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THE SECRET BROTHERHOOD OF FLATLANDERS - by Tom Colborn

 

 [A quick word about the auther of te piece below: Tom Colborn is a Blues Guitarist from London. I met him at the 2nd Paris-Texel trip to the Amistar Resofest in Prague. We both played in there in May 2011 - Bob]
[p][/p]I'm sure the landscape we grow up in has a profound effect on the music we make or gravitate towards.  I don't think it's a coincidence that I grew up next to the Fens (the flatlands of the East Midlands and East Anglia in the UK) and I was drawn to blues from the Mississippi Delta.  I remember looking at old photographs of the Delta and thinking 'that looks just like the Fen!'.  Surely it must be the same for you, in the flat country of the Netherlands.  The slide guitar is the wind, blowing across land low on the water table, drained by dykes and culverts.  Just like the reclaimed floodplains of the Yazoo Basin which form the Mississippi Delta.  I don't want to over-state this idea, obviously there are many other things which influence us, and influenced them, but it's food for thought...Who needs mountains when you can have such big skies?  You can convey the loneliness of an empty horizon very well with a bottleneck - it's what gave Ry Cooder's music such power in 'Paris Texas' - it's impossible to imagine any other sort of music doing the job as well.  But of the Fen and the Delta, there is more than just loneliness – there is menace, paranoia.  You can see for miles on the fen, but so, you can also be seen for miles.  Any figure, plodding across the rich black earth can look sinister in the distance.  Here, you’d see your killers coming from ten miles off – and be unable to hide from them.  The Anglo-Saxons, when they first arrived to this hostile swap and decided to make it their home, when they drained it, dug it, planted it, they entered into a bargain with the elements, a pact with the sea, forever conditional, insecure, a constant, silent negotiation with the water table which could falter at any moment without due attention.  I remember reading about the terrible battlefields of Flanders in the Great War.  The Battle of Passchendaele is a striking example of what becomes of such flatlands when the drainage systems are interrupted – in this case smashed to pieces by artillery.  The very earth becomes the enemy.
Think also of the churning riffs of the Delta Blues too, was this the movement, the dynamism that entered the region before during the inception of the music, when it was tamed for cultivation – for much the same reasons as the Fen? The railroad brought mechanization to this bleak landscape.  Bukka White was obsessed with the trains of his locality – some of his finest pieces are tributes to these iron monsters chugging through the cotton-fields.
The farm I spent my childhood years on was flanked by the embankment for the Great Eastern Line – the section of track which ran between our village and the next was famous for being the straightest bit of track in Britain, and was where the ‘Mallard’ won the world speed record for locomotives in 1938.  This was in Lincolnshire, incidentally, near an area called ‘New Holland’ because it was settled by large numbers of Dutch Horticulturists, and is home to fields of tulips and houses built with many Dutch architectural attributes.
So, what of the Netherlands, Bob, and its people?  Is there a secret brotherhood of European Flatlanders in East Anglia, Holland and Flanders who may have access to a part of Mississippi Blues which mountain-dwellers or city folk could not understand?  Hmmmm…
Tom Colborn 14th June 2011

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