Roger Miller, King of The Road

Roger Miller  (1936-92) was a singer and song writer and another of those country singers who comes from Texas.  Hs family were very poor and after his father’s death, his mother sent him to relatives in Oklahoma…As a boy he liked to listen to the Grand Old Opry, on the radio…  He enlisted in the US Army at the age of 17 or so, and spent a few years in the service.  He played in a band, towards the end of his time, when serving in Georgia.

After his army time, he decided to try his luck in Nashville, in the music business, but it took him some time to get work. He worked in a hotel, and met George Jones and Minnie Pearl, who hired him to play in her band.  However he gave up the music business when he became a father, and worked in Texas in the fire service.  He returned to Nashville after a time and tried to get work as a writer, ending up working for Tree Publishing.  He was very talented but not very disciplined...   He had some success as a performer and writer, but then ended up getting a divorce and living a partying lifestyle.

 He toyed with the idea of becoming an actor, but in 1964 he penned King of the Road, which became his greatest hit...  It was a number 1 hit and netted him a lot of money and was a succesful crossover in the Pop charts.
  He recorded songs by other artists as well, including Little Green Apples. 

In the 1970s, he wrote less, though he had some success writing songs for a Robin Hood film for children and a musical version of Huckleberry Finn... In which he himself played “Pap”, Huck’s drunken father.

He married three times and had several children, including two who were adopted.  Like many country singers, he had bouts of depression and drug abuse.  He was so very talented it might be said that he transcended country, but he was undoubtedly a country singer…

He was a heavy smoker, and died tragically young at the age of 56, of lung cancer….

Kid Rock an eclectic Musician

Kid Rock was born as Robert Ritchie in Michigan, in 1971.  His father owned several car dealerships.  In the 1980s, he got into rap and began to teach himself to play various instruments… He became a DJ and a rapper and had a following of “white kids” who enjoyed listening to rap….  He moved more into rock, and gradually, towards country music….

He had a reputation as a partier, who used drugs and alcohol, but he was also a hardworking, hard-nosed businessman who was determined to be a success.

In 2001, he was supported by David Allan Coe, a country singer and song writer... and began to identify with Southern music and lifestyle and with country music.  His style of music has shifted over the years, including rap, hip hop, rock and outlaw country... but it’s easy to see that his heart is drawn towards country.  

  He displayed a Confederate flag at his concerts.   He defended the use of the flag by saying it was a symbol to him of southern rock and rebellion, not of racism or hatred. He claimed that he loved America and was not a racist and had never flown the flag with hatred in his heart.

 He also played with Lynyrd Skynyrd performing the band’s great hit Sweet Home Alabama, at a benefit for Hurricane Katrina.  He has performed with Jerry Lee Lewis and formed a close working relationship and friendship with Hank Williams Junior.  The 2 of them performed in the Memorial concert after the death of Johnny Cash... He and Hank have a great chemistry as singers and performers, and Hank has called him his “rebel son”…

 Kid has a son by one of his girlfriends, whom he has raised as a single dad... and he was married for a short time to Pamela Anderson. He is now a grandfather and he is engaged to his long term girlfriend Audrey Berry.

He is also a philanthropist and has a charitable foundation; one of the causes he particularly supports is helping the military and veterans.

Jim Reeves

Jim Reeves, nicknamed “Gentleman Jim” was one of the singers I loved as a kid...  Like many country singers he hailed form Texas, and was born there in 1923. His life was short.  He died in a plane crash in 1964 at the age of 40.

He was renowned for his gentle charming manner and his sweet mellifluous voice.   He considered a career in baseball but then got a job as a radio announcer in a Louisiana radio station.  He got work on the Louisiana Hayride, a rival to the Grand Old Opry.

In the 50s’ he began to have hits with singles Like “I love you because” and “Bimbo”...  He adopted a soft gentle low singing style, which went well with the lush background arrangements of the new Nashville Sound.  Later that sound began to lose favour with some artists.  There was a reaction to it, form the Outlaw movement... because they felt that it was too soft, too overly commercial, and too close to pop… or crooning.

But it suited Jim’s voice and personality.   In the late 50s and early 60s’ he became very popular abroad, including countries like South Africa, and also Britain and Ireland. One of his most popular songs in Ireland was the famous “He’ll have to go…”

He had other hits with Distant Drums and “I can’t stop loving you.” 

In 1964, he was piloting a small private plane form Arkansas to Nashville, when he hit bad weather close to Nashville’s airport. There was a storm with heavy rain and it seems as if he became disorientated and lost control of the plane.  The plane crashed. And he was killed.

After his death, Mary, his widow released various recordings of his… and future generations were able to hear his sweet voice and songs….

Rough Music a story available on Amazon

  This is a “band” story set in the US, in the late 1970s.  I wanted to write about this era as I remember it as a kid and I love the music from it.  My favourite country singers date from that era.  I like country pop, to an extent and the Southern Rock movement, which had the wonderful Charlie Daniels and also Hank Williams II. (Bocephus).  So I wrote a novella, about a country rock band and its 2 lead singers and how they cope with life on the road.  It’s is a story about life in the music business, about trying to get on in that world, without compromising one’s ideals about music, and about friendship, as much as about marriage.  

