Het is al weer een aantal weken geleden dat ik een post in deze reeks plaatste. Teveel andere leuke onderwerpen is de waarschijnlijke oorzaak daarvan. Maar nu staat deel 38 voor je klaar om te lezen. Verschillende onderwerpen komen aan de orde… Bill’s vader had eigenlijk niet zo’n goed idee van de muziek zoals zijn zoon die maakte. Uiteraard heeft Bill Clifton het ook over A.P. Carter, en we gaan het iets uitgebreider hebben (dan ik eigenlijk had verwacht toen ik aan deze post begon) over de Canadese Romaniuk Family. Maar dat ga je straks allemaal lezen en beluisteren natuurlijk…

Bill and his father and visitors to Poor Valley

Transcriptie:

$10,000 dollars. Well, I had a lot of children, they were in a private school in Sussex and I don’t make that much money in music, never have, and he’d loaned me $10,000 dollars and he said: ‘I want…’. ‘I don’t know where you think I can just come up with $10,000 dollars’. And he said: ‘But you owe me that’, and he said, ‘I’ll forgive that if you just come back to America and take a job’. So I went back to America and I took a job with the United States Government, overseas!

You found a way to spite him anyway? Yeah, that was it. But anyhow, that was the other reason. And, you know, people say: ‘Well, you should have just let your father sit there’. Well, I should have. I shouldn’t have paid any attention to him. I should have thought: ‘Well, to heck with it, you know, you don’t…’.

Yeah, but that’s all easy in retrospect, isn’t it? Yeah, it’s much easier in retrospect. I mean, I had a hard time with my father, always, and he always, he was somebody who, I can’t remember, I just told this somewhere recently, maybe it was you all, but he sent me a clipping from the Wall Street Journal about the Grand Funk Railroad. Did I tell you that story last time?

I’m not sure. I might have told it to Rienk [Janssen], but anyhow, he, while I was living in England in the seventies, after I moved back from the Philippines; he clipped from the Wall Street Journal an article on the Grand Funk Railroad. This was a popular group, a pop group, which was…

De band Grand Funk Railroad was destijds de decibellenkampioen van de Verenigde Staten. Totaal onvergelijkbaar met de muziek van Bill Clifton. Compleet het tegenovergestelde…

Killed in a plane crash, wasn’t it? No, no, that’s my mistake. That was Lynnyrd Skynnyrd. I don’t know who they were, I mean, it’s just one of those things, but I read this article and the Wall Street Journal had interviewed these people. They said: ‘Well, you know, you have these enormous audiences for your live concerts. Can you explain why that is?’ And they said: ‘Yeah, we have the loudest loudspeakers, we make more noise than anybody, you know. None of the other pop groups can make as much sound as we do. We have the largest number of decibels of anybody’. ‘And does this translate into sales for your records?’ ‘No, we don’t understand, we haven’t sold many records, you know, we don’t understand’. Anyhow, I read this whole article and at the bottom of it my father had written: ‘Is this something you think you could try in England. Maybe you could do this in England?’ Like: make more noise than somebody else, you know. The understanding father.

Okay. I’d like to get back to The Carter Family. I think that on the previous occasion you mentioned already that A.P. realized that his music was different than any other music.  He realized that and he realized that The Carter Family records had gone all over the world. They had gone to Africa, they had gone to India, they’d been released in Australia and New Zealand, Canada and, you know…

Een klein stukje uit een ander en ook wat ouder interview met Bill Clifton. In dit korte stukje blikt Bill terug op zijn vriendschap met A.P. Carter.

How did he find that out? Well, mainly through royalty statements. They show up as sales from those countries and that… he just realized that there were people out there who knew The Carter Family and that the numbers would grow rather than diminish over a period of time. How did he realize that? I don’t know how he realized that. He did, he just sensed that, that this was something important. And this was going to be a good thing. And at some point there would be, there would be people coming to Maces Spring to see where The Carter Family came from, you know.

Een mooie rode schuur ergens in Poor Valley.

