More evidence of growing Italian country scene

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

Here's more evidence that Italy's country western scene is developing.

The Italy blog Italy Chronicles runs a post about an Italian country singer named Fabrizio Pollastrelli who goes by the stage name Paul Aster and plays with a band called "The Fellows." His web site says they play "southern rock 'n' country music."

Aster hails from northern Italy and is currently based on Fano, in Le Marche on the coast.

Here he sings -- like so many other European country artists -- Country Roads....

Italy has a few wellknown, veteran bluegrass groups -- like Red Wine and Bluegrass Stuff -- but until fairly recently it has not had much of a "mainstream" country music scene.

As I've posted in the past , this seems to be changing. There is a slowly growing country-western-music-etc scene that includes country music and other general western festivals as well as a surging line-dance scene.

This is on top of fairly well-established western scene linked to horses and horse-riding, and the Cowboy Action Shooting scene, which has clubs in many parts of the country.

The biggest western event has long been the FieraCavalli -- horse fair -- in Verona.

Here's a video from the FieraCavalli 2009 -- masters of line dancing.






I can't forget that the first European country singer I met when I first started exploring the "imaginary wild west" was an Italian, "George McAnthony," from the South Tyrol/Alto Adige region. I saw him perform a couple of times and did a lengthy interview with him -- he was a nice guy and he and his story helped trigger my interest in the imaginary wild west phenomenon..Sadly, George died three years ago, aged only 45.

Still, just nine or 10 years ago I attended a  well-attended "Western Games" festival near Rome -- and there was no line-dancing, and the country band they had playing drew an audience of zero.

My Sauerkraut Cowboy Essay in Western Way Magazine

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

The Western Way Magazine has published a shortened version of the long paper on European country music I  presented last year at the International Conference on Country Music and elsewhere. It can be downloaded at the web site of the Western Music Association, but I am also posting it here in jpg form. (Note that the caption on the picture of pg 40 is wrong -- these guys were at the Country Piknik Festival in Poland, not at Pullman City.) The full version of this essay can be accessed via the link in the side bar of this blog.

 

 

 

Poland -- Me on Polish TV, Discussing European Country Music

Silesian TV interviewed me for the news piece they did on the Silesian Folk and Country Festival in Ustron.

You can view the clip by clicking HERE. (And please disregard how I'm identified..)

My Article to Appear in The Western Way magazine

Truck Stop plays Pullman City Harz, July 2007. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

I've learned that a (short) version of "Sturm, Twang and Sauerkraut Cowboys," the long essay/paper I wrote on the European country music scene, is to appear this summer in The Western Way Magazine, published by the Western Music Association. The magazine is described as the only professional magazine dedicated to the promotion of western music. Yee-Hah! I'm trying to whittle down my pictures to send the editor just four or five.... not easy!

Even as a shorter piece, I'm looking forward to seeing it in print. I presented versions of the paper last year (and the end of 2007) in various venues, including the International Country Music Conference in Nashville, and at the Autry National Center in LA.

Meanwhile, I've posted a pdf of the long version on my web site. Click HERE -- I'll also put a link in this blog's sidebar.

Germany -- Country Music Messe Nuremberg

This weekend I'm missing (or as it's already Sunday night, I guess I already missed) the annual Country Music Messe, or Fair, in Nuremberg, Germany.

It's a smaller, shorter, sister Messe to the big Country Music Messe in Berlin, in early February, that I have attended for several years. I've written about the Berlin Messe in previous posts and articles (and also radio reports).

Nuremberg started up two or three years ago, and I wanted to go to there this year, to see how this fair differs from that in Berlin. It is smaller, with two rather than three days and three, rather than four, simultaneous stages; but the line-up of acts seems to have been very similar to that in Berlin. Mostly local German groups.

Still, it would have been fun to see friends such as Lonstar from Poland


and David Lee Howard who divides his time between Washington state and Europe.