Elusive Fox

2008-4-15

I heard tell of a Czech version of “fox on the run” (US pop-country song, now a bluegrass standard) by a gent named Vacláv Neckař – all this from a friend who just got together a piece on him that she is airing on Radio Praha. She was giving an idea of some of his songs–having heard them too much editing the sound files–and sang one that was unmistakeably “like a fox.” (This is Rosie, who interviewed me a while back for Radio Praha, and after I loaned her “Limonadovy Joe” went to interview the actress that played the luscivious Tornado Lou, Květa Fialová – see that page HERE )
Back to Neckař; he was the antiheroic “star” of Jiri Menzel’s “Closely Watched Trains” (1968 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, from the eponymous novel by Bohumil Hrabal) and the (front) man of pop (power) trio “Golden Kids.” (it’s not kids as in boys and girls, but as in juvenile goats. Thanks, Czechs! ) Interestingly enough, Vacláv was recently accused of reporting on colleagues to the StB ( the former state security apparatus: http://www.radio.cz/en/news/92777 – the ghosts of communism still haunt…)

For the media-minded of you, here’s a GK hit:

…and a gratuitous though contemporaneous Mannfred Mannnn version of “fox” that is nice (and perhaps sparked a Czech version?):

Sorry for all the tangents – it’s all just to good….

My main point: Anyone know more details on a Neckar (czech-texted) version? (instead of “like a fox,” is the refrain “kolem nas”…? or “jako slon” …? )

I’ll be tuning in to Rosie’s feature once it’s up online, and you can too – after Sunday, head to www.radio.cz and then click through to music features, down the menu on the left side of the page.

Rickyho na ČT 2

A friend emailed me this link to “Na Plovarne s Ricky Skaggsem – An interview with Ricky Skaggs by Marek Eben.”

They must have recorded the segment when Ricky was in town this summer for his show at “Music in the Park”. (see Marek Eben is a musical personality who has been working as a TV “redaktor” / interlocutor for a while. Before coming across him here, I last saw him as one of the hosts of “Stardance,” an instance of the “reality show” where Czech stars are paired with pro dancers and pushed out on the parquet for our amusement.

Here’s his introduction to the interview:

Dobrý Večer.
Když jsme ještě jezdili na Portu, tak se v Portovným žargonu děleli muzikantí na kotlikářem. To by trampy. Pak na hledače nebo pro roky to byli folkáří. A pak na pytlikačí a to byli bluegrassové muzikantí.

Ovšem jsou pydlikáčí a pydlikači. A když za pydlikání dostanete hned dvanáctkrat Americkou Grammy, už to musíme brát vážně. Máme dnes to velké potěšení přivitát na Plovárně absolutné špičku Amerického bluegrassu. Multiinstrumentalistu, spěváka, skladatele, Rickyho Skaggse.

Here’s some English:

When we used to go to Porta, in Porta jargon musicians “děleli na kotlikářem,” [referring--I think-- to the kotlik or pot that tramps used on their rambles.] Those were tramps. Then… This just gets tangled – he is using a lot of funny words…any of the Czechs in the audience care to adda comment below, to explain all this?

I can add a bit of context. Porta is a distinguished festival founded in Ústí nad Labem in 1967; it’s still going strong. The festival’s name comes from the Latin phrase describing its hometown as the “Porta Bohemica,” or “gate to Bohemia.” The event’s original subtitle was “Celostátní festival country western music“…that is, Country-wide festival of…well, country western music. So you see why I’m interested. Eben’s list of folks involved at Porta ends with bluegrassers, the “pytlikače.” Another bit of “jargon” from that Porta scene – something to do with little bags…? Google helps me none here, but I get the sense that this is something like “picker,” an emic term for someone who “picks” a banjo or guitar or mandolin. Inflection can give the word extra emphasis; as Eben says, and Americans too, there a pickers, and there are pickers. When, for their picking, someone wins 12 Grammy awards…you take them seriously. Then he goes on to introduce Ricky and the interview progresses.

I haven’t seen the whole thing yet, but I did notice Eben making what seemed to me a forced smile and some over-nodding as Ricky talks in the first few minutes about music coming from God. Maybe I’m forcing this cynicism on Marek, but at the very least…I can’t imagine he would use similar American-evangelical-style “blessing-from-God” speech to describe his own music-making. Jirka, the colleague who sent me the link to this internet version of the show, stressed that it was about bluegrass and God. I’m curious how he and other Czechs deal with such strenuous testimonies to the sacred aspects of bluegrass musicking?

There’s much more to be done here – now I just have to find a copy of this interview that is not translated over with Czech dubbing…

Tucny: country vs. bluegrass

(July 26, 2007) We had fun tonight – more visitors, and the chance to make and enjoy some tasty chili. Zdenek and Zdenka Roh are in town with baby Frankie in tow, all to see Ricky Skagg’s show at this weekend’s festival. After dinner we took a look at a Michal Tucny DVD that Zdenek wanted me to see – he bolted from the table right after we all finished to show me some of these video-clip versions of Tucny’s greatest hits.

Tucny, whose name literally and simply means “fat,” is an only somewhat portly fellow who was a star on the Czech scene for a while. (see the czech wikipedia article) apparently only sang American country (and therefore bluegrass to some extent–the two have long been confused/synonymous/mixed in Czech usage…more on this below) in the 1960s until Zelenaci asked him to join up in the 1970s (after Soviet-influenced “normalization”policies had limited use of English) and sing with them.

All the clips we saw seemed to feature some visual aspect of Western-ish Amerika – cowboy hats, leather fringe, feather headdresses. Emily took note, and started doing my work for me: she asked Zdenek how Czechs came to like and play bluegrass when what they heard earlier in the early 20th century western films would have been cowboy music in the vein of Gene Autry and Roy Rodgers…and how does this western style fit with bluegrass anyhow?

Zdenek explained that Czechs saw the movies, yes – but they HEARD the music carried by Armed Forces Network radio broadcasts from Munich, and it all mixed together, images and sounds. (this sort of mixing of Cowboy and Hillbilly is addressed in Peterson’s Creating Country Music, if anyone is interested) They liked the songs, and didn’t know to distinguish them based on genre – they were all just known as “country.” The Tucny DVD shows western wear as an important style featured continuously from the 60s to the 90s…..the hats, boots, and themes, imaginative tropes, vocabulary, images.

Czechs seem to have a different genre distinction framework…or way of dealing with genre. Parallel US reception/production of bluegrass dealth with “the western,” but wasn’t as suffused with it–and has come to mark “country” and “bluegrass” as related but very different. I guess this has to make sense; Czechs at mid-20th-century were engaged in a very different cultural political stage, one in which rock and roll was taking over through the 1950s, yes, but there were so many other things going on as well – Stalinist purges seem a bit different in scale than the Red Scares of McCarthyism–though they seem related.

I’m not sure exactly how the “acoustic instrument” and related traditionalist/purist rhetorics operated in the early years of Czech Americanism. They seem to have been there in Monroe’s work and life and in other situations (early festivals, connections to Appalachia and upland southern purity–see Rosenberg’s writing on the premature memorialization of Bill Monroe…by Bill Monroe.)

It seems clear that Czechs were operating in a situation where (American) identity-laden genre distinctions (as in “race records” and high/low bracketing) were less important than the performative value of the music – that it was American, and that it fit existing performative models, musical aptitudes, etc. But this is not the sort of thing that Zdenek was talking about. Seems like he was getting at something simpler: the music simply WORKED.