Did they already come to Maces Spring while he was still alive? No, no. Not while he was still alive. Very few people came there. There were some people that I never met, from Canada; called The Romaniuk Family…

The Romaniuk Family – Country Carter style – Point P-322 (1968). LP’s van The Romaniuk Family zijn ‘few and far between’. In mijn toch wel redelijk uitgebreide verzameling ontbreken ze compleet. Ik heb een poosje moeten zoeken, maar ‘k heb dankzij het Internet toch een en ander over deze Canadese familieband kunnen vinden. Sowieso de afbeeldingen van twee LP-hoezen en een podcast waarin de relatie deze familie en The Carter Family iets beter en uitgebreider uitgelegd wordt. Het origineel van de podcast is hier te vinden (opent in een nieuw tabblad). Veel plezier met luisteren…

This is the story of two families, from opposite sides of North America, with two totally different lives, who intertwined in some very interesting ways. The first is The Carter Family from Virginia, considered one of the founding families of Americana, whose recordings from the early 1900s influenced countless listeners. The second is The Romaniuk Family, an unknown family band from the foothills of Alberta. This episode investigates both The Carter and Romaniuk families, from their early beginnings, to their eventual meeting, and how an unheard-of cover band from Alberta came to be involved with one of the greatest musical groups of the 20th century.
The Romaniuk Family – Songs we love to sing – Point PS-352 (1970)
The Romaniuk Family; wie waren dat?
Hailing from Canada, the Romaniuk Family band consisted of Ann Romaniuk (born 1916), Ed Romaniuk (born 1930) and sister Elsie Romaniuk (born 1927) who all grew up in a coal mining family in rural Foothills County, Alberta and like many folks back then, spent their youth glued to the radio. In 1935 their dad bought a few brand-new 78s of the fabled Carter Family and thus launched a lifelong obsession, plunging Ed Romaniuk in particular into an ardent emulation of the Carter Family and the country music sound they pioneered. Billed as ‘the Canadian Carter Family’, the Romaniuks performed regionally and on the radio, recording their first singles in the mid-1950s, followed by an (exceptionally rare) EP in 1959 and this first full album in 1968. At the time they had a weekly radio show on CBC station CJYR, which had just signed on in ’68, and held their slot up until 1970, around the time their second album came out. The Romaniuks were doggedly faithful to their idols and typically devoted about half of each album to Carter Family classics, tucking in a few of their own originals as well as a traditional tune or two. In 1957 they screwed up their courage and drove all the way to Virginia to search for their heroes, actually meeting A. P. Carter, who was charmed by their sincerity and wowed by their sound. Years later, in 1971, Ed Romaniuk made another cross-continental pilgrimage, this time out to California, where he met Sara Carter, who he hung out and shot the breeze with, along with her husband, Coy Bayes. Most remarkably, the long-retired Sara Carter consented to let him record their bull session, which included them playing a few tunes together – a historic event, as it was apparently the last recording Sara Carter ever made, outside of a brief fling during the waning days of the Sixties folk revival.

Janette talked about them in the interview you did with Janette for us… The Romaniuks, Ed and…

Oh yeah? I never have heard  them or met them but I know about them. And there, well, I… While I was working in England, of course A.P. had already passed away so, but I used to send people over there. I mean, I would be in some place and I would mention the fact that that’s where they were and that the family was still there. And if anybody finds themselves anywhere around Maces Spring they should introduce themselves to Gladys Millard, who was A.P.’s oldest daughter. She was the only one living there at the time. Janette still hadn’t moved back. Joe lived there but he’s a little more difficult for people to visit because he’s never there himself, just like his father. And his wives had not been all that receptive. He’s had a number of wives but none of them have been so receptive to having overnight visitors or something like that. Whereas Gladys always wanted to have them, you know. ‘Oh, you come from Glasgow?’ ‘Okay, well come on in. You know Bill? Oh, you heard him sing over there and he mentioned us? Well, good, you know, come on in and let’s get you a seat at the table and give you some dinner, you know’. And: ‘Y’all stay all night now. It’s getting kinda late, you know’.

