Soundtrack Saturday

As a child in the 1970s I was pretty much raised on TV Westerns. My Mum was/ is a huge fan and they were on television all the time. With fewer channels but also a smaller back catalogue of programmes, repeats of 60s films and TV shows was a way for air time to be filled cheaply. My childhood TV and film memories are a blur of cowboys, the prairies, Plains Indians, gun fights, saloons, wagon trains and the theme tunes connected to them. Rawhide was one of my Mum's favourites, a black and white show that ran from 1959 to 1965 and featured a young Clint Eastwood. The theme tune, sung by Frankie Laine, the life of the cowhand depicted with some realism, is a staple...

Rawhide

The Hollywood Westerns films had big themes. The Magnificent 7 seems to have been on a permanent loop of Saturday afternoon TV, the all star cast riding in to help out a village of Mexicans and save them from bandits. John Sturges' 1960 film, with Yul Brynner and Steve McQueen (who disliked each other apparently) plus Charles Bronson, James Coburg, Robert Vaughan and Horst Buchholtz, never fails to bring about a Proustian Rush, and Elmer Bernstein's theme tune is epic Western personified...

The two big Western TV shows were Bonanza and The High Chaparral, seemingly on loop on the BBC. Bonanza was my Mum's favourite, those Cartwright boys making a living out west for fourteen seasons and 431 episodes, from 1959 through to 1973. Adam was eldest Cartwright boy. Make of that what you will. At least I wasn't named Hoss. Or Little Joe. The theme tune is a twiddly joy. 

The High Chaparral was a rival studio's challenge to Bonanza's weekly TV 60s supremacy in the States, with Big John Cannon and his family trying to make a go at ranching in Arizona, in Apache territory. The Native Americans were not always portrayed as sympathetically as they should have been in either series but in The High Chaparral they sometimes got the upper hand and Big John's disagreements were sometimes with the army whose treatment of the Indians was much worse. Big John had more of a live and let live attitude. David Rose's The High Chaparral theme tune is cut from similar cloth as the Bonanza one (both were orchestrated by Rose)... 

We had one of those Great Western Themes albums that knocked around by our Dansette when we were children along with some Beatles singles, Baron Knights 7"s, a compilation of 60s hits played by top London studio session musicians (the first pop songs I can remember were on this- Windmills Of Your Mind, Get Back, Harlem Shuffle and The Boxer are the ones that stuck with me). Those Western Themes albums were massive charity shop fodder, along with Tijuana Brass, marching bands and Paul Young, but I don't own one now. Maybe I should hit the chazzers and find one. 

In 1977 Star Wars came along, the 1960s Star Trek were early evening TV gold and in 1978 a friend passed me a copy of Starlord, the British sci fi comic that later merged with 2000AD. Both had a kind of sci fi realism/ dystopia, horror and social comment mixed with science fiction and fantasy and from that point, science fiction began to replace the Western. 

Waiting At The End Of My Ride

Today is my grandmother's funeral. She died on 4th August at the age of 101. Her hundredth birthday party, held at the start of March 2020, was the last social gathering we all attended together before lockdown. She lived independently almost until the end (and she lived alone since the death of my Grandfather in 1997) and it was only in the last year of her life that she became unable to cope on her own and moved into a nursing home. Visiting her and only being able to see her through the window due to Covid restrictions was difficult, especially as she refused to wear the hearing aids she really needed to, which made communication harder. My Mum and any of my family who visited would write messages and news on a pad and hold it up to the window. She'd read and nod and smile. Her life was both remarkable and ordinary for her generation- Nony was born on 4th March 1920 in the direct aftermath of the First World War, she grew up in the 1920s and 1930s, served during the Second World War driving a jeep even though she'd never passed a test (and then never drove after the war, typically contrary). Her brother Michael was in the RAF and killed on a flight over Germany in 1943. She talked about him often. She married her husband, Neville Ollerenshaw and often told us that the first time she saw him he was playing snooker, 'bending over the billiards table' she would say. They travelled widely in Europe and were enthusiastic visitors to Europe, driving to France, Germany and Switzerland from the 1950s onwards at a time when, she always said, if you saw another car with British number plates you honked the horn and waved. Their house was decorated with mementoes of foreign holidays- posters from France, paintings of French castles, a Swiss cuckoo clock, little wooden figurines of people in traditional Alpine clothing. They both became teachers. She taught hundreds of children to read and although retired since 1983 was still volunteering in a local school to listen to children read until quite recently. She was a mother, a granny (to eight) and a great- granny (to thirteen, the most recent born last month). 

I started to think about her age and the world she was born into. She was born in the same year as Yul Bryner and Montgomery Clift, two years before Jack Kerouac, Judy Garland and Doris Day (all born in 1922), three years older than Hank Williams, five years older than Malcolm X, six years older than Marilyn Monroe- to pick a handful of famous/ significant people. She outlived them all. It seems strange that these people and all those born in the years after the First World War were her contemporaries- it seems so long ago, another world. When she was born manned flight was only a decade old. Before she was 50  the Apollo 11 astronauts landed on the moon. When I was born (1970) she was 50. When I turned 50, she was 100. She lived an incredibly long time, lived abstemiously, swam in the sea well into her nineties even/ especially when it was a bit too cold for most of us, refused to accept she was old and when she finally did accept it said that she 'never intended to live this long'. Towards the end, a couple of months ago, she'd definitely had enough and was ready to go. By any standards she lived a very long life and although obviously it's very sad she's gone this is genuinely one of those occasions where you do feel like you can celebrate a person and their life, a life well lived and a life less ordinary. We are having a family gathering today and then in September a memorial service in Suffolk where she'd lived since the 1980s. It will be the first time as a family we've all been together since Covid and since her hundredth birthday- we'll raise a glass or two and send her on her way. 

A song; I don't think she would have been a fan of much of the music I post here. Nony and Neville and my Mum were/ are all big fans of TV Westerns and cowboy films though so Frankie Laine singing the theme tune to Rawhide back in 1958 is as good a choice as any. 

Rawhide