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| Via The Tamworth Rage Page |
Bal Kishore Das Loiwal was born in Dehradun, India in 1961. His aunt liven in Nashville, and would send him the latest Country records as they came out, so he grew up listening to the Country classics. There were no music teachers who knew guitar, and so he taught himself.
The 1990s saw him performing in New Delhi at the Rodeo nightclub. A chance encounter with an Australian film producer led to an invitation to perform at Australia's Tamworth Country Music Festival in 2003. He became a media celebrity there - a documentary "The Indian Cowboy ... One In A Billion" recorded his appearance and story and aired on the Discovery Channel in Australia. A rich Aussie bankrolled his first album, which got him nominated for the 2005 CMA Global Artist Of TheYear.
That's a long, unusual journey, one of the many things I love about country music. The Tamworth page about him struck me as both funny and down home in a West-meets-subcontinent way:
Bobby is descended from a princely Indian family, grew up in the foothills of the Himalayas – "You can be a cowboy anywhere" – and lives a comfortable middle-class existence in India, even if his leather outfits turn heads. His style is down-home – there are no airs or graces: when his guitar-picking thumb-nail breaks just before departure for Australia, he finds the missing piece and super-glues it on. "Sometimes I cut off my wife's nail . . . I tell her I need it more than she does."
I usually include the lyrics and who wrote the song in these posts, but Bobby Cash seems pretty obscure on these shores, and even Amazon doesn't have a track listing for his 2004 album Cowboy At Heart which has this track.
In a cab ride in Stavanger, Norway, the satellite radio was tuned to Patsy Cline. Turns out Houston roughnecks had brought country music with them in the first North Sea oil boom and it had stuck.
ReplyDelete... his guitar-picking thumb-nail breaks just before departure for Australia, he finds the missing piece and super-glues it on. "Sometimes I cut off my wife's nail . . . I tell her I need it more than she does."
ReplyDeleteI never thought of trying that.
I've been doing a book on fingerstyle guitar for a year. As soon as my nails grow to be long enough to play the strings audibly they break off. Never thought of doing a transplant with my wife's nails.
If only my cat's claws were a usable shape.
I get splits in my thumbnails.
ReplyDeleteRe. Super glue repairs to nails.
Baking soda acts as a catalyst to the super glue causing it to harden very quickly.
Cracks in nails can be repaired before the nail totally fails.
You can build up a pretty good artificial nail by layering the glue on and sprinkling the baking soda on and repeating until you get the desired thickness.
The result smoothes and shapes well with a nail file.
Nail polish is optional. :-)
Addendum:
ReplyDeletePatsy Cline kills.
Now this is the kind of assimilation some of us are looking for!
ReplyDeleteI remember some years ago at work I met a Chinese student in his early 20's that loved Johnny Cash.
Lab Manager, not sure we can call this "assimilation". Bobby Cash still lives in India. It is a reflection that there are some universal themes in country music that appeal world wide.
ReplyDeleteI guess I was so impressed I got carried away! Good story though, and that song was done pretty well.
ReplyDelete