spin-offs
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It’s a measure of the need for an idea or a book, I think, the way it reverberates in its other life, after you let it go out into the world. I’ve been humbled to experience the impact Buried Country has had.
Be careful what you wish for: Buried Country has been like a lot of the things I like, like that old adage about the Velvet Underground, which says that not many people actually bought their records, but everyone that did formed a band. Buried Country has become the virtual foundation stone or source document for a whole wave of recognition and transformation that's followed. It has inspired and informed a steady stream of spin-offs, and now in the wake of the second edition maybe even more, with a Buried Country: Live in Concert roadshow getting out of the blocks even as we speak… |
Jon Langford artwork
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Certainly I was somewhat aghast in 2014 when I learnt there was a stageplay called Buried Country doing the rounds of the funding bodies, had even won an award. And I wasn't the only one: Jimmy Little's daughter Frances Peters-Little also protested at the misrepresentative fictionalisation of late her father. But as the play progressed through the hoops it was tweaked and renamed Country Song by way of fobbing off Franny and me, and when it went on the road in 2015, it was met with a resoundingly underwhelming response. Karmic revenge eh. You can read here Franny's thoughts on the matter as published in the First Nations Telegraph, and here a broader account of the problem published by the Guardian. The original Buried Country revealed to a black as well as white audience a musical canon that had indeed been hitherto largely buried. That’s why in this sense the CD was so important; because it proved the point claimed by the book and the film with the actual recordings, making widely accessible for the first time, after the models of Harry Smith’s seminal 1953 Anthology of American Folk Music or Lenny Kaye's 1972 Nuggets double-album, a set of songs that would become, if only by default, the basic repertoire in its field. When YouTube was rising in the early 2000s and all sorts of long lost recordings were suddenly thrust upon the world, whenever you saw a clip of vintage Australian Aboriginal music, it was almost uniformly lifted from the Buried Country CD. Today, there is even a Buried Country channel on YouTube, and my only gripe is its lack of comprehensiveness. |
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I was always given to understand that a copy of the book was placed as a prop among a number of others in the art installation Mother Courage that Buried Country cinematographer Warwick Thornton exhibited all round the world in 2012/'13, and I couldn't have been more chuffed!
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Warwick Thornton with the Mother Courage van
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The Buried Country songbook, if I could call it that (and there may even yet be an actual publication along those lines too), has fed to varying degrees not only into Country Song but also other projects by Jon Langford, Tina C, Toby Martin, Luke Peacock and Darren Hanlon. The difference is, both Langford and Tina C, or her alter-ego Christopher Green, have been voluable in acknowledging how Buried Country was where it all started for them; and both Luke Peacock and Toby Martin have gone so far as to invite me to participate directly in their respective projects, Luke’s Painted Ladies tribute to Vic Simms and his 1973 album The Loner (about which you can see more here), and Toby’s Dougie Young tribute band the Rug Cutters with Dougie’s grandson Jimmy James (about which you can see more here). More recently, Darren Hanlon too was set off on a Buried Country-inspired quest, to find the ghost of Dougie Young, and if what he found, in Broken Hill, was Bill Riley, quite alive and well, he recorded some tracks with him. And even as I’ve remained at arm’s length from the two projects originating overseas - that of Jon Langford, who is US-based, and of Chris Green/Tina C, who hails from the UK - I’ve been delighted to give them all my good graces and assistance not only because they've always had the courtesy to give credit where it’s due, but because both have added such a unique dimension of their own that I could hardly deny them anyway!
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Tina C is a drag act I think we used to call them, a channelling of the classic be-behived Nashville diva, whose performances are sometimes as serious as they are frivolous, and she'd already toured Australia several times, to great response in the gay community, when in 2012 she came out with a show called Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word, which Christopher Green conceived after encountering Buried Country. Sorry... toured Australia to great success, bolstered by the involvement of James Henry (Jimmy Little's grandson) as Musical Director and featuring such guest stars as Auriel Andrew, Ali Mills and Casey Donovan. All that was missing was Constantina Bush, but then there's probably no stage in the world big enough for both of these Tinas! Jon Langford took a different tack again. As an artist as well as musician, the Welshman who still fronts legendary British punk band the Mekons if now from a Chicago base (as well as being a member of the Waco Brothers and Pine Valley Cosmonauts), Langford was inspired by Buried Country, initially, to paint portraits of some of its characters (which I can’t deny was in turn a direct inspiration to me to pick up my art tools again and illustrate the forthcoming Deadly Woman Blues), and from there, things snowballed, leading to Jon producing an album on Roger Knox for Bloodshot Records called Stranger in My Land, which drew on the material unearthed on the by-then-deleted Buried Country CD. Jon continues his involvement with Roger; to see more of his artwork go to the Yard Dog Gallery site here |
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