The unpublished Bill Clifton interviews (2004), # 40 (slot)

Tja, en zo kom je er achter dat het beschikbare materiaal op is. Van de opnamen zoals we die in 2004 maakten is dit het laatste stukje. Hierna is het uitgangsmateriaal op. Ik weet nog wel dat Kees Jansen een paar keer een avond naar Winterswijk was gereden (waar Bill en Tineke een huisje hadden) om daar Bill te interviewen. Op een goede avond belde Kees me over het gesprek dat hij de voorgaande avond gehad had en vertrouwde me toe dat hij het gevoel had dat er geen volgende afspraak om verder te spreken zou komen. Kees bleek een goed voorgevoel gehad te hebben. Het boek over Bill Clifton waar Kees Jansen, Bert Nobbe en ik een tijdje van hebben gedroomd is nooit uit onze handen gekomen. Uiteraard verscheen in 2016 Bill C. Malone’s boek ‘Bill Clifton, America’s bluegrass ambassador to the world’. Kees Jansen had na de laatste interview-afspraak met Bill Clifton een en ander netjes getranscribeerd (een enorm karwij) en ook een exemplaar aan Bill Clifton zelf gegeven. Waarschijnlijk langs die weg kreeg Bill C. Malone de beschikking over ons uitgangsmateriaal. We waren daarvan niet op de hoogte, pas nadat Kees toevallig het boek van Bill C. Malone kocht viel bij ons het kwartje dat we geheel onwetend toch aan een boek over Bill Clifton hadden meegewerkt. Ik ben daar tevreden over, en eerlijk gezegd ook een Ik hoop dat jullie hebben genoten van deze reeks posts…

About Songs

Transcriptie:

‘Single girl, married girl’ came along in 1927, so 40 years… 45½ perhaps…

And I think, I think it is still a relative song. Because the choice is not always that free. Even nowadays. No, that’s true, no that’s very true.

Maybe even, maybe for most part of the Western world but this globe is larger than… Oh exactly, yeah! I know it’s not a choice in developing countries of the world at all…

I’ve got one more that I can think of. Nowadays all music is digitalized. Digital means of creating music. Do you think that  will affect The Carter’s music negatively or positively? I would think positively. I mean, you  throw this question at me without even thinking about it hut I would think positively rather than negatively because people are going to eventually tire of music which has been produced purely out of electronic equipment and sounds and vocals even now, I now where they get these vocals from but some of the vocals I hear sound like they’ve been digitally produced too. I don’t know whether they’re really live voices that have been manipulated or what but… And it can be very pleasant music but it isn’t something that grabs you by all your heartstrings. Whereas the music of The Carters, it does. Now the only thing that concerns me is when young people, from the cities especially, I mean I think of one particular person who did a European with me a couple of years ago, or five years ago or something. Who comes from the city? And he said: ‘You know, it’s all very well to sing about this cabin on the hill and the little schoolhouse and all that thing but’, he said, ‘That’s not my experience. I wasn’t born in a cabin on the hill; I didn’t go to those one-room schoolhouses. I don’t know what they’re talking about’. So bluegrass for this person was quite different. And he was a young person from a metropolitan area. And he still plays the music and I think enjoys playing. But I don’t know how much he plays. But that sort of attitude can be…

I would [think] John Duffy felt very much the same way too. Although we never talked about it but I’d say he probably felt the same way. I mean, he was born and raised in Bethesda, Maryland, which is part of Washington, D.C. really. And his father was an opera singer and so his experiences had nothing to do with rural American, mountain style life or anything else. Now mine didn’t either. I mean, my upbringing didn’t but I always identified with all those songs and I always identified with the mountains. My mother was first raised in the Blue Ridge but up Maryland, you know, near Frossburg, Maryland. But that’s quite different from, I mean, that’s not as poverty ridden as the rural South is.

And then again; you could still visit those places the songs were about? You could live those experiences first hand. Whereas people like John Duffy, coming from the Washington, D.C. area twenty or twenty five or thirty years later, could not go back and visit those scenes. Yeah, oh yeah. But it wasn’t of interest to him to visit those scenes, I mean, he really didn’t care. He loved The Stanley Brothers, he loved Carter Stanley’s singing, and Ralph’s I guess too to a large degree, but particularly Carter and when it came to songs like ‘The fields have turned brown’ he could identify. ‘Yeah, ok, that’s their living, not mine, you know’. But he could identify with that. But as far as some of the other songs he couldn’t identify with those.

And I think the younger the generations, I mean, the more we get into younger people playing the music and we get into Nickel Creek and people like that now. And, you know, their experiences are wholly different. So we’re going to get an entirely different kind of music out of them and if they ever play a Carter Family song, I’m sure they can find one, you know, and it maybe something that maybe put upon them at some point. Like, ‘how about should we do a Carter Family song?’ Why shouldn’t we look at that Nickel Creek will probably do one or any of the other modem groups or young groups? But yes the overall push for Carter Family music that I have been making over the years will continue I think through other people. And that the music will stay alive. There’ll be a lot of people who want songs that were written not for money but that were written because they felt the way they felt. And that’s very obvious in the song. Sometimes some Tin Pan Alley songwriters can write things which are absolutely from the heart or they seem to be from the heart and The Carters did a lot of those songs.

‘Mid the green fields of Virginia’ is one I mentioned before to you, I think, in an earlier part, but to me that’s a wonderful song. But here’s a man who had never been out of the city in his life. He was blind, color blind as well as blind altogether, and yet he can write about the beauty of the green fields of Virginia so that you feel it, you know. So, there are some good songwriters out there that have written songs that The Carters recorded that were written for commercial reasons. People had to make a living and they made a living by writing those songs. But they’re different than so many of the others being written today. Or the ones I hear at least. I don’t know, maybe I’m hearing the wrong songs. Fm sure there are some pretty good writers out there but it’s like everything else: the quantity of what’s coming out is so great that you can’t hear them all anymore. And I’m sure that if I were to sit down and listen to everything that Strictly Country magazine lists every month or every issue then I would hear songs that I couldn’t believe how good they are. But I’ll never hear them because there’s just too much product out there.

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