How Belfast Got the Blues

Joanna Braniff, Noel McLaughlin

Description

This is not just an important music book; it is an important history book. It captures the moment before Belfast and Northern Ireland became synonymous with the Troubles. It places one of the best-known figures in global popular music, Van Morrison, in his historical and sociocultural context. It also reinstates Ottilie Patterson into her rightful role as a central figure in Ireland’s music. It addresses a significant gap in Ireland’s popular music studies by appraising the contribution of a politically and musically significant female figure.

It makes a major original contribution to the understanding of popular music culture in Northern Ireland, and to the broader popular music culture in Britain in the 1960s. It will remain for many years the definitive study of the subject and a point of reference for further research and controversy.

In light of the re-emergence of Northern Ireland in contemporary British political debate, this book presents a nicely timed intervention, placing Northern Ireland at the forefront of a key moment in British and Irish cultural history, and presenting highly innovative readings of key popular cultural figures. Integrating its account of the popular music culture and local ‘scene’ in Northern Ireland with the broader and highly complex context of the sociopolitical milieu, it offers original and insightful readings of key 1960s figures, including film director Peter Whitehead, The Rolling Stones, Them, Ottilie Patterson and Van Morrison. It includes much new material, obtained in interviews and through meticulous archival research, to challenge the mainstream narrative of the mid-1960s music scene in Belfast.

It is extremely well researched, making use of newspaper and film archives and existing publications, but also an impressive set of personal interviews with veteran musicians and others from that time. The authors challenge much of the received wisdom about the period – for instance, about the decline of the showband – and present their arguments carefully and thoughtfully. While meticulously researched and thoroughly analytic, the writing is uniquely accessible and engaging.

The chapter on the neglected Belfast blue singer Ottilie Patterson represents a paradigm shift in Irish popular music studies, and sets her story and considerable achievements centre stage. This alone makes the book very noteworthy. The chapters on Van Morrison and his band Them place his early career in the context of the local and global music industry. The story of The Rolling Stones film, made by Peter Whitehead, is discussed in the context of the international fervour of the times. The knitting of the music scene with the distinctive social, cultural, political and religious factors is deftly done.

Primary readership will be academic – scholars, researchers and students across a range of areas. Fields of interest include popular music studies, Irish studies, political history, cultural studies, film studies, jazz/blues history, women’s studies, civil rights.

It will also appeal more broadly to fans, writers, journalists and musicians interested in Belfast, Northern Ireland, the Blues, rock and roll, jazz and the 1960s, as well as to fans of the individual musicians.

Introduction: Belfast at a crossroads

Chapter 1: 1964

Chapter 2: The political power of a film that might have been

Chapter 3: ‘We gotta get into this place’

Chapter 4: ‘Them are coming!’

Chapter 5: A story of Them

Chapter 6: Irish lady sings the blues

Chapter 7: 1966 – The summer of love?

Chapter 8: Crossroads – Times have surely changed

Sujets

• Musique
• Histoire de la musique
• Irlande du Nord
• The Rolling Stones
• Mick Jagger
• Music
• Van Morrison
• New Musical Express
• History
• Cultural Studies
• Stephen Ireland
• Northern Ireland
• The Troubles
• Ireland
• NME
• Criticism
• Celtic studies
• Multiple signal classification
• Peter Whitehead
• Charlie Is My Darling
• Popular music
• Irlanda del Norte
• Conflicto de Irlanda del Norte
• Performing Arts

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books Ltd
• Date de parution: 08 octobre 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781789382754
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

How Belfast Got the Blues

How Belfast Got the Blues
A Cultural History of Popular Music in the 1960s
Noel McLaughlin and Joanna Braniff
First published in the UK in 2020 by 
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK


First published in the USA in 2020 by 
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
 Chicago, IL 60637, USA


Copyright © 2020 Intellect Ltd


All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, 
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by 
any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or 
otherwise, without written permission.


A catalogue record for this book is available from 
the British Library.


Cover designer: Aleksandra Szumlas

Cover image credit: City Week , 9 September 1965.

