Mea culpa. Or, as young folks say these days: “my bad”. It’s like this. I pick up a battered old single, a local release, mid-sixties. I have not heard of the artist, Ned Miller, but I recognise the song on the A-side. “Do What You Do Do Well”: one of Johnny Cash’s hits. Clearly, then, […]
Category: Country
Like samizdat pamphlets, there is a certain aesthetic to the shabby pirated records which used to be pressed in parts of the world where copyright law was cheerfully ignored. Such an operation was Chung Sheng (中聲), a Taiwanese label which used to sell cheap knock-offs of mainstream releases to US servicemen based there. Whatever the […]
After the First World War, Rudyard Kipling wrote beautiful short story, The Gardener, about a respectable middle-class Englishwoman, Helen Turrell. She is unmarried, but has an illegitimate son, Michael. Helen keeps up the pretence that Michael is her nephew, and the village pretends to believe it. When the war comes, Michael volunteers, and is sent to […]
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A western, and sad
We did not have a television at home when I was a boy. This was the 1970s, when TVs had become pretty much universal in Australia, but my Mum and Dad did not approve of this trend. Although I didn’t like it at the time I am grateful for their non-conformity now. Much of my […]
In the 1950s there was a person with the initials G.S. who lived in my area. He or she liked music and collected records. I know this, because a box of 10-inch shellac records turned up in an op-shop near me, and most of them had “G.S.” neatly written on them. Sometimes, G.S. used a […]
Like quite a few great Australians, including Pharlap, Tex Morton was actually a New Zealander. Born in Nelson in 1916, he started performing at 14, and enjoyed success with travelling bands, playing and recording country songs. In the early 1930s he did what all ambitious New Zealand musicians do: crossed “The Ditch” (the Tasman Sea) […]
You know her, even if you don’t know it. You know her voice. If you have listened to Emmylou Harris’s albums, Luxury Liner and Quarter Moon in a Ten Cent Town, or Neil Young’s Comes a Time, American Stars and Bars and Rust Never Sleeps, or the Doobie Brothers’ Minute by Minute, or a whole […]
It is hard to make a living in music. Most musicians do it for love, and either earn nothing or have a day job. So whenever people are payed to play and sing, that is a good thing. If it is playing at birthday parties, playing favorites-and-requests at a country pub, creating a soundtrack for […]
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