Roy Orbison Part III

 Roy was beginning to realise  how exceptional his voice was and it was so well suited to performing Heartbreak songs.  One big hit was "Only the Lonely" and another was Running Scared about  a man who was afraid of his girlfriend leaving him. He toured in the UK and was somewhat surprised and annoyed to find that the Beatles were now famous  yet at a concert he performed 14 encores and the Beatles would not let him go out on the stage again.  During that time however he got to know George Harrison and they would later become close friends. 

In 1963, his wife Claudette, left alone in Nashville was lonely and embarked on an affair with the contractor who was working on their new house there.  Their marriage was unhappy on and off at the time because Claudette was depressed when he was away touring.  He toured in Australia and again in Britain and Ireland.  He was popular with young teenager girl fans... He had another big hit with Pretty Woman which is also about a man who falls in love with a woman because he is lonely....His own marriage was getting more difficult and he and Claudette divorced in 1964 because of her affairs. 

Roy and his wife reconciled a while after their divorce and revealed that they had remarried. but tragedy was in the offing.  Roy loved cars and motorcycles and he and Claudette went riding on his bike one day a couple of years after their reconciliation...and they had an accident.  Roy survived but Claudette was killed.  Roy was desperately grieving for his wife but continue to bury himself in work.  However it was the 1960s and his gentle style of music, and country background was a little out of step with the world of the 60s.  He had always sung rockabilly but his albums at this time did not do well.  He went on touring and then in 1968 another tragedy struck.  He was working in England and in September got the horrific news that his house in Hendersonville Tennessee had burned down and his two elder sons had died in the fire.  

Again he buried himself in work, his youngest son Wesley went to live with Claudettes parents.. and a few years later Orbison married a German woman and they had 2 more children.   Johnny Cash bought Roy's house in Hendersonville and planted an orchard...as Roy could not bear to own the property...

Roy Orbison Part II

 In the late 50s Roy gave up singing for a time and concentrated on song writing.  He married Claudette and they had 2 sons. However they were not very well off but Roy had always been ambivalent about performing.  He loved music - particularly country, rock and roll and rockabilly...but he suffered badly from stage fright and was shy about his unusual looks and his wearing thick glasses.  He liked performing in some ways but did not like the PR aspects of the music business.  

In the beginning of the 1960s though he began to experiment with singing styles and found that his voice which had a large range, was well suited to the new Nashville Sound.  This involved giving a smoother more melodice sound to country music which had been initially simple, using instruments that were easy to play, such as guitar, or fiddle... and songs that were easy for anyone to sing.  The Nashville sound was more "musical", using string instruments, and having trained and talented backing singers.  In time the Nashville sound went out of fashion as it began to seem too soft and over produced  and tamed the energy and earthy nature of earlier country music.  Yet at its inception it was new and interesting.  Roy's voice was well suited to heartbreak songs and he was an excellent singer.   He went back to performing....and did very well in the US and also in the UK.

Roy Orbison Part I

 Roy Orbison was born in Texas in 1936 and became known as a singer whose subject was heartbreak.  He was the son of an oil driller and in his childhood the family moved around Texas to various jobs.  He  grew up mainly in Wink, Texas but disliked the town, seeing it as "football, oil and sand".  He was a sensitive shy boy.  He did not want to work in the oil business but tried to study enough to get a start in the field if necessary.  however his heart was in music.  He had poor eyesight and had to wear thick glasses and he was also embarrassed that his hair was almost white as a boy and died in jet black.  He wanted to performed but did suffer badly from stage fright....

As a boy, Orbison began to sing on the radio and played with a band in high school. They played country music and one of his favourite artists in that genre was Hank Williams... Roy knew  that he wanted to play music but his shyness was a problem... He enrolled in college after high school so as to have a back up if he did not succeed in the music business, but he kept on playing with his band, at local gigs and studying during the day.  He met Johnny Cash who suggested that he apply to Sam Phillips of Sun Records.  Phillips at first rejected him but then  he did record "Ooby Dooby" which was his first big hit.  He and his band now known as the Teen Kings began to write songs in rockabilly style.  He became friendly with Elvis Presley who also had gotten his start at Sun Records and he wrote a song called Claudette, named after his girlfriend Claudette which became popular.  However although he would become famous for his voice, at the time, he was not sure if he should go on performing or if he should concentrate on song writing. 

Noel Streatfeild Part II

 Noel trained as an actress, and spent 10 years in the business, working for various theatre companies.  So she got a good grounding in the world of the stage.  In 1936, she wrote Ballet Shoes which was a children's story about 3 children who are left badly off by a neglectful old guardian, and who go on the stage to make money.   The novel was very popular and was illustrated by Noel's sister.  She went on to write other "showbusiness" novels for children while also writing some romances under a different name.  Her children's books are the most popular and many were adapted for film and TV. 

