Circus picture of the year award : Codie Prevost's All Kinds Of Crazy album cover!

When I first posted this picture I assumed it was faked. After all, would you look so calm in front of two rampant elephants? But it turns out Codie Prevost is a cooler customer than I thought. He emailed to say: "Crazy as it seems the Elephants are real. I am
living in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada and the Tarzan Zerbini Circus came through town. My graphic designer went down and we got permission to do the
whole photo shoot for the new album there. It was so amazing!! You cannot see in the photo but the Elephant Trainer is off to the left side. He actually told the
Elephants to rear up like that!!"

Must have been been a great day. And, listening to Codie's album All Kinds Of Crazy as I write, I'm happy to report it's a great slice of contemporary country. No circus songs, but some top notch balladry such as the mid-pace opener, I'll Be Your Whiskey. The album's out March 1. Click here to pre-order All Kinds Of Crazy from iTunes. 

Me and the Elephant
Circus Mania author Douglas McPherson (right)

Meanwhile, back in the circus, here's me with Sonya at the Great British Circus, where I watched one of the last ever appearances of ellies in a British big top. Read my backstage journey through the world of circus in Circus Mania - The Ultimate Book For Anyone Who Dreamed of Running Away with the Circus. 
Click here to read half a dozen customer reviews of Circus Mania on Amazon! 

Read Gretchen Peters'
Confessions of a Nashville
Circus Girl
(Click the link on the right)

For more country songs about the circus, click here!

Click here to read a review of The Hank Williams Reader

THE HANK WILLIAMS READER book review

From circus to country music... more than 60 years after Hank Williams passed away in the back of his chauffeured Cadillac in the small hours of New Year's Day, 1953, this new book, The Hank Williams Reader, celebrates the enduring legend of the Father of Country Music.

The book contains more than 60 articles, essays and book extracts written during Hank's lifetime and in the decades since, which have seen him become recognised as one of the most important figures in American music history.

Contributors include Bob Dylan, Steve Earle and... Circus Mania author Douglas McPherson, who contributed the article Sex, Drugs and Country Music - A Profile of Hank Williams, America's Darkest Legend.

But although I'm in it, and might therefore be considered somewhat biased, I have to say that this is an incredibly good portrait of Hank's life and legacy.

They say journalism is the first draft of history, but wait long enough and the contemporaneous accounts of journalists, unfiltered by the benefit of hindsight, become a walk through history itself, and that is what has happened to the many articles gathered in this volume.

The editors have done a tremendous job in bringing us the earliest newspaper features that were written about the singer in his lifetime. From there, the articles move forward through time to show us the reports of his death and funeral - which drew 20,000 people from all walks of society. It was the biggest funeral the southern states had ever seen.

Readers letters to newspapers reveal the depth of the loss felt by his fans. But as we move onwards through the posthumous writing about his life we see the many ways in which people have tried to interpret or shape his story, from tabloid writers who sought to sensationalise it, to family members who tried to sanitise it and diligent music historians who strove to uncover the truth decades later.

The book ends with an extract from Steve Earle's novel, I'll Never Get Out Of This World Alive, in which the drug-addled anti-hero is haunted by Hank Williams' ghost.

From living picker and singer to fictional character, the Hank Williams Reader takes us on a rollercoaster journey through the making of an American legend. It's a remarkable book, and having read it, I feel honoured that my essay, written 20 years ago at the very beginning of my career, was considered worthy of inclusion in what I have no doubt will endure as one of the most important works on one of music's most important figures.

Published by Oxford University Press, the Hank Williams Reader can be ordered from Amazon by clicking here.

Update: Nice to have a quote from my article singled out in a review of the Hank Williams Reader in no less a publication than the Wall Street Journal:

"British entertainment writer Douglas McPherson fantasized in 1978 that "perhaps his ghost is there in the smoke and whisky fumes as some unknown singer shoots up, drinks up, and carrying his guitar in trembling hands, walks into the blinding spotlight. . . . Perhaps he is . . . trading guitar licks or one last beer with Gene Vincent, Sid Vicious and Elvis Presley. "

Click here to read the review.

