Waylon Jennings

Waylon Jennings was born in Texas in 1937, to a poor farmer’s family.  His father moved to Littlefield Texas, when he was a child.  There, he set up a general store.  Waylon was never a great student; he loved music and could play guitar pretty well, at the age of 10.

Aged 16, he left school because he had been in trouble at times, and was not doing well scholastically.  Then he worked for a time at temporary jobs including his father’s store. 

He began a career as a DJ in a small station in Lubbock Texas.  He liked to play artists like Chuck Berry and Little Richard, as well as country, and as a result he lost his job at one time.  Waylon had an exceptional strong deep voice, a little like Johnny Cash, but at first he seemed content to play other singers’ music.

But in 1958/9 he was taken on by Buddy Holly, who was then an up and coming rock and roll artist.  Buddy was on a winter tour, in the cold month of January 1959.  Jennings gave up his seat on the plane to one of the other musicians, who had the flu, and he agreed to travel on Buddy’s tour bus, thought the heating was broken. The two men joked to each other, Buddy saying “I hope your old bus freezes up” and Waylon responding with “I hope your old plane crashes”… a joke that was to haunt Jennings for many years. 

Because of course Holly’s plane did crash, killing everyone on board. 

Waylon returned to singing with his band, the Waylors but he had relatively little success, until talented singer Bobby Bare, persuaded Chet Atkins to listen to some of his singing. 

During the 1960s and 70s, Waylon did battle with the Nashville establishment. 

He was a womaniser and had frequent bouts of drug abuse. He began to get creative control over his work in the early 70s, and to perform “country outlaw” music. he was friends with Johnny Cash at one stage and they shared an apartment, both of them using drugs.

In later years, both men struggled to get clear of their addictions and to control their musical careers.  Their friendship grew closer in the 80s… they both acted as well as sang… Waylon married Jessie Coulter who was his last wife, and Johnny had married June Carter, who was his muse and partner in singing.  

Waylon had a long stint as the narrator of the comedy “southern” show, Dukes of Hazzard and made one appearance as himself, singing, in the show.  He and Johnny both appeared in a remake of the John Wayne Movie Stagecoach. 

The cast also included Willie Nelson and other country singers, and John Schneider, who had played Bo Duke in Dukes of Hazzard, and who was trying to start a country singing career, also was in the TV film.  From this film and other appearances, was formed the “super group”, the Highwaymen... consisting of 4 country superstars who were getting a bit older and were less popular in the charts.  But they had enormous success as a group, touring, and performing new and old songs together, and appealing to older country audiences all over the world. They were Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson and Waylon.

Later still, in the 1990s, Waylon started to work with the “Old Dogs”, another super group of Nashville singers who were older. This group consisted of Jerry Reed, Bobby Bare, Mel Tillis and Waylon. Shel Silverstein wrote several comedic songs for them, about the funny side of getting older.

Waylon’s talent was awe inspiring, as a guitarist and a singer.  He had great power and depth and his rough deep voice was admired by his fans.  He was a hard working performer, in spite of his frequent bouts of abusing drugs, including cocaine.  He made a heroic effort, in the 80s to get off the cocaine, so as to save his marriage to Jessie Coulter and to stay in good health and spend more time with his son Shooter…

However he was a heavy smoker and over ate, developing diabetes, in his later years. His health got worse, and he had to have heart surgery and later on, an operation to improve the circulation in his legs.  By 2000, due to pain issues, he quit touring.  Late in 2001 he lost a foot, and died in early 2002, of diabetes complications.   He had spoken on the phone to Johnny Cash, his old friend, shortly before his death, and Johnny died a year later.

Waylon’s influence on “outlaw country” artists lives on.  I've always been a huge Cash fan, but I sometimes think that Waylon's voice was at least as good and maybe a bit better.  I managed to see Johnny shortly before he had to give up foreign tours, but I never saw Waylon live. I  wish I had...

Dinah Mulock Craik Novelist

Dinah Maria Craik (Nee Mulock) was a well-known and prolific author of the 19^th Century, who made a good living with her writing.  As the Victorian age progressed, writing became a respectable career for women. It could be done at home.  It did not require much formal education and as Trollope later said novelists were permitted a good deal of latitude in getting practical details “right”.

She was born in Stoke on Trent, and her father was a minister of a non-conformist congregation.  However he was unstable and difficult and the family were not well off.  Born in 1826, she moved to London around the age of 20, knowing she would have to make her own way in the world. 