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Rough-Music-Nadine-Sutton-ebook/dp/B01AEQS0G0/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1452977780&sr=8-1&keywords=nadine+sutton

Winifred Gerin Part III

Winfred’s father died in his sixties... and then her mother went to France, to have a holiday and recover from her grief, taking her daughter with her…  It was during a holiday there that she met Eugene Gerin, a Belgian cellist. They fell in love. 

Her mother was worried about her marrying a foreigner with a somewhat uncertain profession such as a musician.  But Winifred was in love and determined to marry him.  They wed and moved to France to live, and for several years, she was a devoted and happy wife, following her husband to engagements.  Eugene was devoted to her, as well.  Their one sadness was that they had no children but they often visited Eugene’s family in Belgium… and his brother Maurice had a son, Paul.  Winifred was the boy’s godmother and was very fond of him.  His parents had to work, so he was cared for mostly by his grandmother, Eugene’s widowed mother.  Winifred also helped with her godson… and he was something of a consolation for the children she had not had, herself.  She and Eugene also adored animals and usually had pets.  As the 1930s progressed, however, there was the fear that War would come, and when it did, and France fell and Belgum, the Gerins made their way to the South of France, to try and get back to England. 

They lived for 2 years in Nice, unable to get away to do something for the War Effort, and living on short rations.  Winifred still mostly gave her meat ration to her beloved cat.  Jewish people moved to the South of France, also trying to escape from Europe and the Gerins were among those who made heroic efforts to help them get away.

Winifred Gerin Part II

Winifred was intelligent and loved literature and history, and she became a student at Cambridge….

Her brother Roger was considered more intelligent and academic minded.  Still,  she was keen to have a university education, which was still very rare for girls of any class.  However when she started to study history at Cambridge, she found it more difficult than she had anticipated. 

She was romantic minded and loved history for its thrilling stories.  When she found herself expected to study dull aspects of constitutional history, it was a struggle for her.  She was not able to put aside personal likes and dislikes, and achieve an impartial viewpoint. 

She persuaded her father to let her change from history, to studying French.  Frederick Bourne was concerned about his finances and he wanted his children all to be able to earn a living.   Although he was comfortably off, he worried particularly about the care of Roger, who would need a trust fund to maintain him in a good and well run mental hospital.   Winifred talked about getting a job as a teacher... However, when her college career was over, she stayed home and did not look for a paid job. 

The job she really cared about was writing, and she was determined if possible to achieve a career was a writer. 

She was never interested in writing novels, saying that she could not think of plots. So she concentrated on poetry and plays, and spent a few years, going on with her reading of literature, and starting to write…learning her trade.

She wrote a play about Fanny Burney, who was a contemporary of Jane Austen- and a novelist.   She loved Austen and the Brontes….

Winifred Gerin Part I

Winifred Gerin was born in Hamburg, Germany in 1901, but she was English and her family moved back to England when she was a child.  They grew up in a London suburb which was virtually the country.   Her father was Frederick Bourne... When she became a writer, Winifred wrote under the name of her first Husband Eugene Gerin, a Belgian.

Frederick Bourne was from a “good” family, with connections to the gentry.  He had been working in Germany as a manager for a chemical business.

Winifred is best known for her historical biographies, and particularly her biographies of the Bronte family. I love the Bronte legend, and hope someday to write a biographical novel about them, particularly Emily.

So I was interested to find that there was now a biography of Gerin herself.  She and her second husband, John Lock moved to Haworth in the 1950s and immersed themselves in Bronte history.  They were very active in the Bronte Society, and Gerin wrote biographies of all four Brontes, Charlotte, Emily, Anne and Branwell.  She also wrote a biography of Horatia, Nelson’s daughter, another of Mrs Gaskell, Charlotte Bronte’s biographer and one of Anne, Thackeray’s daughter.

I have just started reading Gerin’s life, and will blog more about her later, but I was intrigued to find that she had tragedies in her early life which may have drawn her towards an interest in the Brontes.  One of her brothers died when she was young... just as 2 of the Bronte daughters died…

In addition, her brother Roger’s life was tragic.  He was a highly intelligent young man, and was expected to do well at college.  However, he was also both shy and arrogant, and did not fit in well, though he was academically capable.   

He began to act erratically, falling in love with a girl whom he hardly knew and claiming that he was going to marry her. Certainly there were some echoes here of Branwell Bronte... who was also intelligent but awkward and clumsy in his social relations, especially with women. Roger had a severe and catastrophic breakdown and was unable to continue with his education.  He was taken to a mental hospital where he spent the rest of his long life, never speaking after the first year or so.  He was suicidal, had delusions and believed that he had done something terrible.

So these are issues that may have made Winifred feel a kinship to the Bronte sisters.   It is well known that the Bronte children created  imaginary worlds, writing down and acting out fiction, which was their chief leisure activity as children.  The Bourne children also had a vivid imaginary life, making up plays which they acted out, based on Dickens and historical events.

I hope to write some more about Winifred later…..