Sturm, Twang and the Imaginary Wild West in Europe
Monday, March 10, 2008
Peter Rowan and Druha Trava Video
This clip is from June 2005, when Peter Rowan toured for a week with Druha Trava. I caught about three concerts on the tour - in Plzen, Brno and Trnava (Slovakia). It was the first time I got to know the members of the band; I ended up interviewing Robert Krestan and Lubos Malina and writing a story that appeared in the International Herald Tribune and the New York Times.
This clip is from the performance in Trnava, at the annual DobroFest -- a celebration of the Dobro, or resonator guitar, held in a town near where the inventor of the Dobro, John Dopyera (who emigrated to California with his family as a boy) was born.
I'm posting this to see if I can "embed" the video from YouTube....
For several years I've been exploring the imaginary wild west in contemporary Europe -- observing and experiencing the many ways that Europeans embrace the mythology of the American Frontier to enhance, imbue or create their own identities. (Or, indeed, just have fun.) On this blog I will post pictures, stories and links relating to this multi-faceted subculture, from European country music to rodeos, theme parks, round-ups and saloons....
I'm an American writer and photographer who has researched and written widely on Jewish culture and heritage issues for more than three decades. I've written several books on the topic and manage the website www.jewish-heritage-europe.eu, a project of the Rothschild Foundation (Hanadiv) Europe.
I also am working longterm on "Sturm, Twang and Sauerkraut Cowboys: Imaginary Wild Wests in Contemporary Europe," an exploration of the American West in the European imagination for which I won a 2006 Guggenheim Fellowship and an NEH summer stipend grant. In 2015 I was the Arnold Distinguished Visiting Chair in Jewish Studies at the College of Charleston, SC. My other honors and awards include Poland's “Knight's Cross of the Order of Merit" and the Michael Hammer Tribute Research Award from the Hadassah Brandeis Institute (HBI).
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