R.I.P David Crosby.

KATE RUSBY - THE WILD GOOSE

Sauntering.

It is January 16^th. I am halfway through Dry January now. It has been a breeze, I have enjoyed it. I haven’t missed alcohol at all, but I bet they are missing me in the pub. Never mind, it is only two weeks to go. Not drinking in January was one of my New Year resolutions. Another was to go for a walk every day. I have kept to that one as well, but I added a proviso which is ‘if it isn’t raining’ because we have had a lot of heavy rain recently. We are back into a cold snap this week which means sunshine. I had a nice saunter through Southwick Country Park this afternoon. It was very enjoyable, getting some fresh air and communing with nature. A lot of people hate wintertime, but the way of getting through it is to embrace it. Get out there and start walking. You soon warm up when you get walking. I don’t walk quickly, I stroll, or saunter. I saw a quote about sauntering a few days ago by John Muir. He was a famous Scottish/American environmentalist and author.

“I don't like either the word hike or the thing. People ought to saunter in the mountains - not 'hike!' Do you know the origin of that word saunter? It's a beautiful word. Away back in the middle ages people used to go on pilgrimages to the Holy Land, and when people in the villages through which they passed asked where they were going they would reply, 'A la sainte terre', 'To the Holy Land.' And so, they became known as sainte-terre-ers or saunterers. Now these mountains are our Holy Land, and we ought to saunter through them reverently, not 'hike' through them.”

I forgot to take my camera out today, but I did yesterday when I had a bit of a saunter. The photos aren't that great, but they will have to do to illustrate today’s little blog.

 

 

Hebden Bridge Circa 1971-1974 by Trevor Beales.

Hebden Bridge is a small market town in the Calder Valley of West Yorkshire about eight miles west of Halifax. I can’t remember ever visiting there, but I’d like to if I ever get up to Yorkshire again. That is because these days it is a popular tourist attraction famed for its arts and culture and has a vibrant music scene. It is home to artists, writers, photographers, musicians, alternative practitioners, teachers, Green and New Age activists and more recently, wealthier 'yuppie' types. The popular TV drama Happy Valley was filmed there, and Dream Academy made the original video for Life In A Northern Town in Hebden Bridge. 

It hasn’t always been such a pleasant town. In the early 1970s it was a grim post-industrial town in decline with the buildings black with factory soot and polluted with asbestos from a closed mill where 12% of the former workforce had lung disease. Change was beginning to happen though. Hippie types had begun to move in, attracted by the ease to squat in abandoned houses and the proliferation of magic mushrooms in the surrounding landscape. The counterculture had arrived. Trevor Beales wasn’t one of these new arrivals, Hebden Bridge was his hometown. He was a gifted singer-songwriter and guitarist born in 1953. In 1971 at the age of 18 in the attic of his home at 1 Ivy Bank, Charlestown, Hebden Bridge he began recording his songs on tape. They lay dormant for decades until a chance meeting in 2018 between his wife Christine and an old friend of Trevor’s called John Armstrong led to the tapes being rediscovered. This led to the songs being compiled into an album by Basin Rock records and released in December 2022 as Fireside Stories, Hebden Bridge circa 1971-1974.

Photo by Christine Beales.

I first heard of the forthcoming release in November when I read an interview with Christine Beales in The Guardian. Then last week on a Facebook folk music group I read somebody singing the praises of this new album, saying it was a ‘lost classic’, which is a claim I have heard many times before. I decided to order the CD which arrived a couple of days ago, and I have been listening to it on this dark rainy afternoon. It is an attractive looking CD with monochrome photos of the area taken by Charlie Meecham in 1969/70. 

Listening to the music I must say I am very impressed with his deftness on the acoustic guitar. It created a nice peaceful atmosphere in my kitchen today. I read that Trevor was inspired by the likes of James Taylor, Chet Atkins, and Django Reinhardt. The names that sprang to mind when I first heard him were Bert Jansch and Jackson C. Frank, but I don’t even play the guitar, so others might think differently. I especially liked the fingerpicking of the opening track Marion Belle which is a seafaring yarn about a ship ‘sailing into hell’. It shows a flair for story telling in his lyrics. Tell Me Now is a similar type of song which tells the tale of young John who was hanged after an affair with the mayor’s daughter. It sounds like a traditional English folk song, but the sleeve notes say that all the tracks were written by Trevor, apart from Braziliana written by Dave Evans. Metropolis is a song about the loneliness of moving to a big city. Considering that these recordings were made during the ages 18 to 21 I think Trevor’s voice sounds very mature for his age, apart from some tracks where he sings in a higher register which I don’t think is so successful. For me, the outstanding track is Then I’ll Take You Home which I have shared below, so you can judge for yourself. To my ears it is very reminiscent of  Ralph McTell. If every song was as good as this one, I would say that it is a great album, rather than just enjoyable. In Hebden Bridge at the time, many of the hippie element had become followers of the guru Maharaj Ji and his Divine Light Mission. Trevor looked on this with disdain as shown in the lyrics and was contemptuous of charlatan mystics. The lyrics also show that he would rather have some beer than smoke pot. The bluesy last track Fireside Story made me think of John Martyn.

Later in the 70s Trevor formed a prog-rock group called Havana Lake who released one album called Concrete Valley in 1977 which didn’t have much success probably due to punk rock exploding onto the scene. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if it wasn’t re-released soon. Sadly, Trevor died suddenly in 1987 from sepsis at the early age of 33, leaving Christine and a daughter Lydia who was only eight months old at the time. It must be wonderful for Lydia to see her father finally get the recognition he deserved. I am glad I bought this album. I don’t think it is the greatest thing I have ever heard, but the guitar playing is excellent. If you like the sound of folky bluesy acoustic guitar songs, you might enjoy it as well.

