And that was a big part of my tour so I’m wondering what you’re gonna do about it. Can you teil me now whether it’s worth stopping tomorrow to see if you have visas?’ ‘Yes, can you come by at two o’clock in the afternoon?’ Well, I did and I got them. But that was at the point when I sort of viewed the Soviet Union and I viewed enough of Georgia and the Ukraine and Russia to get an idea of what was going on there. And what I had read in the newspapers in the United States had very little to do with that. And I had listened to a lot of music on the radio primarily while I was there. And I had heard people, I heard a woman who sounded just like Kitty Wells. Who, I’m sure had never heard Kitty Wells in her life. And she was singing folk songs from somewhere. I don’t even know whether she was Siberian, Russian or whether she was from Mongolia or where she was from, you know. But she was singing so much like Kitty Wells and I thought: ‘Ghee whiz’. I mean, I don’t know what the song says but it must have the same sort of ‘home’, the same kind of connotations as our country songs do. And then I heard some music that was very fast and, very interesting, more like bluegrass like Monroe played it. And I thought; ‘this is really interesting’. I did a program myself on country music with Vladimir Poszer Senior. Well, Vladimir Pozner Senior was somebody whose name I got from Pete Seeger and whose phone number and address I got from Pete. He had grown up in the United States, till he was eighteen years old and going to high school in America. He had a French mother and a Russian father.

Vladimir Aleksandrovich Pozner (Russian: Владимир Александрович Познер; 24 October 1908 – 31 July 1975) was a Russian-Jewish émigré to the United States. During World War II he spied for Soviet intelligence while he was employed by the US government. Pozner was born in St. Petersburg. His family fled Soviet Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution, and Vladimir Pozner became a Communist sympathizer while living in Europe. Vladimir Pozner and his family moved to East Berlin and later to Moscow in the early 1950s. There he worked as a senior audio engineer for the Soviet film industry. His sister, Victoria Mercanton, was an in-demand film editor based in France. He retired in 1968, and in 1969 suffered a heart attack. Pozner died on 31 July 1975 during a flight from Paris to Moscow. Vladimir Pozner’s cover name as identified in the Venona project by NSA/FBI analysts was ‘Platon’ or Plato in Russian. Pozner’s son, Vladimir Pozner Jr., born in 1934, worked as a journalist and interpreter in the United States, Soviet Union and later in Russia.

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