Forget The Beatles, Liverpool these days is all about country music according to The Bluecoat’s Honky Tonk exhibition. Laura Davis reports
IN WARDROBES all around Liverpool there are pairs of snake skin boots among the rows of trainers, stetsons nestling next to football scarves and replica Winchesters propped up alongside piles of old Beatles LPs.
For every Philharmonic violinist there’s a handful of country fiddle players. For every girl doing her Saturday afternoon shopping in rollers there’s a woman practising double toe-heel swivels in the living room.
Because if Johnny Cash had been born British he wouldn’t have a Cockney drawl or a Yorkshire lilt, he’d have grown up in the shadow of the Liver Birds eating Scouse.
“The music historian Kevin McManus described Liverpool as the Nashville of the North,” says Sara-Jane Parsons, curator of The Bluecoat’s new Honky Tonk exhibition. Opening today, it explores our city’s fascination with country music and the similarities between Liverpool the Southern states of America.
Parsons has been planning the show for some time, after moving back to Liverpool in 2008 having lived in Texas for 15 years.
Work by professional artists will be displayed alongside country and western memorabilia and a film featuring Liverpool musicians, line-dancers, gunslingers and collectors.
There’s a huge fondness for country in the city most famous for Merseybeat and rock ’n’ roll, says the curator.