Copy editor: Newgen Knowledge Works

Production editor: Faith Newcombe

Typesetting: Newgen Knowledge Works


Print ISBN 9781789382747

ePDF ISBN 9781789382761

ePub ISBN 9781789382754


Printed and bound by TJ International, UK.


To find out about all our publications, please visit 
 www.intellectbooks.com 

There you can subscribe to our e-newsletter,
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 and buy any titles that are in print.


This is a peer-reviewed publication. 

This book is dedicated to Dave Laing.
And to our parents, who were there.
www.howbelfastgottheblues.com
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Belfast at a Crossroads
1. 1964
2. The Political Power of a Film That Might Have Been
3. ‘We Gotta Get into This Place’
4. ‘Them Are Coming!’
5. ‘A’ Story of Them
6. Irish Lady Sings the Blues
7. 1966: The Summer of Love?
8. Crossroads: Times Have Surely Changed
References
Index
Acknowledgements
A great many people have assisted with this book. We would like to begin by extending our heartfelt thanks to the many interviewees who so generously gave their time and memory, often in interviews that lasted for several hours: John Braniff, Terry Cooper, Ronnie Greer, Billy Harrison, Rosemary Lane, Peter Lloyd, Walter Love, Eamonn McCann, Colin McClelland, Gil McWilliams, Jimmy Page, Oscar Ross, Donald Stewart, Noel Stevenson, Peter Whitehead and the ‘political adviser’ at Stormont.
Thanks also to the staff at the Newspaper Library in Belfast, the Public Records Office of Northern Ireland, the National Jazz Archive in Loughton Essex and the British Library in London. To Intellect Books, and particularly to Faith Newcombe and Tim Mitchell, who have been tireless in their attention to detail and in assisting the book in every way. We would also like to thank the five peer-reviewers for their careful reading, helpful suggestions and critical comments.
We would also like to offer our sincere thanks to John Adams, Sean Campbell, Elayne Chaplin, Lawrence Davies, Kevin Donnelly, Lisa Flavelle, Anne Hailes, Russ Hunter, Peter Hutchings, Peter ‘Magic’ Johnson, James Leggott, Edna Longley, Áine Mangaoang, Rob Morrice, Marc Mulholland, Michael Murphy, Lonán Ó’Briain, John O’Flynn, Jamie Sexton, John Sheehan and Gerry Smyth who, in different ways, have helped make what started out as an ambitious project a reality.
A special note of thanks goes out to John Hill and Martin McLoone, both for their pioneering work on Irish film, media and popular culture and for being a continuing source of inspiration and encouragement over the past three decades. We hope that this book honours the spirit and excitement of their writing. Thank you also for your insightful comments on the pre-publication manuscript. Special thanks too to Sarah Gilligan. In addition to her intellectual generosity, Sarah had the critical foresight to introduce us to Intellect. It proved to be a prescient stroke of publisher-writer ‘match-making’ as Intellect has proven to be a more than suitable home for the project. 
However, a very particular expression of gratitude must be extended to the late, great Dave Laing, who, similarly, has been a consistent source of inspiration and encouragement. As a pivotal figure in the formation of popular music studies, Dave distrusted what might be termed the ‘sweeping universal account’ and was dogged in the belief that a place-based study of a single city across a heavily mythologized decade was a valuable lens for illuminating aspects of the broader story of the cultural politics of popular music in the 1960s. As such, he played a key role in encouraging and nurturing this book. He provided us with the first platform for some of the ideas in the pages that follow in the journal he edited, Popular Music History . This book is dedicated to his memory.
Noel would like to thank the Free Trade Inn in Newcastle for informally adopting a writer in residence and providing an environment conducive for developing ideas (and offering an alienated author a ‘third space’ away from the private sphere of the home and the professional domain of the office). Thanks must go to the many people there who engaged with discussions of popular music, city identities and the politics of the 1960s, particularly Alan Dunlop and Bill Speed. To Ysanne Holt and Matthew Potter for invaluable practical and intellectual support. Noel would also like to thank the dear, but sadly departed, figures of Gregory Gray and Roger Pomphrey for years of discussions about popular music and for being a consistent source of inspiration. In the same vein, thank you Rob Alder, Mike Bandoni, Rob Braniff, Mick Clarke, Lindsay Hannon, Ferank Manseed and Don Ramage for your thoughts over the years on how music works, in a technical, experiential, emotional and political way. Last, but by no means least, Noel offers a very particular and huge expression of gratitude to his partner, Paula Breen, for her continuous support, patience and encouragement and for helping overcome the moments when the optimism of the will is overtaken by the pessimism of the intellect. Joanna would also like to thank her husband, Andrew, for his continued help and encouragement throughout the planning and writing of this book.
Introduction
Belfast at a Crossroads