She was friendly with Charles Mudie who founded the "Mudies’ Circulating Library" which was a very successful business.  It had great influence on teh reading habits of the Victorian public.  Books were expensive; so many middle class people got them out of a library, borrowing them a volume at a time and paying a small subscription.  Mudie only took books which were geared towards the respectable middle classes, so immorality and “risk taking” were weeded out of the reading matter he supplied.  

Dinah wrote short stories for the young and then began to produce 3 volume conventional novels.  She did not have any problem with the restrictions of publishing novels that fit with the Victorian moral conventions, but she was independent as a woman and took pride in her ability to make her own living rather than needing a man to keep her or to validate her in society.  Other novelists such as Mary Braddon, or George Eliot, who had “improper” private lives, or who wanted to write more serious novels which did not always abide by the strict rules of Victorian fiction, had more problems. Eliot complained about the “crowd pleasing” types of novels that women wrote, such as the “silver fork” ones which were a bit like Georgette Heyer - in that they were set in High Society... and were in Eliot’s view “silly”.   She also complained about the sensation novels which became best sellers.

 Another novelist Elizabeth Gaskell, who was happily married, naturally “proper” and religious had some difficulties with the style of the popular novels of the time, such as very long books which if published as a serial needed exciting events and cliff hangers that did not suit Gaskell’s quieter talents.

Dinah Craik wrote several works in her first 10 years in London. She was proud of being able to support herself and felt that it was wrong to educate girls to do nothing but marry, when it was often difficult for a girl of the upper or middle classes to find a husband.

In 1857 she wrote the massive best seller that made her famous “John Halifax Gentleman”.  It was a very Victorian tale of a young boy from a poor background who has a lucky break, being taken in by a well to do Quaker, and being given a start in his business.  (The tradesman’s son Phineas is an invalid and unable to take over his father’s business).

Phineas feels sorry for John –and persuades his fatter to help him out.  John proves that although he is not from a rich or grand background he is a natural “gentleman” and he soon take advantage of being given a job by old Abel Fletcher.  In the Samuel Smiles tradition, he works his way up, displays a talent for mechanics and business, is rigidly honest, and eventually takes over the business. 

It was a novel that came along “just at the right time” for making a young businessman a hero.  The middle classes were on the rise, gradually becoming leaders in their communities and the wealthiest people in the country as a whole.  Their political and social influence was now equal with that of the landed upper classes. Previously novel heroes had generally been “Gentlemen” of independent wealth or in the “genteel professions” i.e. owning land, being in the military or the law or clergy.  Now a man with his own business, who has worked his way up from poverty, was the hero and it appealed to the public.

Craik’s novel wasn’t that popular with critics, and most readers nowadays would agree that John is a tiresome “ultra-good” hero.   He has no real faults.  He does not drink gamble or womanise and he doesn’t even waste time!!

He is always worthily busy, working to improve his situation.  He falls in love with a well-bred heiress but does not marry her till he is moderately prosperous.  He has disputes over business and social issues, with upper class neighbours but always wins.  His problems are pretty much solved before they have begun to give him trouble.

The upper classes are generally portrayed as selfish, vicious, weak and “on their way out”.  So it is hardly surprising that the novel was popular with middle class readers.  John is good to his workers, and although he has come up from the poorer classes, they don’t resent his being successful.  He is plainly a “natural gentleman” and bound to do well and become rich and powerful.

Craik made good money from this and other novels though her later novels gradually become more didactic and less successful, though they still sold well.  However her life in general was a happy one.  In her 30s, having been contentedly single for a long time, she fell in love with George Lillie Craik, a young man several years her junior who was working in publishing. Craik lost a leg in a train accident and she nursed him, marring him in 1865.  She continued to write and to help with his work, as he became a partner in the famous publishing firm of Macmillan’s.  But soon after their marriage she adopted a foundling child, a little baby girl whom she named Dorothy.  Her adoptive daughter and her husband were a source of great happiness to her. 

They lived in Bromley, near London, and her busy happy life went on for several years till she died of heart failure at the age of 61 during preparations for her daughter’s wedding

Susan Coolidge 1835-1905

Susan Coolidge was an American author for girls and like many kids, as a child I read her famous stories, “What Katy Did” and its sequels.  They are still popular, but I have never been able to find out much about the author. 

