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Chasing Fireflies: An Englishman's Recollection of Travelling through America in 1974

by Stan Laundon

346 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #04-0021; ISBN 1-4120-2097-2; US$27.50, C$32.25, EUR23.00, £16.00

Thirty years ago a young man fulfilled a dream by travelling to Nashville, Tennessee; this tells what happened to him and his companions on a journey through seven States.

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about the book      about the author      excerpts      catalogue info

About the Book They say there is a book in everybody. Well, if that's true, it's taken me nearly thirty years to write mine! My story tells of a visit I made to the United States in 1974 when two friends and I decided to head down to Nashville, Tennessee to attend a six-day music festival. At the time I was employed by BBC local radio in the north east of England and every Sunday I presented a country music programme called "Country Time." It seemed, at this time, most of my colleagues who presented similar programmes within the local radio network had already been to Nashville - and I was probably the only one who had not. I was about to rectify this, a trip of a lifetime for me. Until now I had only ever been abroad once - to Majorca. For my two travel companions, it was their first overseas holiday. This is the story of those two weeks. It is not all about music and Nashville. It is about our experiences, thoughts, memories and the fun we had on the way to Tennessee - via New York, Newark and Virginia and on our way back home travelling through Kentucky, Indiana and Pennsylvania. How nice it was, too, to meet people such as Dolly Parton and Johnny Cash - and a relatively unknown guitar player called Jerry Reed who wrote songs and played guitar for Elvis Presley and later went on to make several hit movies with Burt Reynolds and Gene Hackman. REVIEWS The Star, Hartlepool, Friday April 30th, page 11 Evening Gazette, Middlesbrough, April 30, 2004 British Country Music Association Bulletin, June 2004

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About the Author Stan Laundon was born in Hartlepool on June 15, 1943. He attended Dyke House School in the town and served an apprenticeship as a turner. He left his home town in 1961 to work with pop singer, Joe Brown. Initially, he ran his fan club but soon ended up touring with him as his road manager and right hand man. During his time with Joe he ghost-wrote a series of newspaper articles for the "Lincolnshire Chronicle." He also spent time as a freelance writer for the Express and Independent Newspaper Group in Wanstead and Walthamstow in east London and for the music magazines "Beat Monthly," "Beat Instrumental" and "Opry." After four years in London, he returned to his native north east to work in various fields - insurance, entertainment and journalism, writing for newspapers and magazines and had a regular weekly column about country music in Hartlepool Mail. He joined BBC local radio on Teesside in September 1970 and enjoyed a career with them that spanned almost twenty-four years. During this period he produced and presented a country music programme called "Country Time" that was broadcast on BBC Radio Cleveland for twenty-one years and was a guest presenter on the BBC Radio 2 national programme "Country Club" when regular host Wally Whyton took a break. He also did a small amount of television work as an extra and appeared in three episodes of the Jimmy Nail series "Spender" on BBC. He now lives in retirement on the Costa Blanca in Spain.

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Excerpts

As we stood in the small lobby of the "Mid Town Plaza," and as the desk clerk was filling in the obligatory reservation cards and checking our passports, I noticed something out of the corner of my eye that made me turn my head - twice - because I wasn't quite sure that what I did see was correct! I thought I had just seen a half naked teenaged girl walk across the bottom of the hallway.

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This was the Southland- now we had trees, vegetation, plants, flowers, shrubs and, most of all, fresh air and a bright and clear blue sky. We saw a huge blue and yellow sign on the grass verge at the side of the highway that read 'Welcome to Virginia.'

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As we sat near the bar, a foul-mouthed drunken youth started making abusive comments in our direction. The barman was taking a note of this incident as he wiped clean a beer glass with a towel. The obnoxious loudmouth said he was a cousin of Elvis Presley.

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During the interval, I was invited backstage to be introduced to many of the stars - including Dolly Parton. She looked stunning.

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It was a very humid night - very warm. The type of night I would expect it to be in the southern states. It was the kind of atmosphere that was depicted in that great movie "In the Heat of the Night."

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Here in Pennsylvania the fields and farms stretched for miles- and on each piece of fenced off land on the sunny slopes seemed to have a detached, wooden building that reminded me of a Dutch barn. This was the land of the Amish.

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Catalogue Information

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