Memphis Slim has been in Belfast; Jesse Fuller; Champion Jack Dupree; John Lee Hooker’s been there. They’ve got folk clubs and rock clubs there, but it’s got nothing to do with the English scene. In fact […] it doesn’t have much to do with the Irish scene either, it’s just Belfast. It’s got its own identity, it’s got its own people […] it’s just a different race, a different breed of people.
Van Morrison 1
It is difficult to think of Belfast as a city of singing and music. It is a bleak, grimy city, windswept and cheerless in the winters and wet and cloudhung in the summers. It is the capitol [ sic ] of the six northern counties that make up Ulster, the part of Ireland still held by Great Britain, and it has much of the dreary heaviness of the English midlands. The surrounding countryside is a beautiful landscape of small farms and rolling hills, with the coast and the mountains not far away, but Belfast seems apart from the beauty around it to huddle against its riverside tangle of shipyard building cranes. Its buildings are smoke stained granite, its city center without color or excitement.
Sam Charters 2 

These contrasting quotes establish two very different images of Northern Ireland’s (NI) capital. In the first, Belfast’s particularity is emphasized, with the city a buoyant and cosmopolitan hive of diverse musical activity, its separateness from England and Ireland foregrounded. The second citation, from legendary blues historian Sam Charters, envisages Belfast as akin to any other ‘dreary’, ‘provincial’ city in the United Kingdom, an ‘anywhere’ devoid of distinction. It is not so much that the truth ‘lies somewhere in between’ than the fact Belfast is, and has always been, the subject of different projections. In this sense, the city is a construct: imagined – and continually reimagined – to respond to, and represent, different agendas.
While it is doubtful, even politically suspect, that the citizens of Belfast constitute a separate ‘race’, one can with a little knowledge of local history (and some intellectual generosity) understand what Van Morrison is alluding to with regards to the city of his birth. ‘Race’ is of course a contested term, but designations in, and about, ‘Northern Ireland’– its political status, history and identity – are similarly contentious. ‘Ulster’, ‘the North of Ireland’, the ‘occupied six counties’ – and indeed ‘Northern Ireland’ – have never satisfied all of its inhabitants, all of the time. Yet, the city’s most famous and lauded musical son has a kind of a point, despite the clumsiness of the rhetoric. Belfast is not only different, politically, socially and culturally from the rest of the United Kingdom, but it also possesses distinctive features which similarly mark its separateness from the rest of Ireland, North or South.
It is important to point out from the outset that this distinctiveness is in no way mystical, or ‘essential’, nor indeed racial, but material and historical. The city stands apart from its surrounding ‘regional’ hinterlands, with Greater Belfast the largest urban conglomerate in the ‘province’ by a considerable distance, and after Dublin, the second largest on the island. Its historical association with shipbuilding, heavy industry and manufacturing has given the city a modern and industrial character which is at odds with the general image of the rest of Ireland. The hard, distinctive cadence of its working-class accent also renders Belfast as somewhat different from its Northern environs; a ‘staple argot’ so odd in timbre and metre that it prompted Philip Larkin to describe the proletarian Belfast idiolect as ‘a Glaswegian, after a short stay in the USA, whining for mercy’. 3 As Gerald Dawe has put it, in attempting to capture this geographical and cultural ‘apartness’: ‘[u]‌nlike most Irish cities, which give their name t