Her real name was Sarah Chauncey Woolsey... And she was born to a well-known and well to do New England family. New Englanders had an aristocracy of families of English origin, who were usually intellectually minded and liberal in their politics.  They were usually anti-Slavery, for example.

Coolidge worked as a nurse during the American Civil war and after the War she wrote her novels.  Like Louisa M Alcott, she lived most of her life in New England –at Newport Rhode Island - but made occasional trips to Europe.

She wrote “What Katy Did” in 1872 and continued to write books for children and also biographies of literary figures, for the rest of her life.  Like Alcott, she never married.

The story of the Carr family is based on Coolidge’s own memories of her childhood.  Katy is a harum-scarum girl of 12 - the eldest of six children, and has ideas of being an artist.  However she is always in trouble, in a mild way and it is not until she has an accident, which leaves her bedridden for 4 years that she begins to grow up. From her bed, she learns how to manage the house, and to look after her siblings. 

In a few years, her back injury is cured and she is able to walk again.  In the next book “What Katy did at school”, she and her sister Clover go to boarding school and have more adventures.  In the third book in the series, she goes on a trip to Europe with an older friend and meets the man she is going to marry.

As the books are Victorian children’s stories, they are somewhat heavily “moral”.  Katy’s accident is the result of disobeying her Aunt... and she learns from the bad experience.  When she goes to School, she is shocked that the teenage girls at the school flirt with the young men at the nearby College. Yet somehow I never found them quite as irritatingly “moralistic” as Little Women and other Alcott books.
I’m glad to find that they are still loved by today’s young girls.

Jerry Lee Lewis Wild man Rocker

Jerry Lee Lewis was born in Ferriday, Louisiana in 1935, to a poor family. He had from childhood an extraordinary gift for music and a wild personality, so that he became famous as much for his “wild” ways and off stage antics as for his talent.   His rock and roll performances used to include standing on the piano, setting it on fire and giving his all.
About a year ago, my partner got tickets to see him but I couldn’t go. So I missed what‘s probably one of his last performances. He came on stage on crutches, and only played for about 40 minutes but I was told it was one of the most wonderful performances he’d ever see and heard
Jerry has always been a flamboyant personality and a law unto himself. 
Although he grew up in a bible Christian atmosphere, with Jimmy Swaggart the evangelist being one of his cousins, he was instinctively rebelling against conformity with the South’s conservatism. (Another of his cousins is the country singer and talented pianist Mickey Gilley). He sneaked into “black” clubs and bars to hear what was then called “race music”... as a kid.
As a teenager he attended a bible college but dropped out. He believed that “rock and roll was the devil’s music” -at times, but he was drawn to it.
In the 1950s, he was a king of rock and roll. Elvis was regarded as such but he was a much more conservative, gentle conformist. Jerry Lee was a rebel, arrogant, egotistical and at times very foolish. He created a huge scandal, which almost killed off his career in the 1950s when he was discovered to be married to a cousin of his, who was only 13. Jerry was 22. The marriage was legal, her parents had consented as it wasn’t unusual in the South at the time for girls to marry very young... with parental consent.  (The country singer Loretta Lynn was also married in her early teens).
However Jerry Lee had actually still been married when he wed Myra, because his divorce from his previous wife had not been finalised. 
In the UK, people were scandalised when her age was discovered. He also had trouble in the USA; for some years afterwards, he went from high paying gigs to small time ones, and was struggling to make a living.
He married many times after his relationship with Myra ended in divorce, and continued to rule the stage with his piano and his country and rock and roll singing. some of his big hits were “Great Balls of fire”, “Whole Lot of Shakin’ going on” which were attacked at the time for their sexual innuendo. He also remained loyal to his country roots and had many country hits. He’s famous for jamming with Johnny Cash, Elvis, and Carl Perkins at Sun Studios one Christmas, tapes that were later released as the “Million Dollar quartet” and have been made into a stage show.

Norah Lofts

Norah Lofts was born in England in 1904 and was a very prolific novelist.  Like Jean Plaidy - she wrote numerous historical novels, often about royal women.  She also wrote many novels set in Norfolk, where she was born.  She was interested in rural history, in farming and in the lives of the rich and the poor.  Some of her works are about the history of a particular house, about the families that occupied it over centuries. Her biographical novel about Anne Boleyn (The Concubine) was narrated by a fictional servant, Emma Arnett... whose life is intertwined with Anne’s and who introduces her to the Protestant faith.

Norah was happily married and died in 1983.  She also wrote murder mysteries and “spooky “fiction under different pseudonyms. 