Click here for some country songs about the circus.

Circus Comes To Town

Sara Petite is the latest country singer to turn to the circus for inspiration, with new album Circus Comes To Town. The glossy gatefold sleeve opens to reveal pictures of Petite in clown make-up; spread-eagled on a knife-thrower’s target; and, in a bizarre piece of S&M imagery, cowering bare-backed with a bear headdress in the shadow of a man with a whip.

Sadly, the title song isn’t as colourful as the packaging. Kinky Friedman's Wild Man of Borneo and Gretchen Peters' Circus Girl are much more evocative of big top atmosphere.

Sara Petite
- Clowning makes her
brown eyes blue

But, disappointing though the title song may be, this is still a darn fine album of traditionally-slanted country delivered in an upbeat and modern way by a singer with a seriously backwoods twang and a feisty two-fisted attitude.

Kinky, freaky, wild and dangerous

Kinky Friedman has been singing the same dozen songs since the early 70s. Perhaps it’s because the sometime detective novelist and politician has known all along what the rest of the world may eventually realise: that they’re some of the finest songs ever written. A leaning towards the satirical and downright outrageous has stopped the Kinkster getting the recognition of more ‘serious’ songwriters like Kris Kristofferson, Guy Clark and Tom T Hall. His appearance on famed TV show Austin City Limits was the only edition deemed too incendiary for broadcast at the time. It languished in the vaults for thirty-odd years, but its eventual release on DVD a couple of years back proved second only to Jerry Lee Lewis’ tornado-like appearance as the tautest, most compelling performance ever filmed by that programme.

What’s all this got to do with Circus Mania? Well, aside from the funny songs like the feminist-baiting Get Your Biscuits In The Oven And Your Buns In The Bed, Kinky has written some moving and sharply observed songs about the tawdry side of showbusiness, including the tales of down and out country singers Sold American and Nashville Casualty and Life.

One of his best compositions, meanwhile, is a dark, poetic reflection on life in the big top, Wild Man From Borneo. The loneliness of the circus freak is sublimely evoked, along with the blindness of a credulous audience: “We come to see what we want to see, but we never come to know.”

The fakery behind the glitter and the disillusion of the performers is exposed in lines like, “The tattooed lady left the circus train, and lost all of her pictures in the rain.” But so, too, is the air of danger and fascination that is part of circus’ siren call. “Don’t you get too close to me, don’t you get too near,” warns our “hairy, scary, legendary, living souvenir” of a narrator.

This is circus that bites. But then, Kinky is a singer and writer who bites, too. He sounds as good as he ever has on this mature and assured vocal and guitar live performance (Kinky Friedman’s Bi-Polar Tour - Live From Woodstock) that puts the spotlight on some of the best lyrics ever penned.

author Douglas McPherson with
Circus of Horrors founder
Dr Haze (right) and showman
Gerry Cottle (L) at the
launch party for
Circus Mania

But what of the real Wild Men from Borneo? The celebrated dwarf, Tom Thumb? The stuffed mermaids and white elephants presented by PT Barnum? The circus freaks enmeshed in legal battles to defend their right to work from disability rights campaigners who want to end their exploitation? And the modern day freak show that is Britain’s Circus of Horrors?

Delve into the world of circus freaks in Circus Mania - if you dare; one eminent critic confessed there were lines he was too squeamish to read.



Buy Circus Mania direct from Peter Owen Publishers by sending a cheque for £10 (including postage in UK; add £2.75 for overseas orders) to:

Peter Owen Publishers
81 Ridge Road
London N8 9NP

And, in the words of Kinky Friedman, may the best of your past be the worst of your future.

Read also: Confessions of a Nashville Circus Girl, my interview with Gretchen Peters about her song Circus Girl.

