Minnie Pearl (1912-96)

Minnie Pearl was born Sarah Ophelia Colley, in Tennessee, in 1912.  Unlike her stage persona, Sarah was from a prosperous business family, and had studied at a “young ladies” school, where she majored in theater and dance.  She was well educated and intelligent. For a few years, in her early life, she taught dance, and then produced plays and musicals.  During this time, she began to develop the “Minnie Pearl” character. In 1940, she made her first appearance at the Grand Old Opry, with this comical act.

Her character was a “hillbilly girl” from a fictional town Grinders’ Switch, who dressed in homely clothes, wore a straw hat with the price tag still on it, and talked about her “country” friends and relatives. She made gentle fun of “hillbilly life” and about her own inability to “catch a feller”.

Her catchphrase was a loud “Howdeee – I’m just so proud to be here.”

She was well loved by Opry audiences and did comical songs and dances.

In her mid-30s she married Henry Cannon, who ran an air charter service and then became her manager.   She was good friends with Hank Williams senior, who was starting his career in the 1950s.  In later life, she would say to his grandson Hank III who resembles him, “Honey you’re a ghost.”

She appeared frequently in the long running country music show “Hee-haw” and was involved in business ventures, but she was also dedicated to charity work. After she recovered from breast cancer, she was involved in supporting the hospital where she had been treated.

 Her marriage was childless but happy and lasting.

In the early 1990s, she had a stroke and this brought her performing career to an end.  In 1996, she had another stoke and died.  There is a bronze statue of her in the Opry’s Ryman Auditorium, a tribute to her immense popularity

Little Jimmy Dickens

Jimmy Dickens was born in West Virginia in December 1920 and died, having had a long and productive singing life- in the new year of 2015. (2^nd January).

He came from a poor family, and was determined not to become a miner, like his father.  He had seen the hardship of life in the mines.

Jimmy  was a very short man, not quite 5 feet tall.  He adopted the name “Little Jimmy Dickens” in reference to his short stature.  Some of his novelty songs referred to his size, such as “Take an Old cold Tater and wait” Another one was “I’m Little but I’m loud.”

He dropped out of college, to start a singing career,  and in 1948 he was spotted by Roy Acuff of Nashville and moved there. He was one of the first singers to wear the loud glittery rhinestone suits  that were  adopted by many later performers. He became friends with Hank Williams and Minnie Pearl, and Hank gave him the nickname Tater.

His first marriage ended in divorce, and he remarried a little later.  His second wife died in an automobile accident in the 1960s and he then married his third wife Mona Evans, who survived him. 

He was a comedian as well as a singer and was well loved.  He appeared with Brad Paisley and as a host at the Opry.   He went on performing and talking to his fans until a few days before his final illness

Hank Williams Jnr and The Living Proof

I missed the recent movie about Hank Williams Senior, (I saw the Light).  But I’ve seen the original biopic “Cheating Heart “ and I’ve seen “Living Proof” which is about Hank Junior (also known as Bocephus). Although it is a TV movie, I really like it.  Richard Thomas (alias John Boy Walton) plays young Hank Junior and is surprisingly good.  He doesn’t look much like him, but he’s a good actor and makes up for the physical differences (Hank being 6 foot 4 and sturdily built) and the limitations of its being made for TV. 

The book is based on Hank’s autobiographical book of the same name and covers his early years, his time when he was singing his father’s songs and dominated by his mother “Miss Audrey”. It also covers his increasing unhappiness with not being able to do his “own” kind of music, and then his terrible fall in 1975, when climbing on a mountain in Montana.  The fall caused serious injuries to his face and skull and he almost died.  However, with typical tenacity, he fought his way back to life... having numerous surgeries to reconstruct his face, and learning to talk again. It took a long time, over 2 years, for him to get back to some kind of normality… and he then started to wear shades, a hat and a beard, to hide the scars.

Hank junior has enormous talent.  In some ways, as a singer, he’s got a better voice than his father.  He has more power and vigour.

