From: "rob humphreys" Date: Sun Sep 15, 2002 11:45 am Subject: Born To Be With You - Johnny Duncan Johnny Duncan - submitted by Rob Humphreys Born 7th September 1932 Olive Springs, East Tennessee USA. Died 15th July 2000 Taree, Australia Johnny Duncan is best remembered for his big hit Last Train To San Fernando. The elements which went into that hit are as varied as Johnny's career. Here was a 'Skiffle' singer from Tennessee with his Bluegrass Boys recording a train song originally written by a Trinidad group and recorded in England by recording engineer Joe Meek. Johnny was everwhere in the late 50's - sharing billing with Cliff Richard, a regular on BBC TV's 6.5 Special and his own BBC radio series Tennessee Songbag. Regular appearances were made on another radio program Saturday Club and I remember recording those on my reel-to-reel tape recorder. Looking back he was kind of our token UK resident Country and Western - complete with piped suits and bootlace tie. Anyway let's rewind 70 years to Johnny's birth in a small coal mining town in East Tennessee - close to the Smoky Mountains and Knoxville. As a youngster Johnny tuned into the Opry on radio and his interest in music grew beyond the Southern Baptist Gospel music he had been brought up on. Leaving school at 14 he still continued in music lessons and improved on chords he'd picked up from watching black sharecroppers play. An early wanderlust saw Johnny and his brother riding boxcars and he decided that a coalminers life was not for him and he joined the army to see the world. In boot camp in Lubbock, Texas he played in a trio and eventually found himself in England in the early 50's where he also played with a few other servicemen. Marrying an English girl, Betty, Johnny returned to the US in 1953 and seemed to forget his musical aspirations as he took employment in the aircraft industry in Kansas. However his wife took ill while visiting the UK and Johnny returned to be with her. He even worked on his father in law's clothing stall on Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire market. As he liked Dixieland Johnny visited London and saw Chris Barber's Jazz Band and the story goes that Ottilie Patterson saw him in the audience and came up to him afterewards and remarked on his resemblence to Barber's recently departed banjo player Lonnie Donegan. When Johnny said he could play and sing too to this led to Johnny joining Chris Barber for a year and making a few recordings with the group mainly on back up vocals and mandolin. He is lead vocal on Doin' My Time. Deciding to strike out on his own, Johnny complete with his Bluegrass Boys cut Hank Williams Kaw-Liga c/w Ella Speed which was a flop. The Bluegrass Boys were assembled under the guidance of Denis Preston, who was responsible for recording both Lonnie Donegan and Chris Barber - don't forget Joe Meek was doing the engineering! Preston asked the well-respected and versatile bass player Jack Fallon to form a band for Duncan. Choosing only the best professional musicians, Jack Fallon picked Lennie Hastings on drums and initially Bryan Daly on guitar, who was soon replaced by the veteran Denny Wright fresh from Lonnie Donegan. Duncan's group was christened The Blue Grass Boys, in homage to Bill Monroe's band in which Duncan claimed to have played in the earlier 1950s. For studio work, Danny Levan on violin was the forth member of the band, with Fallon doubling on fiddle. Incidentally, Canadian born Fallon had previously led a country style band in his own right and had played US bases in the UK - one of his band members was a pre rock'n'roll Tommy Hicks (Steele). Then came the release of Last Train To San Fernando which was a massive hit in '57 - the flip side was a self penned Rockabilly Baby which was a lot nearer to the rockabilly spirit than Guy Mitchell's trade description prosecutable title of Rockabilly. This started the whole tv/radio/touring sequence which was to carry Johnny on for a few hectic years - nothing as big as Last Train was to come recordwise although the follow up Blue Blue Heartaches/Jig Along Home entered the top twenty. Johnny was launched on the back of Skiffle but he was not really a Skiffle artist not did he profess to be. For the time he was pretty unique and able to choose the majority of his output - some may say that was his downfall as his biggest hit Last Train was one of the few tracks he didnt choose - incidentally it was originally pitched to Chas McDevitt. His early solo recordings are quite unique then - for the time and place- things like Footprints In The Snow just tumble over with excitement, zest and exhuberance. His tribute tracks to Hank Williams and his spiritual album all sound pretty good from 2002. Later when covering hits like Dang Me he sounded a little more stereotyped. Throughout the sixties Johnny continued to play live dates although the record hits were not coming and he made some recordings with small record labels. In 1972 he made his first visit to Australia and toured with Reg Lindsay. Later in the seventies Johnny settled in Oz - moving around before settling near Melbourne, later he moved to Newcastle, NSW before moving further up the coast to Taree. In the late seventies Johnny entered the Australian New Faces TV show - as a contestant! and even got a Tasmanian tour resulting from this appearance. I am not sure if Johnny was musically involved in the eighties and nineties. He appears to have found peace and quiet in the Australian countryside. At the time of the Bear Family 4CD Box set there was very little known about Johnny's whereabouts at all and it was only a rumour he was in Australia - other rumours were he was working as a milkman in Sunderland..... The strongest rumour was that he was a taxi driver in Australia and I tried to get to him to be interviewed by the BBC but was advised by contacts here that he would rather be left alone - I took their word for this but in hindsight I think Johnny would have made contact. The sleeve notes to the Bear Family Box, to my mind, seem a bit critical of Johnny - there are hints he was not from Tennessee and his later recordings are not considered all that great. Jack Fallon is quoted as saying the moment he met Johnny he suspected his accent was not from Tennessee. There is even other speculation in the sleeve notes that Johnny was really from Glasgow! I find this hard to believe myself and took Johnny on face value. His 'accent' remained the same throughout his career and I considered his voice to have that 'high lonesome' sound although it did thicken a little in the late sixties. His recordings were dynamic and exhuberant. I've just lived with the box set for a week and amazed at the clarity of the recordings. It was left to Rollercoaster Records and Keith Glass to put the record straight. Check out the excellent booklet which accompanies Johnny's last CD, "From Tennessee to Taree- The Johnny Duncan Story". Keith Glass is an accomplished producer, writer, music historian, and performer. Keith was a personal friend of Johnny Duncan, and produced the CD. Keith travelled to Taree and in Dec 1999 recorded 4 brand new tracks with Johnny. Sadly Johnny never saw the release of these tracks - dying two weeks after being diagnosed with inoperable bowel cancel in July 2000. Recommended listening: You have a choice of two. The Bear Family 4 CD Box Set or From Tennessee to Taree- The Johnny Duncan Story - Rollercoaster Records. The first is for completists and the latter is excellent as an overview of Johnny's work and of course you get his last 4 recordings.