She wrote about circus children, and also about skating.. and since she knew a good deal about the life of the professional theatre, and how children worked in it, they were very popular.  She emphasised the need for stage children to have grit and determination and also to be disciplined and work hard.  She criticised her characters who allowed success in the world of performance to make them spoiled and selfish.   In later life she wrote the Gemma books which were about Gemma Bow, who had had success as a child actress in films but then found that she was too old for children's parts.  Gemma has to live for a couple of years with her cousins, the Robinsons who are all talented amateurs, who spend a lot of time, performing in charity and school productions.  Gemma finds that in an ordinary school, she does not do well, as her education on movie sets was sketchy and she learns to adapt to "normal" life.. becoming less selfish and realising that her cousins are also talented..  

Noel never married, and died in 1986.  

Noel Streatfeild author Part I

 Noel Streatfeild is famous as the author of numerous children's novels which are set in the world of the theatre and performance.  She was born in 1895 to a middle class family, in Sussex.  Her father was a clergyman who later became a bishop.  She was eager to have a career, since she was considered the plain daughter of the family and she was lucky enough to be born at a time when middle class girls were beginning to go to University and to earn their own livings.   She started out acting in charity shows, and decided to go on the stage herself. Her older sister Ruth was a nurse during World War One, which was one of the ways that middle class girls emancipated themselves in the Georgian era.   Ruth was also interested in the theatre and was a talented artist.  She worked as an illustrator and did the illustrations for some of Noel's books.  Noel joined an acting company, and trained as a professional actress.  It was just becoming a respectable profession for a young woman of genteel background but it was still rather unusual for a clergyman's daughter.  Dorothy Sayers, who was born around the same time as Noel and who was also a clergyman's daughter, was passionately fond of the theatre but became a playwright and novelist. 

Lucy Walter Part II

 Lucy and Charles were the same age and within a year, she had produced a son, James who would become Duke of Monmouth.  He was Charles' first son and his father was devoted to him.  However he was trying to regain his throne, and soon after James' birth he had to go to Scotland.  During his time in Scotland Lucy had an affair with Lord Taafe, and became pregnant again..  She had a daughter Mary.  Charles refused to acknowledge this child as his..

Lucy Walter Royal mistress Part I

 Lucy Walter is an obscure historical figure but she has some fame as one of the first significant mistresses of Charles II.. and as the mother of James Duke of Monmouth who rebelled against his uncle James II...

Lucy was born around 1630 in Wales to a family of middle rank gentry.  Some referred to her as a "strumpet" but in fact she was born to a genteel family.  Her life was disrupted however by the English Civil wars... and it led her on a path which was unusual for young women of respectable family.  Her family home was attacked during the wars, and she fled to London. She found a protector in Algernon Sidney who was a gentleman who favoured the republican philosophy but was ambivalent about Cromwell.  

Lucy was an attractive girl without, it seems much brain but there were almost no options for a woman like her other than to marry or become a man's mistress.  She seems however to have been willing to take the mistress option, and after  a short affair with Algernon Sidney she moved on to  the protection of his brother Robert.  She ended up in the Hague like many refugees.  There she met Charles II who was then Prince of Wales and became his mistress. 

Dave Dudley Truck driving singer

 Dave Dudley was a country singer whose specialty was trucking songs.  Country music has traditionally focused on occupations that were common among the American working men (and women).  Some of the favourite ones were train songs.  In the 1920s and 30s, working men rode around the country on trains, looking for work.. or worked building and repairing trains and rail roads.. In spite of poverty and hardship, there was an excitement about travelling, and hearing songs about it appealed to the listening public....Boxcar Willie sang about hoboes who travelled and lived rough and poor... and most of his songs were train songs. 

Many country singers of the older generation came from a farming background such as Loretta Lynn, and Johnny Cash whose fathers were sharecroppers or farmers. They often had other work on the side.  Loretta's father worked in a mine and did some farming and in later life, he gave up mining and ran a small store. 

Truck driving was another occupation for working men, and so trucking songs became popular.  Truck driving was at first a male job, drivers would be away from home for long periods of time, working hard, a life of bars, truck stops and cafes and getting away from their wives.  Dave Dudley recorded Six Days on the Road, in 1963 and it became a huge hit.  Shel Silverstein wrote a parody of the song called "6 Days back at home" which detailed the problems of a driver on his time off, his being stuck at home, listening to a nagging wife, noisy kids and having to do jobs around the house and longing for the companionship of the road... However the original song notes that truck driving while it has its freedom and fun, is a hard life, with trucks needing mechanical repairs, having to dodge police ("Smokies") and problems with delays and late deliveries.  The song refers to drivers "taking little while pills" to keep awake while driving...(which was cut in some versions) and being away from his woman and wondering if he should find another girl but feeling that it wasn't "right"....