He is also a very talented instrumentalist, playing 8 instruments, very well.  As a boy, he met all the great country singers, who were friends and fans of his father, but he also loved rock music and wanted to do both country and “southern rock.”

One of the visitors in his childhood was Jerry Lee Lewis, who encouraged him to play rock and who didn’t see any conflict between loving country music and also rock and roll.

In the 1970s and 80s, Hank worked with Waylon Jennings and Charlie Daniels, and he was hard working and prolific.

His songs were raunchier than his father’s work, about drinking, having fun and hell- raising.  Though in most of his music, there are poignant reminders of his father’s work.  One of his albums -“Whisky Bent and Hell bound” contains the title song, which refers to drinking in a honky-tonk and listening to Hank Williams.

 It also contains the songs “Women I’ve never had”, “The Conversation” and “White Lightning” by the “Big Bopper”, which is about making moonshine.

One of his best-known songs is “Family Tradition”, in which he refers to the fact that he and his father both “lived out the songs that they wrote”, and liked to “get drunk and sing all night...”

I’ve never seen Hank junior live, but I hope I will one day.  What impresses me most with the snippets I’ve seen of his concerts are his vigour as a performer and his obvious enjoyment of his work... And his talent at adapting lyrics, on stage which is of course an old country tradition.

I’m very glad that he’s still going strong. 

Anne Boleyn

I have always wanted to write a novel on Anne Boleyn, but these days there are so many of them.. So a while ago I wrote a "long story" about her possible romance with Tom Wyatt.  its on this blog....as a separate "Page".  I am not writing for publication at present, so I hope readers might enjoy this...

Willie Nelson...

Willie Hugh Nelson was born in Texas in 1939, and he’s still performing. As a boy, he was reared by his grandparents because his parents split up during his infancy.  His mother left and his father remarried.  He and his sister Bobbie lived with their grandparents but Willie dreamed of escaping from the poverty and isolation of life in the South at the time.

He started to play country music as a kid, writing songs and playing in a band. He went to High school and did time in the American Air force, but left due to health problems.  After that, he went to University but dropped out after a year or so, because he was working as a DJ and starting to have some success with his music. He married young and had a son Billy (who later committed suicide), and struggled to make a living. He was in and out of various jobs and in and out of the music business.

In 1960 he moved to Nashville and hung out in Tootsies Orchard lounge where he hung out with musicians and song writers, trying to get a start.  He sold his song “Crazy” which became a hit for Patsy Cline. His marriage was stormy and there was a story that his wife tied him up with skipping rope during a row.   (Other accounts say she sewed him up in a feathered filled comforter)....

In 1963, he married his second wife, Shirley Collie and bought a farm outside Nashville. Shirley was also a singer, and toured with her husband but their marriage broke up in 1971 when she discovered that he had fathered a child with another woman. However she worked with him after the divorce.
Willie was increasingly successful but was never very good with money. 

His ranch near Nashville burned down in the early 70s and he decided to leave Nashville.  He went back to his native Texas and settled in Austin. In the early 70s he released a concept album Phases and Stages, about a divorce, partly seen through the eyes of the husband and then from the wife’s standpoint. He and Waylon Jennings began to collaborate on songs in the “outlaw country” genre, so called because it was more raucous and real, and didn’t conform to the “Nashville conventions” and sound. He also worked with Merle Haggard, with Johnny Cash, and eventually in a super group, the Highwaymen which consisted of him, Waylon, Cash and Kris Kristofferson. Some of his hits included City of New Orleans, Hello Walls, Pancho and Lefty, Mama, don’t let your Babies grow up to be Cowboys…

He liked to experiment with his music, working with different artists such as Ray Charles and Neil Young.

But he ended up in trouble with the IRS.  By 1990, he owed them millions of dollars in unpaid taxes. Many of his assets were seized and sold but he managed to clear his debts within a few years.

Willie is notorious for his love of touring, one of his most famous songs being “On the Road again. “ And he kept on working hard, even as he grew older, to earn money.

