| Transcript |
A shipment of San Antonio doo-wah
The author, center, having fun.
THE
The British are a nation of magpies, and they're storing our music.
Right now I'm listening to a radio
interview with Lee Clayton, a
country singer and songwriter
from Alabama, and every so often he and
the DJ/interviewer break off to play one
of his numbers. He's very good, but I've
never heard of him before, though I've
recognized most of the soncjs they've
been playing, the last three being sung by
Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings and Jerry
Jeff Walker. On Sunday on this same
station I got an hour and a half of 1950s
San Antonio Chicano doo-wah music,
and the week before there was an hour of
Cousin Joe from New Orleans. (I don't
read radio schedules; these are just programs that happen to be there when I
switch on.) Not much to write home
about, you may think—except that writing home about it is exactly what I'm
doing. I live on the other side of the
ocean, and the station that broadcasts
this arcane music is BBC Radio London.
BY DAVID HELTON
A/though author David He/ton fives in
London, his heart will always be in Texas.
As the Cockney San Antonio doo-wah
freak put it, "We know more about these
geezers than what the Americans do."
Well, how much do you know about
Juanito and Pete, Slim Mickey or Johnny
Spain? Certainly any mental files I ever
had on them are long lost, and I spent
part of the fifties in San Antonio, and
was in my teens then and used to listen
to that kind of music. Yet here is a Londoner who could write an encyclopedia
entry on the genre (or subspecies) and,
what's more, gets an hour and a half
of scarce BBC air time to entertain the
city's other aficionados of Juanito and
Pete and company. A Johnny Spain
record, he said, changes hands these
days at 20 British pounds.
In fact Britain's full of curators of
odd bits of Americana. When I arrived
here several years ago, one of the first
people I met, a man who lived in the
flat above me, was a Wild West fanatic.
He had a room stacked halfway up the
window with True West-type magazines
and obscure historical journals, most of
them published in Texas and Arizona,
and since it's not that enormous a subject it's conceivable that he knew everything there was to know about it. For
instance, he could name from memory
all the men who died in the Alamo. He
could give you a run-down of Billy the
Kid's psychopathology, or tell you the
economic imperatives leading to the establishment of Round Rock. At first he
was excited to learn that I was from
Texas, but he cooled as time passed and
he saw that I was just another dumb
cowboy who'd been to too many movies
and didn't know the Ringo Kid from
John Wayne. And it was of course only a
hobby with him, except for whatever
political thrill he got from being president of the local Wild West Society
(though in British tradition politics can
be a hobby too). After he'd got up off
his blanket in the morning and taken off
his boots and bandana, he'd put on a
brown business suit and go to his office,
where he worked as an accountant.
The other night I met some friends at
a pub, and we went into the back room
where a world famous—or so I was told—
New York cocktail pianist was giving
what looked like a chamber recital. I
was the only one there who'd never heard
of the man—so please don't ask me his
name—but I think I was also the only one
who managed to feel sorry for him. I'm
not a great frequenter of places with
cocktail pianists, but I've seen one or
two, and a hundred in films, and while
the piano player plays, the people go on
with their chatting and drinking, in a sort
of cocktailly way, lots of tinkles to go
with the tinkling music. But this poor
bastard was up on a little stage, and the
audience, about two dozen gents and
ladies dressed in cocktail gear, sat in
straight chairs in a semi-circle just
beneath him, silently staring at him and
holding their token martinis (and a
British martini is just that, no gin) erect
in their laps. At one point between tunes
he said very shyly that it was all right
with him if we talked, but I was the only
one to try and I immediately got shushed.
After a while I couldn't stand either the
social constraint or the man's obvious
agony (you don't take your piano-playing
to a cocktail bar in the first place if
you're overendowed with chutzpah) and
went back to the main part of the pub,
where I could drink beer and hear the
juke box. This is the same pub, by the
way, where every Sunday afternoon all
the Dixieland purists gather (with much
the same attitude, although there are
more of them and they do make a little
noise between numbers) to hear precise
imitations of King Oliver, Louis Armstrong and the rest of the jazz-goes-up-
the-river crowd. Occasionally, the MC
will drag up some poor nonagenarian
Creole, tottering from jet lag, and make
him blow his old lungs out, while the
audience sits in a hush so unnatural
considering the kind of place that the
fellow must have started his career in,
that he probably imagines he's performing at the Judgement.
I could go on and on with examples
of this, including a bluegrass crowd that
I fell in with once and, of course, the
massive annual Country Music Festival
at Wembley Stadium, where a large part
of the audience of hundreds of thousands
dress up in cowboy suits, complete with
spurs and toy guns, and the main attractions are Nashville musicians who have
recently, or not so recently, peaked in the
States. (In the last couple of years, a
country rock night has been added, but
only hippies go to that one. Hippies, as
any decent Tammy Wynette connoisseur
will tell you, don't got no sense of
history.) There are Civil War fanatics
who stage battles, fast-draw experts,
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