Dave was born David Darwin Pedruska in Wisconsin in 1928, and he initially became a baseball player.  He played a few years and then had an arm injury which led him to seek other work.  He then became a country singer in the late 1950s.  In 1960 he was involved in a car accident which set back his career but in 1963, "Six Days on the Road" became a huge hit for him.  It was written by Earl Green and Carl Montgomery.  He had a lot of popularity in the 1960s and 70s but it began to fade by the 1980s.  He was well liked in Europe though, particularly in the UK and Germany and he performed there... As his recording and performing career began to wind down, he went into business, buying a lake resort which he ran with his wife Marie. He didn't achieve the long running success of artists like Johnny Cash who was still doing novel and exciting work up to the time of his death....but he had a solid career.  He died in Wisconsin in 2003, at the age of 75.  

Laura Ingalls Wilder Part II

At the age of 18 Laura was working as a schoolteacher, and during that time she met a young homesteader called Almanzo Wilder, and they fell in love and married.  Her early years of marriage were difficult.. Almanzo (she called him Manly) was hard working but farming  was not an easy way to make a living.  Laura had her first child Rose at 19.  A little later a son was born who died within a few days. Like her birth family, the Wilders also moved round a lot before settling.. They had bad luck with a barn fire which destroyed their harvested crop.  Their baby son died and there were no more children.  The Wilders got diphtheria and Manly had a stroke, which left him very ill for a time.  He limped for the rest of his life and was not a strong man, but he and Laura (whom he called Bess because he had a sister called Laura) managed their farm and achieved some years of stability.   However it was many years of hardship and poverty.  In middle age, Laura became a writer for the first time, starting to write about farm life and advice about farming.  She was an expert on poultry and she gave talks to other rural women.  She then began to write the stories of her childhood, moving around the prairies, which made her famous....

Laura Ingalls Wilder Part I

Laura Ingalls Wilder was the author of the famous Little House on the Prairie series of books which were televised in the 1970s.  She was born in 1867 in Wisconsin.  This period, soon after the Civil War was a period when the frontier was opened up.  People moved out west, mainly to take up offers of free land, and build communities in the land that was being cleared of its American Indians and turned over to farming and ranching.  Her parents were pioneers who led a wandering life.. Laura was the second child, and grew up leading a hardscrabble existence, moving from place to place, working hard and never quite rising to prosperity.  

Her father had a wanderlust and also the severe weather conditions of the frontier often made for hardship, with crops being destroyed by blizzards, drought and so on.   They moved to the Indian lands in Kansas a few years after Laura's birth but only stayed a short while.  They found that the farm they had settled in was on an Indian reservation so they went back to Wisconsin.  Charles Ingalls her father took odd jobs as well as farming.. but farming was precarious due to frequent crop failure. The family moved around Minnesota, Iowa and Dakota before settling in a new town called De Smet in 1879 where the were to remain for the rest of their lives.  However life was still hard and Laura was expected to contribute to the family income as soon as she could.  She went to school in small one room schoolhouses and as she was an intelligent girl, she enjoyed learning and it gave her the option of becoming a teacher.  It was almost the only career for a respectable young woman.  She also  worked as a dressmaker in her teens and then started to teach high school. 

Rough Music by Nadine Sutton

Another stohyr of mine that’s  available on Amazon is Rough Music. It is not a love story, but a novella about music and a band.  Set in the 1970s and 1980s it is about a small rock band that’s trying to make it big, and the conflicts between doing real music and commericalism, marriage versus life on the road.   

Beds and Blue Jeans, on Amazon by Nadine Sutton

Beds and Blue Jeans is a light heated story, about a young couple in present day America, and how they start living together and learn to love each other....  Its available on Amazon., 

Merle Kilgore Songwriter

 Merle Kilgore was a country singer and songwriter, who was also the manager of Hank Williams Junior for a time.  He is buried in Hendersonville, Tennessee near to Johnny and June Carter Cash.   He was born in Oklahoma in 1934, but was brought up in Louisiana.

He met Hank Williams at the Louisiana Hayride, when he was a teenager and became friendly with the family… After attending college, he began a career as a singer but became beter known as a song writer.  He was a distant cousin of the Carter family and through them he met Johnny Cash.  He and June Carter co-wrote “Ring of Fire” which was recorded by Anita Carter, June’s sister but then Johnny Cash recorded it and had a much bigger hit with it.  It was a song about forbidden love, inspired by June’s affair with Johnny…Merle also co-wrote another famous song, Wolverton Mountain which was a big hit for Claude King.

During the 1960s he worked with Johnny Cash, as part of his touring act... When June married Johnny at the end of the 1960s, Merle was his best man.   By the 1980s he had moved more into the business side of country music, and was managing Hank Williams junior and other artists.

He was married with 5 children.  In later years he developed lung cancer and went to Mexico for treatment... where he died of a heart attack…