Beeswing by Richard Thompson

Author:Richard Thompson [Richard Thompson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571348183
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2021-05-14T16:00:00+00:00

At last it was time for our first American tour. The accident had delayed us by a year, so it felt long overdue. Since the Beatles had conquered all before them, there had been a cachet in coming from Britain, but we were late to the game. We weren’t as sexy as the Stones, or as goofy and lovable as Herman’s Hermits or Freddie and the Dreamers. And most importantly, we weren’t recycling recognisable American styles – if audiences there were going to like us, they’d have to take a step in our direction.

American music had been creeping across the Atlantic ever since Stephen Foster, in the mid-nineteenth century. His songs romanticising the South, like ‘Camptown Races’ and ‘I Dream of Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair’, were sung in middle-class homes in Britain at a time when pianos were becoming affordable to many. With the appearance of the gramophone, American place names – ‘Carolina Moon’, ‘My Old Kentucky Home’ – and ways of life became romantic and mythic. Jazz, swing, blues, country and rock and roll were irresistible, and we had looked to the States for cultural innovation and excitement for decades. British music was sometimes derided as corny and non-essential by comparison. Folk music had retreated underground, with people mocking the morris dance and the finger-in-the-ear seriousness of the revivalists; the rare English folk song that crossed into the pop charts was dismissed as a novelty.

As a kid, even though I grew up singing the old folk songs at home and at school, the music that I found most exciting was either American or imitation American: rock and roll. Its infectious rhythm pushed all the essential teenage buttons and spoke of a seductive lifestyle that was beyond the means of the British, impoverished by the war and just coming off rationing. I knew nothing about the Everly Brothers other than their music, but they conjured a perfect world of big cars and kids with licences to drive them, soda shops, record hops and sweet girls who would love you forever. In the world of Jerry Lee or Gene Vincent, it was all edgier and more dangerous, a world of speed and kicks, and sweet girls who would probably go all the way and then love you forever, even after the fatal motorcycle crash.

The ‘British Invasion’ took American styles like blues and R&B, mixed them with some European sensibilities and made them whiter and more digestible, before taking them back to America. In Fairport we loved the response to the Beatles by bands such as the Byrds, the Left Banke and the Lovin’ Spoonful. The great singer-songwriters, like Dylan, Cohen, Ochs and Mitchell, were our true inspiration, as were the Band, with their blend of roots styles that were so familiar to us from records. All around the world, people had grown cynical about American politics, but they loved American music – especially the blues and country music of the Southern poor and the tougher, electrified sounds of the urban disillusioned and disenfranchised.

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