The cowboy image
Roy Kerridge
Peterborough is not a favourite city of mine, and as I arrived in a hot, stuffy Bank Holiday coach I looked out of the window appalled at the crowds of surly ruf- fians outside. Young men, brutalised and unemployable, surged from the town like rats leaving a sinking ship.
'Football,' I guessed correctly. Horror at the thought of soccer in the sun mingled in my mind with relief at the city being drained of the worst of its inhabitants. I had come to Peterborough to see the Festival of Country Music, a four-day event held on the banks of the River Nene, with a huge marquee, a 'country style' fairground and a vast camping site for all the immaculate tents, cars and caravans belonging to the enthusiasts.
These enthusiasts were a breed new to me. I had dimly noticed cards in pub win- dows advertising country and western clubs, but had not realised before how far matters had gone. A new working-class movement had arrived in our midst, more innocent in its way than the cults of sport and bingo. Nearly everyone wore Stetson hats and fringed imitation-buckskin waistcoats for the occasion, and cowboys and Indians mixed amicably. Tall, brawny young men strode around wearing cap pistols with a formidable air, accompanied by adoring plump maidens in jeans. On the whole, boys wore black Stetsons and girls white. A few older couples had made most elaborate costumes, gunfighter black with white embroidery, and with cut-down ver- sions for the children. Many a respectable shopkeeper no doubt hid his grey hairs beneath a ten-gallon hat. Country music allowed them to go on playing cowboys well into middle age. Despite their fancy dress they seemed to take themselves quite seriously. I was the odd one out as usual, and I put on my guitar tie-pins and tried to look as Western as possible.
The fairground was slightly disappoint- ing, despite its many attractions. Stalls sell- ing cowboy gewgaws, expensive leather waistcoats and records that had begun to melt in the sun seemed out of place among children's attractions. Harsh ballads of truck drivers and their drink and divorce problems blared oddly from roundabouts better attuned to hurdy-gurdy music.
I ran into a familiar face, that of Bryan Chalker, then editor of Country Music World. He seemed disconsolate, as the crowds weren't up to his expectations, thanks to competition from 'Expo', the East of England Show. Complete with the Roundheads and Cavaliers of the Sealed Knot, this fair had been scheduled for the same weekend on a site only six miles awaY. However, a friend bore him away to the oeer tent and he cheered up amazinglY, Several country music papers were on sale, hawked around by their own editors. 'Chief Shilo', resplendent in his feather head- dress, stood outside his wigwam selling photographs of himself in aid of charitY. Having convinced himself that he was a Red Indian, he dressed as such, not in the least embarrassed by his white skin and Kentish accent. 'I am a blood brother,' he told rne. Living in a dream-America, the word 'country' meant rodeos and cacti to the festival people. Those who still held to the archaic meaning attended the East 01 England Show instead. In America, cowl: try music gives some meaning to the lives of farm workers.
Yet it was from our countryside and that of Ireland and Scotland that the ballads and dance tunes originated, to be cross-bred with the banjo music of negroes in the American South to make the music marketed as 'country' by radio and recoil' company talent scouts in the Twenties, Nowadays in America the music has a wide, spectrum, merging with rock and roll an 0 syrupy pop at one point, and remaining pure 'mountain music' at another. It is the latter traditional variety that I enjoy, as played by Jimmie Driftwood and the fiddle" and-banjo 'bluegrass' bands. When I ward to hear its British equivalent, I do not listen to would-be cowboys singing in terrible assumed accents, but to Irish and Scottish accordion music, as played so well by B°b- bie Jordan, a blind beggar in the Portobello Road. This is as it should be, for to over" reward ballad singers, as our democratic American cousins tend to do, leads to anachronisms such as a sub-HollYw°°ci world of singers with mansions, nervous breakdowns and amphetamines, warbling nasally of truck-driving breakdowns, Bible Belt farmsteads and the Christian virtues.
Such subject matter accounts for the lack of young middle-class interest in country music in Britain. In some places the sign ‘C & W' simply means 'pub music', and I have heard music-hall songs and calyOs°5 described as 'country'. Members of a Lon' don country music club, I found, celebrate the fourth of July and their deliverance from the English. Perhaps symbolism can go no further, but I notice that an English policeman outside the American embassy has taken to chewing gum and twirling his radio as if it were a six-gun.
The 'cowboy image' in country music all' peared with the coming of Western filals, and now every singer, whether from the Deep South or Southampton, wears a Stet' son hat. Ballad singers who remained in England in the 18th and 19th centuries sang topical news stories to old tunes. This led to broadsheets and eventually to the popular, press. Now, with the Peterborough festival sponsored by the Daily Mirror, the two strands were once more being brought
together. However, what with the loud amplification of the British groups blasting away from the large marquee, the sultry Weather and the smell of hot dogs, I began to feel quite giddy. Not far away the great Cathedral beckoned in the blue evening light, sending out healing waves of peace and tranquillity to my steel-guitar-fevered mind. Before I could reach its cloistered silence, I had to run a gamut of cowboys mixed oddly with tipsy Cavaliers in full Costume, who lurched from every pub doorway. The Sealed Knot had lost some of Its tone since the departure of Count Nikolai Tolstoy, and I asked a lone Round- head where his fellow Puritans could be. Oh, they're all lying dead drunk in a tent, but they'll be ready for battle tomorrow.'
hurried on, finding in the cathedral grounds a monastic Peterborough of Mediaeval stone, a refuge from the dangerous city outside.
Next evening, as I took my seat for the
I found my nerves racked still further by the audience's habit of firing off cap pistols to show their enthusiasm. Some- times they all did this at once, usually when a guitar reached an ear-splitting whine, and I felt as if the top of my head was coming off. When an American singer appeared, the compere warned the gunslingers to be quiet as 'in America, when they pull out a gun they mean it', and presumably .he would have shot right back. The songs sounded authentic enough, but the singers and corn- Peres had some difficulty in switching ac- cents back to East End or Geordie in bet- ween. One singer, Snuffy Garrett, emerged as a stand-up Northern comedian between songs, with a line in lavatory humour that would not have been appreciated in the Bi- ble Belt but suited Peterborough very well. Clapping took up a great deal of the time, Particularly for 'our wonderful police'.
'A round of applause for British country music!' the compere kept shouting, and the deafening response suggested a patriotic reaction to the initial enthusiasm for America. We British could show the Americans that, thanks to our true blue grit, we could be even more American than they were!
Lonnie Donegan, my old teenage idol, saved the day as far as I was concerned by Introducing an accordionist, Bill Scott from Edinburgh, who played Scottish reels and Irish jigs to great applause. A final render- ing of 'My Old Man's a Dustman' quite restored my spirits and sent me back to my lodgings in a rollicking mood. This was fur- ther improved by a visit to a Chinese restaurant where a table of Irish diners vied with one another in singing ballads of their native land, despite all the poor manager could do. I had even obtained a signed Photograph of Philomena Begley, an Irish country singer I had never heard before, b, In whose name proved irresistible. So, all al all, it was a good Bank Holiday, marred only by my boarding-house keeper, who angrily chased me out of doors for trying to use his sitting-room for writing in after his chucking-out time of 10 a.m.
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