Gretchen Peters' Confessions of a Nashville Circus Girl

 
There’s more to life than circuses... or so I distantly recall. When you spend a year writing a book about circus it tends to become a case of clowns to the right of me, elephants to the left, here I am stuck in the middle with Gerry Cottle.

When I’m not writing about circus, however, I write about music. Sometimes I even combine the two, as I did when I got to interview the massively successful American songwriter Gretchen Peters about her new Best Of, which she titled after her favourite song... Circus Girl.

Here’s an extract of my feature in Country Music People, in which Gretchen explains her affinity with the girl who walks the wire in the centre ring.

She even put a drawing of a big top and a Victorian trapeze flyer on the cover.


GRETCHEN PETERS - Girl On A Wire

by Douglas McPherson

I’ve witnessed some emotionally charged musical moments in my time...

But the only piece of music to give me the full lump in the throat, grit in my eyes, pass me the Kleenex, excuse-me-while-I-just-hyperventilate-a-bit effect, is one I heard a couple of weeks ago. You might not recognise the 100-year-old melody by its title, Entrance of the Gladiators, and you’ve almost certainly never heard of its composer, the unfortunately surnamed Julius Fucik. But if I said “circus music” to you, I guarantee you or anyone else on the planet would be able to dum-dum-dummy-dummy-dum-dum-da-da it to me.

My visit to the Great British Circus
- Britain's last circus with elephants -
where I first heard the famous circus theme music
Entrance of the Gladiators
at ringside with the smell of horses and camels
in my nose

Next to Happy Birthday To You, it must be one of the most widely known pieces of music ever written. It should sound incredibly naff.

Quite why it hit me so hard and unexpectedly was probably because I was sitting in a big, cold tent, with trampled mud and grass beneath my feet, a circle of golden sawdust in front of me, and a whiff of camel wee in the air.

The circus can have that effect on you, as Gretchen Peters found when she took her young daughter to a big top for the first time.

“My daughter was maybe seven or eight and I realised she was getting to that age where she was sort of becoming jaded about things. The circus came to town and I wanted her to see it while she was still young enough to get the magic of it, before she grew up enough to see through it.

“She loved it. But what I really wasn’t prepared for was how wonderful and evocative it was for me. I was really, really inspired by it. The tawdriness as well as the magic. The juxtaposition of both of those things. I went home that night and wrote Circus Girl.”

‘I work the high wire in the centre ring,
Defying gravity, that’s my thing...’

"Defying gravity in the centre ring."
The death of real life
circus girl Eva Garcia during her
high altitude performance at
the Great Yarmouth Hippodrome
inspired my book
Circus Mania

When she came to compile her new Best Of, Gretchen had no hesitation in calling the album Circus Girl.

“There are very few songs that you can play for 15 years that you don’t get tired of at some point. Even the ones that sometimes people really like, you need to give them a rest. But that is one of the very few songs that I have never got tired of playing.

“I’ve always thought it was my most autobiographical song. The character is so very close to home. As a metaphor for the music business... I just thought that metaphor was irresistible.”

‘Believe me darlin’ it’s a lonely world,
It ain’t easy for a circus girl.’

Gretchen is best known for writing Independence Day, a 90s hit which remains the career song of country superstar Martina McBride. But Gretchen is a good singer in her own right, and her Best Of is recommended to all fans of thoughtful singer-songwriters.

I certainly think she’s nailed the life of a girl in the big top. Here’s how Circus Girl ends:

‘So I climb that ladder right on up to the sky,
I don’t look down and I don’t ask why,
And just for a moment I’m on top of the world,
Just for a moment... I’m a circus girl.’

Circus Mania
"Brilliant"
- Mail on Sunday

To read about real life circus girls, and boys, and clowns and freaks and animals, read Circus Mania - The Ultimate Book For Anyone Who Dreamed of Running Away With the Circus. Just £10 including postage in the UK (add £2.75 overseas) from:
Peter Owen Publishers
81 Ridge Road
London N8 9NP

Click here to buy Circus Mania from Amazon.