Keep it country
Do you remember Cumbrae island’s fabulous 50s Ritz Cafe we reported on a while back? I’ve just been again, but this time it looked a little different.
This was Cumbrae’s annual Country & Western Festival, where the island’s tiny town of Millport is taken over by sharp shooters, stetsoned son-of-a-guns, hay seeds, high-rollers and, most of all, line dancers. The town’s pubs and shops all get a makeover for the weekend. Below is the newsagents.
And this is the Kelburne bar, renamed for the weekend. In the back room two men looking not unlike the Chuckle Brothers sang Country songs over a bontempti beat while women danced wildly. People were dressed right up too. Here a gang of men in black watch the parade.
Best of all was the beautiful town hall, reinvented as the Lynchian-sounding Cactus Jack’s for the duration. Here, from (high) noon until midnight every day, ladies line danced non-stop.
There was a class at the start which I attended, pigtails flying out around me as I span the wrong way again and again. Women sat in groups at tables round the edge leaving their husbands behind to dance when a song came on that they recognised. This whole room was packed. There was joking about the blank expressions on their faces, but it seemed to me a sort of zen serenity. Line dancing isn’t something you perform. It’s about keeping going, joining in, doing it. It’s joyful, even if it doesn’t look it, and I’m delighted to have found a way to dance until I’m 80.
I’ll be back next year. It really was a helluva weekend. And on my way out of Cactus Jack’s I saw this little house opposite. A line dancer’s retreat within hobbling distance of the dance floor. I want it.
“Latest lynchings”??? REALLY???
Valid point. The mix of authentic, or attempted, and wildly inauthentic was everywhere. I believe there is a very strange flag lowering ceremony at the end which I didn’t go to as apparently there is no smiling allowed.
Surely the combination of the confederate flag and the latest lynchings is all *too* authentic – both of them are still strongly associated with white supremacy. The American South has a long and shameful history of racism: I find it, honestly, pretty shocking to see it evoked here as a cutesy piece of nostalgia.
Thank you Marika. I absolutely agree and am somewhat ashamed of myself for not making the obvious connection. The cultural appropriation of Americana by white working class Brits is interesting to me, and though I think there is a blindness to the underlying history that is essentially innocent, rather than racist in a deliberate sense, it does make me uncomfortable. I am from the far end of Cornwall where one similarly isolated community has an annual celebration that has far more explicitly racist origins and I find it pretty shocking that even today this continues, with the arguement that it’s a bit of local fun, or that time has removed the offensiveness seeming to me not to outweigh the very obvious offence. Being away from my own little bit of the country I was perhaps less sensitive to this. Thanks for commenting. It’s given me plenty to think about. x
I don’t think that you have anything to be ashamed of; you’re reporting, not designing, if you know what I mean.
As an American child of a British parent, living in the UK, however, some days it is very uncomfortable to see the very worst of American culture exported and sometimes embraced. I mean, GWB was bad enough, now we’ve (or rather, they’ve) inflicted the Kardashians on the rest of the world.
I realize that Americans do the same cultural hijacking with your history and tv programs and so on, and that annoys me just as much. It is just disturbing that the messages conveyed by Confederate flags and references to lynchings aren’t commonly understood and avoided.