Mark Zwonitzer en Charles Hirschberg schreven samen een mooie en uitgebreide biografie over The Carter Family onder de prachtige titel ‘Will you miss me when I’m gone?’ Toen Kees Jansen en ik heel wat jaren geleden The Carter Family Conference bezochten in Londen, Engeland kwam dit boek uit. Ik heb het destijds met veel plezier en grote interesse gelezen.

That’s what Charles Hirschberg referred to as well. That when he went to the valley, you know, people were very, very hospitable. And there was never a shortage of places to eat or to sleep. Yeah. Who said that?

Will you miss me when I'n gone? Iets meer informatie over het boek...
Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone? is the first major biography of the Carter Family, the musical pioneers who almost single-handedly established the sounds and traditions that grew into modern folk, country, and bluegrass music – a style celebrated in O Brother, Where Art Thou? A.P. Carter was a restless man, seemingly in a constant state of motion. On one of his travels across the sparsely settled mountains and valleys that surrounded his home in southern Virginia, he met and married a young girl named Sara Dougherty. Orphaned as a child, Sara was remote by nature but seemed to find release in singing the typically melancholy ballads that were a part of her home tradition. For fun, A.P., Sara, and her cousin Maybelle (who married A.P.’s brother ‘Eck’ Carter) would play and sing the hymns and ballads known in their Poor Valley community, occasionally adding songs A.P. had collected during his travels. Then, in 1927, they traveled to Bristol, Tennessee, to audition for a New York record executive who was hunting ‘hillbilly’ talent and offering an amazing fifty dollars per song for any he recorded. These Bristol recording sessions would become generally accepted as the ‘Big Bang’ of country music, producing two of its first stars: Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family. By the early 1930s, the Carter Family was the most bankable country music group in America, with total sales of more than a million records. By the late ’30s, they were appearing regularly on high-power radio station XERA, which broadcast from coast to coast. A whole generation of country people could gather around the radio and hear the sound of music that came straight from their world. Johnny Cash in Arkansas, Waylon Jennings in Texas, Chet Atkins in Georgia, and Tom T. Hall in Kentucky all listened to the Carter Family. It was their formal schooling. Inside the Carter Family, however, things were hardly perfect. Though nobody outside the family knew it, Sara had left her difficult and quixotic husband in 1933. In 1936 she won a divorce. Even throughout the long and painful breakup, the Carters kept performing together, singing an ever-widening range of new songs they wrote or old songs they remade: songs of love, of betrayal, and of the death of fondest hopes. And they kept at it even after Sara married A.P.’s cousin Coy Bays in 1939. After fulfilling a final radio contract in 1943, Sara and Coy moved to California to settle near his family. The original Carter Family never performed or recorded together again. With Sara gone, A.P. retreated home, opened a general store, and lived out the next two decades in obscurity, the odd man out in a new and reconfigured Carter musical clan. Meanwhile, Maybelle and her daughters (Helen, June, and Anita) went out and got themselves new radio contracts, working in Richmond, Virginia; Knoxville, Tennessee; and Springfield, Missouri, before ascending to country music’s ultimate stage, Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry. Nearly fifty years in the business won Maybelle the title ‘Mother of Country Music’ and the adoration of generations of guitar players and just plain listeners. The story of the Carter Family is a bittersweet saga of love and fulfillment, sadness and loss. Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone? is more than just a biography of a family; it is also a journey into another time, almost another world. But their story resonates today and lives on in the timeless music they created.

Charles Hirschberg who wrote the… Oh, right! Yes, that’s right. They are. I  mean, that’s exactly right. And so a lot of  people went over there from overseas, while I was working over here, I mean, from Holland as well. But various people have shown up there. Thinking: ‘Well, Bill says ‘go by’, you know, go ahead’. And Gladys always said: ‘I’m so thankful you do that because you know that we never go anywhere, we never will. We’re never gonna get anywhere so at least we learn about things from other people coming here’. But A.P. didn’t have that. It never happened in his lifetime.

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