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'Long Gone Lonesome Laugharne'

Peter Thabit Jones - America Again

Peter has been invited back to America in May 2009 for a series of poetry readings and literary talks in New York. He will be hosted by Professor Sultan Catto of City University of New York, The Graduate Center, and his American publisher Stanley H. Barkan.

Whilst in New York he will also participate in a new project with Stanley, who is planning to produce a DVD based around the popular Walking Guide of Dylan Thomas’s Greenwich Village, written by Peter and Aeronwy Thomas, Dylan’s daughter, which was commissioned by Catrin Brace of the Wales International Center, New York in May 2008.

The Cross-Cultural Communications project is being lead by Michael Cipot, CCC’s video manager, with poem contributions from Stanley and other CCC poets. Trefor Ellis will provide some Welsh songs.

Peter will produce a narrative contribution and Swansea singer-songwriter Terry Clarke, a frequent participant at The Seventh Quarry/Cross-Cultural Communications Visiting Poets Events, will sing original songs and compose the incidental music.

The Songs

Terry was commissioned by the Dylan Thomas Centre in Swansea in 2005 to compose a suite of songs based on his perceptions/interpretations of some aspects of Dylan's life, work and friendships.
The songs were first performed as a complete collection at the Boathouse in Laugharne
in 2006 and again later that year at the annual Dylan Thomas Festival in Swansea.

He continued featuring some of the songs in live sets from time to time and indeed wrote some new ones on the same theme.

The invitation from Peter Thabit Jones and Cross-Cultural Communications has led to Terry deciding to record them as a complete album to be called Long Gone Lonesome Laugharne.
Work will begin early in February with his close friend and collaborator Wes McGhee.
He says "Working with Wes on my Night Ride To Birmingham album in 2004 was such a joy and I'm excited about working with him again"

Only three songs from the original commissioned collection will be on the album/DVD.
The other songs are new, mostly written since the Cross-Cultural Communications invitation was extended.

They range through all of Clarke's influence's; Cash/Sun era rockabilly, the NewYork ballads of Bacharach/David and Sondheim/Bernstein, memories of his childhood in Berkshire, Texas jazz/swing, the film dreamscapes of Federico Fellini.

The Last Chance Saloon imagines a thirteen year old Phil Spector asleep in the Bronx dreaming Da Doo Ron Ron as Dylan Thomas sits drinking in a bar.

In 1953 Dylan passes away in November, at the closing of a year which began with Hank Williams death, saw the beginning of The Drifters' recording career in New York and the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in Westminster Abbey.

The title song Long Gone Lonesome Laugharne is shot through with echoes of Clarke's beloved Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings.

These are songs where neon is smeared like lipstick across Times Square and Dylan Thomas steps on Wrigley chewing gum wrappers with a Mickey Spillane novel in his overcoat pocket.

West 12th Street will probably come to be regarded as the centrepiece of the collection.
A heartbreaking minor key ballad in 3/4 time reminiscent of Leonard Cohen, it juxtaposes the tragedy of Dylan's passing in St. Vincent's hospital with people going on with their everyday lives unaware of what's happening, or indeed, unaware of Dylan Thomas at all.

On the street below a cab picks up a fare, Billy Joel plays on the lawn of his parents house, on Broadway a janitor sweeps the steps of the Brill Building getting ready to open the doors to the future.

The future; Bobby Darin's fingerpops; Dion DiMucci's Italian Bronx soul, Neil Diamond & Laura Nyro's New York serenades, Lou Reed, Bruce Springsteen, Willy DeVille and Martin Scorcese's street poetry.

These songs take trains and boats and planes from New York back to Laugharne.
These songs claim that Dylan Thomas was 'cool' when most people thought the word referred to a Frigidaire.