The road to revolutions
PEOPLE facing a twicedaily commute may find it hard to agree but there’s something very special about journeys. The first European pilgrims to land on North America’s shores compared themselves to the ancient Israelites, who had their own journey to make out of Egypt.
Generations on, the people in the wagon trains that settled America’s Western wilderness also sang hymns about Jordan’s shore and the Promised Land.
America’s much-loved road movies, from Thelma And Louise to Easy Rider celebrate this nearreligious obsession with the journey and so, as ARENA: AMERICAN EPIC (Sunday, BBC4) proved, does the music. Even the story of America’s music seems to have had travelling at its heart. In the 1920s, the USA’s fledgling record companies experienced their first downturn, as prosperous consumers began to buy radios.
Canny money men decided to target the poor and the minorities and producer Ralph Peer was sent to remote rural communities and the back alleys of the port cities in search of songs to record. Peer was described as a man who could catch lightning in a bottle and his early wanderings, complete with recording studio, forged the DNA of the music we listen to today.
Hearing he’d set up a temporary office in the town of Bristol, Tennessee, singers poured out of the Appalachian mountains, some on foot, some, like the soon-to-be legendary Carter Family, in a battered Model T Ford.
With one of their party about to give birth and all of them clad in rags, the Carters made their own epic trek to get their sound sealed in wax. Meanwhile, in the hard-up streets of Memphis, Peer captured a different tradition.
The songs of the makeshift jug bands (sometimes using bottles in place of woodwind or brass) talked about knife fights, treacherous lovers, drug habits and the dark side. Peer’s recordings of jug band legends like Will Shade made the sound so popular that the Mayor of Memphis commissioned one for his re-election campaign, and won.
In this sweeping, electrifying, Old Testament-style account of America’s musical journey, it was fitting that the first chapter ended in Memphis, with a young man called Elvis Presley, whose sound merged the two kinds of lightning Peer had captured in his bottles. The rock of the mountains and the roll of the streets.
In contrast to some nostalgic TV shows, INSPECTOR GEORGE GENTLY (Sunday, BBC1) never quite stands still. As we caught up with the gravel-voiced veteran copper, Gently (Martin Shaw) was being urged to retire. He had a bright young (female) officer making great strides on his team and the desk sergeant was beginning to hint that making cups of tea was no longer part of his job description. Some things, of course, do not change, and in this story, as in every other, Gently’s protégé Bacchus (Lee Ingleby) was doing the sour-sexist-grieving-alcoholic-mess-on-the-edge routine.
Bitter words were said as Gently’s case revealed shoddy police work by Bacchus. The colleagues parted, Gently to an uncertain retirement, Bacchus to the bottle.
The question is not whether Bacchus will, in a future mystery, need Gently’s help and go cap in hand to his old boss while he’s mowing the lawn, it’s why Gently had any faith in him. Were all the other coppers worse?