Hebden Bridge Today.

Then I'll Take You Home - Trevor Beales

James Joyce died on this day.

James Joyce died on January 13th 1941 in Zurich.  James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist, poet, and literary critic. He contributed to the modernist avant-garde movement and is regarded as one of the most influential and important writers of the 20th century. Joyce's novel Ulysses (1922) is a landmark in which the episodes of Homer's Odyssey are paralleled in a variety of literary styles, particularly stream of consciousness. Other well-known works are the short-story collection Dubliners (1914), and the novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Finnegans Wake (1939). His other writings include three books of poetry, a play, letters, and occasional journalism. Here is me & Kim at James Joyce's statue in Dublin about 20 years ago.

Searching For Tia Blake.

It is another dark, windy and rainy day here. I won’t be going out today. I am listening to a CD called Folksongs & Ballads by Tia Blake & Her Folk-Group. I discovered Tia Blake quite by accident about three years ago. I was looking on youtube for a song by Fairport Convention called Rising For The Moon but got the title wrong and found Rising Of The Moon by Tia Blake. I knew this song previously as a rousing rebel song by The Clancy Brothers. It is all about the Irish rebellion of 1798, but Tia had changed it to a slow wistful, lilting and mysterious ballad. (I have shared it below) I was very impressed and listened to a couple more of her songs. I determined to buy an album by her to add to my collection of long-lost singers, but when I looked on eBay all that was available were vinyl copies of her only LP which were very expensive and no good to me anyway because I don’t have a turntable to play vinyl. Time went by, and recently I heard that the album had been re-released on CD and copies were available from a company in Germany called Grooves Inc (Or something like that) My search for Tia Blake was over and my CD arrived here a few weeks ago.

I’ll just tell you a little bit about Tia Blake. That is not her real name, she was born Christiana Elizabeth Wallman in 1952 and grew up in North Carolina. I think her mother was originally from Canada. After she left school, she worked for a publisher for a few months but got bored with that and headed for Paris aged eighteen. Friends had given her the address of a record store in the Latin Quarter called Disco ‘The’. When she met the owner Benito Merlino they fell in love, and she stayed. The shop was a popular hang out for the artistic, creative, bohemian types of Paris, and musicians would practice there. They encouraged Tia to sing and finally at the end of 1971 they recorded eleven songs in two sessions. 

The album was released in France in February 1972 on a label with the ponderous title Société Française de Productions Phonographiques. Tia and her group only ever played one concert, at Theatre Du Vieux-Colombier in early 72. Shortly after that Tia left France and returned home. I have read that she made some demo recordings in Canada a few years later that emerged on vinyl for Record Store Day in recent years, but the French album was the only work released in her lifetime. I have enjoyed listening to the CD very much indeed. None of the songs were written by Tia, they are mainly traditional songs that are in the public domain, songs that she had sung all her life. The opening track is Betty & Dupree. The guitar picking by Bernard Vandam, Francois Brigot, and Michel Sada is first rate and reminds me of Bert Jansch and Pentangle. Black Is The Colour is a Scottish song that I am very familiar with through Christy Moore. I wish I Was A Single Girl Again is a sad song of regret, and you can sense a feeling of underlying sadness and mystery in Tia’s voice on many of these songs. 

Jimmy Whalen has some nice flute accompaniment by Sydney Aufrere which gives the song a kind of South American feel. I like all eleven of the songs although Rising Of The Moon remains my favourite. It seems to me a bit of a tragedy that the album was only released in France in 1972. I think if it had been recorded in New York about ten years earlier when the Folk boom was at its height, and Tia had been singing in the clubs of Greenwich Village she might have made quite an impact. Maybe she wasn’t all that ambitious because I discovered that there was more to Tia than music… She was also a writer

Tia returned to education and graduated from Smith College in 1989. Then she became a freelance writer. I discovered that she had two stories published under her real name of Tia Wallman in the prestigious British literary magazine Granta which I know well. It isn’t really a magazine, more like a paperback book published quarterly. I wanted to read her stories. I found one of them online here- https://granta.com/forbidden-games/.  I found it fascinating. Her parents were divorced, and the story tells of her father buying 10,000 acres of savannah grassland in Brazil, and Tia’s life there. It shows she had a very eventful life even apart from heading to Paris. There is a vivid description of a grass fire breaking out and their efforts to beat it out while being infested with little creatures and insects that are hopping and jumping ahead of the flames. There are trips to Guyana in which even Fidel Castro makes an appearance. Her father seems to be a mysterious figure who might have been working for the CIA. Tia wonders why he is known as Havana Jack. I had to buy Granta 94 on eBay to read the other story called We Went To Saigon which is even more amazing. Tia’s stories read like a Grahame Greene novel. Her father who was now in Vietnam wanted to see his daughters, so at the height of the Vietnam war he flew Tia and her sister to Saigon. What sort of parent would give their kids a holiday in a warzone? There is no doubt that Tia was a talented writer as well as a great singer.

Sadly, Tia Wallman /Tia Blake passed away in 2015 from breast cancer. She was laid to rest in Quebec alongside two of her brothers. I am glad to have discovered her music and writing. She never achieved fame and fortune, but maybe she wasn’t all that bothered about that, and for her, being creative was its own reward. I think the one record she made will be enjoyed by a small number of people for a long time, so she will never be forgotten.