During the 1980s, he began an acting career, first in the Film, “Electric horseman” and later in a remake of Stagecoach with Johnny Cash.  He had a busy career in TV and films, taking part in an episode of Miami Vice, in a film based on his own life called “Honeysuckle Rose” and in a film version of the Dukes of Hazzard. 

As well as his music, and acting, Willie is a generous man, with a lot of charity interests.  He -together with John Mellencamp and Neil Young started “Farm Aid”, a charity to help American farmers and he has worked with other charities. He is an advocate for liberalisation of marijuana laws, having smoked weed much of his life.. and having gotten into trouble with the police over it many times.  He also promotes the use of Biofuels and solar energy.

he is still out there singing, and performing with his guitar Trigger... And has always been well known for being generous in the time he spends with fans, after his gigs. 

Parnell and Katie O'Shea Part II

Parnell and Katie became lovers, and around 1881, O’Shea found out about it, and forbade her to see him.  However, the relationship went on.   It seems possible that when she became pregnant with her first baby by Parnell, she resumed marital relations with Willie.    Parnell ended up in Jail, for a time, due to his political activities. Katie due to her Liberal party connexions, (since her family were traditional liberals) was involved at times in negotiating between Parnell and Gladstone.

While he was in jail, he was paroled in order to attend a family funeral, and at the time, his first child by Katie, a baby girl called Claude Sophie, was taken ill and died.  He visited Katie and saw the baby.  Willie however seems to have believed that the baby was his, and had her baptised as a Catholic.

Katie later claimed that Willie himself was frequently unfaithful to her, and they continued to live apart.  however, since they were both financially dependent on “Aunt Ben”, it seemed impossible to get a divorce.  Willie could have divorced his wife for infidelity... but she would have had to claim some other reason, as well as adultery, in order to sue him for divorce.

Since Mrs Ben Wood was very old, it may have seemed to all three of them, Parnell, Katie and O’Shea, that it would be better to wait a while and to go on with their triangular situation.  Aunt Ben was a very proper old lady and would have been horrified at the idea of her niece being involved in an affair or getting a divorce.  Willie was never well off and may have reasoned that if he waited till Mrs Wood died and left her fortune to Katie, he could ask for some financial inducement to allow himself to be divorced for “adultery and cruelty” or some other cause.

Parnell was devoted to Katie.  He was sincerely patriotic and passionate about his work for Ireland, but his private happiness mattered a great deal to him.  Katie was not very political, she was happy as a wife and mother, though she did enjoy the “secret political negotiations” to help her lover.  as time went on, Parnell lived secretly with Katie in Eltham, a London suburb, where she had a house near to her aunt.   She had two more children, daughters, by him, Katie and Claire.  Many people in political circles knew about their affair but it was not known publicly.  Since Parnell was a protestant, leading an Irish party of mostly Catholics, his behaviour was dangerous.  The Roman Catholic church had enormous influence with the Irish voting public, and would have been horrified to know that their political leader was a long term adulterer who was contemplating marrying a woman who would have to get a divorce to become his wife.

However since divorce was still scandalous, it is hard to blame Katie for not wanting to be the guilty party in a divorce...  Parnell worked hard during the 1880’s with the Land Campaign and convinced Gladstone that Home Rule was an inevitable step forward.  He was a skilled political leader, with a disciplined party behind him, and it was hard to argue that the Irish were “backward” or not fit for self-government, when they were playing the political game so successfully. Parnell was eager to reform the land system in Ireland, but as a landlord himself he was less radical in his beliefs than the socialist Michael Davitt, who considered Land Nationalisation.  He was himself an “improving landlord” at his Avondale estate, but he could see the argument that in the Irish context, it might be better to allow tenant farmers to buy out their farms and to be “peasant proprietors”.   But he was less interested in land reform than in getting Home Rule for Ireland.  This would not have meant complete independence but it would have been a stepping stone, giving the Irish some power of self-rule. 

Katharine O’Shea and Parnell Part I

On a trip to Ireland, I read a book about Katie O’Shea, Parnell’s mistress and later his wife.  I hope to blog later about Parnell, but I want also to write about his wife...