One of my favourite Lofts novels is “Lovers all Untrue”, which is a novel based loosely on the Victorian Madeleine Smith, who is reputed to have murdered her lover and escaped the gallows. Lofts uses her story to create a horrible controlling Victorian “Papa”, Mr Draper – a middle class business man who is possessive and domineering over his wife and two daughters, Marion and Ellen.  His wife has long since retreated into invalidism.  Mr Draper is probably harsher than most Victorian fathers, but Lofts was clearly horrified at the restrictions such a man could place on his womenfolk and how narrow and stifling were their lives. Marion, like Madeline Smith, is rebellious and intelligent and unable to bear her life, she tries to escape by taking a lover.  But things go awry and she becomes pregnant.

Some of her novels have been filmed, including Jassy.  The Concubine is another favourite of mine, and Lofts had also written a short biography of Anne Boleyn.

I haven’t been able to find out much about Lofts as there does not seem to be a biography of her, which is a shame.  I’ve found her works very interesting and well written

Sensation novels

Sensation novels became popular in the 1860s, and were decried by moralists who felt that they dealt with scandalous sexual behaviour and the seedy underbelly of Victorian life, with crime and sordid lifestyle and behaviour.  But there was an appetite for light and exciting fiction among people who were not interested in readying “heavy” serious novels.  Braddon admitted that while she was keen to write a “good” novel, she also wanted money and she was willing to write these stories which appealed to the public.

The novels became popular and sold well, and their heyday was soon after the first Divorce court was established by law in 1857.  Previously divorce had been in the hands of the Church and couples had to go through the church courts and then, they had also had to get an Act of Parliament to dissolve a marriage.  Now -there was a court which handled divorce and marital breakdown, and although divorce was still considered wrong by most, and unacceptable, there was a legal mechanism to allow unhappy people to find a clean and lawful way out of a bad marriage. 

Divorce was still very rare, and the grounds for men and women getting a divorce were not equal, but it was a start towards giving women more freedom to escape their marriage legally.  Under the previous system, while there was no law against a woman putting a petition to parliament -generally it was men who divorced their wives.  Now with this new court, women could sue for divorce on various grounds.  Men could do so for adultery alone, whereas women had to have another ground- such as cruelty, desertion, unnatural sexual practices etc.

Old fashioned moralists also criticised the Divorce court and thought that the sensation novels were a similar indication that morals were declining.  There were complaiants  that women were behaving in an improper and immoral fashion and taking it into their own hands to get rid of husbands instead of suffering the miseries of a cruel husband, as they had had to do previously. 

Braddon and Sensation Novels Part II

On reading about Mary Elizabeth Braddon, I have been looking at some of her sensation novels.  She was one of the earliest who wrote in this genre, which she did partly for money and partly because it was a kind of writing she enjoyed.

Unlike some women writers, she had had a varied and somewhat difficult lifestyle.  Having been an actress, and having chosen to live as Maxwell’s mistress, and waiting several years before they could marry, she knew more about the seamy side of life than some authors like Jane Austen.  Austen was an intelligent and unprudish woman; she was not ignorant of the problems of the world or the hidden side of life…such as mistresses, drunkenness and so on that she wrote about gleefully in her juvenilia.  However compared with a girl like Braddon, coming along many years later, born into a fairly poor family, a girl who had had to go on the provincial stage, a “lady” like Austen was sheltered.

Braddon’s novels often tell the story form the man’s point of view and she’s capable of writing about life for young men, lounging around London, looking for amusement.  Knowing the world of publishing and writing for the magazines, and the stage, she was able to write confidently about people who are far from rich and comfortable and sheltered... who work at what the upper classes would call vulgar or seamy jobs.  She is able to write of a male world because, as a woman who had broken the social conventions, she had to live more in the world of men, than in the world of respectable females.  

In “The Doctor’s Wife,” she writes of a young man who makes a living writing thriller like stories for magazines... And her heroine’s family lives in lower middle class poverty, her father making a precarious living as a forger while claiming to be in the law.  In  ”John Marmont’s Legacy,” the heroine, Mary Marmont is living in a shabby flat in central London, among working class people, while her father ekes out a living as an extra on stage…

George Eliot too lived with a man she was not married to, and ladies (except for a few) did not visit her.  However Eliot was an intellectually minded woman and wanted to write novels that were ultra-serious and would not descend to “money making” fiction like sensation novels.