[Dixielandjazz] Dick Wellstood and SHIRAZ

[ROBERT R. CALDER]

I was in touch with the Shiraz Socialist webgroup 

run it seems by one "Charlie the Chulo" 

when looking for Wellstoodiana on-line. 


Charlie the Chulo is musically AOK regardless of anything else 

and he had a mail from Dick Wellstood's daughter thanking him for a feature on the too long departed stride master 


and people were asking what happened to the tapes Dick had of Donald Lambert and even maybe Willie Gant 

So I asked did anybody know where the Wellstood family was and what might have happened to the tapes.

When I was a schoolboy I used to frequent the Communist bookshop in Glasgow because it was the only place some blues records could be had. They came out on the same label as the folkie stuff.
Some years later the veteran proprietor and I could have been prosecuted for listening to some of the music we sampled from his old and dusty vinyl stock -- if we'd been in Prague. 


One day much later an offer I'd made to a musician to review his CD for a US-based website was turned down angrily after initial acceptance, because for whatever reasons the website proprietor had expressed a measure of disdain with reference to George W. Bush. 

And here was me thinking jazz an ally of Free Speech. Of respecting not views but human beings, though not without such possibilities as HarrySweets Edison dedicating a performance of "There will Never Be Another You" to the then President Reagan. 

But what happened to Dick Wellstood's tapes? They're an example of one thing politics are for!

Robert R. Calder