The Blues Brothers 1980 - George H W Bush - Rab C Nesbitt - Glen Campbell: The Rhinestone Cowboy TV - Glen Campbell: I’ll Be Me TV - Mandy TV - Red Elvis: The Cold War Cowboy TV - Rich Hall TV -
We got both kinds. We got Country and Western. The Blues Brothers 1980 starring John Belushi & Dan Aykroyd & Steve Cropper & Donald Duck Dunn & Murphy Dunne & Willie Hall & Matt Murphy & Carrie Fisher & Ray Charles & John Candy & Aretha Franklin & Twiggy & James Brown & Henry Gibson et al, director John Landis, lady behind bar of Bob’s Country Bunker
When I need a little advice about Saddam Hussein, I turn to country music. George H W Bush
Mad Cowboy Disease. Rab C Nesbitt: Duel, BBC 1998
Moonlight & Prozac … I Have Seen God And He Likes What I Do … Stand By Your Manslaughter: Country & Western, Scotland. Rab C Nesbitt: Community, BBC 1998
He recorded some of the 1960s greatest songs. Glen Campbell: The Rhinestone Cowboy, BBC 2013
1970s: stories of divorce, drink and drugs. ibid.
As a guitarist he was incomparable. ibid.
Glen was a regular in the US pop show Shindig. ibid.
In 1968 he outsold the Beatles in the USA. ibid.
Now he was America’s fastest rising star. ibid.
BBC 1975: The Glen Campbell Music Show. ibid.
‘He was a good old country boy.’ Glen Campbell: I’ll Be Me, Glen's father
Lola: What are you reading?
Mandy: The Guinness Book of Records. Mandy II: Mandy Bloody Blower, at the nailbar, BBC 2020
These people are gods: they’ve done something with their lives … I’m not a record breaker. But I am a line-dancer though. I’m going to win the local line-dancing endurance competition. Practicing? I’ve done twenty-two hours straight through. I’ve got a secret … [inaudible] … nappies … ibid.
Mandy: I heard you’d gone to the Peak District tot start a new life. I heard you’d got a hot-tub.
Susan Blower: I did. But it’s all gone to shit … It’s all gone. I want to make it up to you. ibid.
Lola: Step 1: Gaze into the eyes of the voodoo head; Step 2: Name you foe; Step 3: Tell the head what you want – and you must be specific.
Mandy: I want to be the last one standing at the local line-dancing endurance competition. ibid. Lola buys head over the internet
Announcer: The prize will go to the lady line-dancer standing. And remember, you must keep your thumbs in your belt-loops at all times. Otherwise you are DISQUALIFIED! OK, good luck everyone. Positions please. And here we go. ibid.
… [20 seconds into competition Mandy staggers] … Lola! Water! ibid.
Loo roll! Loo roll! ibid. Mandy & Susan remain
Announcer: Susan Blower wins the award. God rest her soul. ibid. Susan crushed by giant glitterball with voodoo-head mistakenly brought into competition hall and onlooking from table
Dean Reed lives in East Berlin because he likes it better over there. An entertainer who has become the Soviet version of a superstar: he sings, he acts, and he speaks with what seem to be genuine conviction the Soviet line. Red Elvis: The Cold War Cowboy ***** 60 Minutes, Sky Documentaries 2022
Six weeks after the 60 Minutes interview is broadcast he disappears. ibid. historian
From that point on there is no way back; he is an enemy of the government of the United States. ibid.
By the late 1960s Dean Read is a fully fledged political radical. ibid.
He is rebelling against the government [East German] he previously cooperated with. ibid.
This is the story about country music that constantly has to reinvent itself. Rich Hall’s Countrier that You, BBC 2017
It’s influenced by the Scots, the English, Irish, Scandinavians and the European immigrants who settled in the Appalachians parts of Virginia, Tennessee and Kentucky. ibid.
No-one called it Bluegrass; that term didn’t even come in till the 1950s. ibid.
Leave me or I’ll find someone who will – that’s the motto of country music. ibid.
After recording for Ralph Peer at the Bristol sessions in 1927, the Carter Family were an instant sensation. ibid.
Hiram King Williams [Hank] pushing the inherent limits of country music as far as they would go … a true singer-songwriter. ibid.
The man who called himself Chuck Berry junior who wasn’t Chuck Berry taught Waylon how to play lovesick blues. ibid.
The current creative deficit in Nashville is nothing new. ibid.
Roger Miller had been hanging round Nashville as a songwriter for years … sending up the banality of country music at the time. ibid.
The distinction of original bad boy of course belongs to Johnny Cash. ibid.