Parnell was an Anglo Irish landowner, who inherited an estate in Wicklow, and tried to develop it, so as to improve the conditions of his tenants.  However, in the late 19^th century, generally speaking relations between tenants and landlords in Ireland were very poor.  Memories of the Famine were still very much alive and in order to protect themselves against rural poverty, tenant farmers did not usually divide their farms among their children as had been common before the “Great Hunger”.  Tenants had few rights and were often desperately poor.

Irish landlords were often relatively poor and because of this, and because of differences of religion and politics, many of them did not do much for their tenants.  They did not try and encourage better farming methods or rural industries.  So when farmers could not pay their rent and were evicted, or had children who could not find work on the land, emigration to America or England seemed to be their only option.

Parnell was one of the better landlords, who did try to help his tenants.  On inheriting Avondale - he took an interest in planting trees, and in developing a sawmill and industrialising the area.   He also like many gentry took an interest in politics.  However, in spite of his conservative Anglo Irish background, he adhered to the Nationalist rather than the Unionist side. 

during the Land Wars, he worked with Michael Davitt, agitating to help the tenants in fighting for land reform, so that they had more security of tenure, and could see themselves as co-partners in managing their farms.  The various Land Acts that came in at the time led in the end towards the farmers being given loans to buy out their farms from the landlords, so that Ireland eventually became a nation of “owner-farmers” rather than a country where much of the land was owned by the upper classes.

However Parnell’s ambitions extended also towards securing Home Rule for Ireland.  As a young man, he was not interested in literature or history, and knew little of Irish history.   But he learned. He developed politically and became a skilful “Operator” who welded the Irish Party into a weapon that was able to influence the Tories and Liberals, on the question of Home Rule. 

Gladstone came to believe that Ireland would ever be peaceful or prosperous until she had some degree of self-government... And Parnell wielded enough power in the House of Commons to be able to push the Liberal Party towards bringing in a Home Rule bill.

By 1890, he had achieved a great deal of success on this issue.  But his private life became public knowledge, and brought him down.

In 1880, Parnell, a bachelor, met Katharine O’Shea, the wife of an Irish Nationalist MP.  Willie O’Shea was a member of a Catholic “gentry” family, who had been a captain in the British army.  He had married Katharine (Katie) Wood in 1867.  She was the daughter of a Liberal gentry family, but was one of many children… and the family were comparatively poor.   They had had three children but within a few years, the marriage had become distant and not very happy.  Willie was not making much money, he was probably unfaithful and they had grown apart.

Katie was not a militant feminist, she woud have been contented as a wife and mother but she grew disenchanted with her husband.  In the 1870’s she had become companion to her rich and elderly Aunt Mrs Benjamin Wood or “Aunt Ben”.  The old lady was fond of her, and paid for a house for her and for rooms in London for Willie... and it was expected that she would leave Katie the bulk of her large fortune.

Katie kept her aunt company, read to her and was occupied with her children, but in 1880 she met Parnell, who was becoming known as an important Irish politician.  As a society hostess, she made a big effort to get him to go to one her parties, but he was shy and unsociable and didn’t want to attend social events. She succeeded in persuading him to come, and within a short time they had fallen passionately in love.  Parnell was awkward and often seemed cold to people he met, but he had found in Katie a woman he could love and communicate with. 

RF Delderfield (re posted)

Ronald F Delderfield, author and playwright, was born in Bermondsey in London, in 1912. His father worked for a meat trader in Smithfield Meat Market, and then became involved in local politics, being the first Liberal to be elected to Bermondsey council. His father supported the Liberals, and Ronald also was mildly liberal in his political views. In 1918 the family moved to suburban Croydon, were they lived until 1923, when they moved out of London, to Devon. His father was able to get him into a small public school, West Buckland, where he got a good education and which became the model for Bamfylde School in his novel “To Serve them All my Days”. 
His father and a friend bought a small local newspaper, in Exmouth, and used it to support their political views... and to cover the local news. 
Many of Delderfield’s novels are based on his real life experiences. His two “Avenue” novels, which are set in Croydon, from World War I to World War II, are based on his childhood in that area. Jim Carver, hero of the novels, is a working man, who gets into Labour politics after seeing the horrors of World War I… He works as a driver for a big company, but devotes most of his free time to trying to “improve the world” and his political views shift as the 20s and 30s progress. He becomes friends with Harold Godbeer, who is a middle class man and more of a Tory, who works as a managing clerk in a firm of solicitors. Harold admires Jim for his war service and his work in the ARP in World War II, and Jim takes on some of Harold’s more conservative common sense views. 
In his novel Diana, Delderfield uses his own and his father’s experiences as working at a local small-scale newspaper. John Leigh, from a poor family, takes a job as reporter for a small paper, in Devon, while being in love with the rich and spoiled “Bright young Thing” Diana. 
Delderfield moved from newspaper work to writing a play, in 1936. He began to have some success, (like Esme Fraser in the Avenue novels) and then went into the RAF for his war service. After the War, he settled in Devon and went on with his writing career. He married and adopted two children. He enjoyed country life, and many of his characters give up town life and move to the country, particularly to Devon, and take up farming. He started to write novels in the 1950s, and wrote many different sorts of books. However, in all his writing, he was conservative in his story telling, he was not into “fine writing” or experimental fiction. In the 50s, he wrote the 2 Avenue stories, which follow the fortunes of several people who live in the Avenue, mostly working or lower middle class people. Archie Carver, the son of Jim, makes a modest fortune in running shops but causes a death through drunken driving and ends up in prison. He feels guilty about this and then takes up property development, after the War and his prison term and he and his father reconcile. 
Esme, the young “hero” of the books, tries his hand at writing, but goes into the RAF, and then buys a farm in Devon, after marrying Jim’s daughter Judith. 
He also wrote some novels based on the Napoleonic Wars, and several nonfiction books about Napoleon, his family and his Marshals. In the 1960’s he wrote two novels about the love affair of John Leigh and the wealthy Diana... which were combined later into one novel and titled “Diana”. he wrote two historical “family sagas”, one based on a Victorian soldier, Adam Swann, who comes out of the army and goes into business, transporting goods, in places where the railways had not yet reached. Adam has a large family who take up various different jobs, and Delderfield can cover the history and social changes of the Victorian and Edwardian era. His eldest son, Alexander, becomes an officer in the Victorian army. His son Giles becomes a social reformer and later an MP. Another son, George is interested in mechanical things and develops a motor car and looks towards motorising his father’s business. 
His next saga, “the Valley” story, is set in Devon, and covers the life of Paul Craddock, who is a wealthy young man whose father made a fortune in business. On leaving the army after the Boer War, Paul turns his back on city and business life and decides to buy up a large estate in the West Country and modernise it. He is also liberal minded and tries to improve life for his tenants and supports various reformist causes. His first wife, Grace, leaves him because she is much more radical than he is... she is a passionate believer in Women’s Suffrage, and she devotes her life to working for the cause until she is killed in World War I.
 Again Delderfield uses his hero’s life to cover the social history of the 20th Century, from the beginning of the century, to the funeral of Winston Churchill in 1965. His second wife, Clare, is a simpler earthy girl, a farmer’s daughter, who Is not intellectual and is contented with a life as “the Squire’s wife” in the Shallowford Estate. Paul has seven children, who go into different areas of work, but generally Delderfield's most sympathetic characters tend to opt for  less ambitious jobs like teaching, running a small business, or farming and don’t aspire to high flying careers or making a lot of money in business.  He was not hostile to business, but to an extent, he was critical of "Big Business."  He himself ran a small antique business in later years, and one of his Avenue characters, Edgar Frith is also in this business. 
I’ve always enjoyed Delderfield’s unpretentious prose, and his long readable works and “ordinary” likable characters. 
He died in 1972. Many of his books have been televised by the BBC, during the years when they did “good” costume dramas. These include “Diana”, “To Serve them All my Days”, the Avenue books and the “Valley Saga..