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Here's an interesting coincidence. For the last couple of days I've had the Shakin' Stevens song "This ole house" stuck in my head. Today I come across this story in the local press:
Shakin' Stevens - the Welsh Elvis - discovers he's actually Cornish
By WOCornwall | Posted: September 20, 2016
By Kirstie Newton

When the Cornish mining industry fell into decline in the late 19th century, workers scattered across the globe in search of employment. Mexico, New Zealand, Australia and South Africa all saw Cousin Jacks in search of employment as, closer to home, did Wales.

So it was that singer Shakin' Stevens, upon delving into his family history, discovered that he was part of what is known as the Cornish diaspora, with family not only in Kernow but also Mexico and Canada.

"I've come to a time in my life when I want to know more about my family," says the man fondly referred to as Shaky (real name: Michael Barratt). "I realised I didn't know anything at all, so we started looking – going on Ancestry.co.uk, calling in full birth certificates. That's how I found out that my forefathers came from Gwennap, where they worked down the tin and copper mines."

Indeed, this Welshman born in Cardiff traced his Kernow relations to the village near Redruth in 1760. At that time, Methodism was strong in Cornwall and Gwennap was at its very heart, with preacher John Wesley visiting its open air amphitheatre 18 times between 1762 and 1789. But by the 1880s, things were changing.

"The mines were closing, so my grandfather left Cornwall," he explains. "I had no idea. When I was growing up, the baby of 13 children, we were seen and not heard. My mother used to send us into another room if she wanted to talk about family matters. I spoke to my eldest brother, who was 94, and he gave us lots of information, but when I mentioned Cornwall, he said, 'No, really?' This a family that we never thought moved out of its own backyard, and it went around the world."

Shaky and partner Sue visited Gwennap, taking in the pit and also Trefula Farm, where his great-grandfather once lived. "It was a great feeling to walk down the path and wonder what it was like to live there," he says. Photographs taken there have been used to promote his new album, Echoes Of Our Times, inspired by the stories he collected.

The opening track, Down In The Hole, is an obvious reference to the hard life the miners endured; a promotional video features images supplied by the Royal Cornwall Museum, who were more than happy to give Shaky a pictorial flavour of how his ancestors would have lived and worked.

...

A studio recording of the final track, the eco-anthem Last Man Alive, can be seen online and prove that Shaky still has the moves, even at the age of 68. In the meantime, he'd love to write an autobiography, and is planning a tour (with Cornish dates) in spring 2017. He'll be happy to return west of the Tamar: "When I come to Cornwall now, I do feel that link. My family was there, and my heritage is there. I'm a part of it, no doubt about that."

http://www.westbriton.co.uk/shakin-...ally-cornish/story-29733933-detail/story.html

I don't think I even knew Shakey was supposed to be Welsh, although I did live in Wales for a few years. Now I'm in Cornwall, and I learn he's really Cornish!
:) I've visited Gwennap church, and posted a pic of the churchyard here:
http://forum.forteantimes.com/index.php?threads/gravestones-and-epitaphs.9679/page-7#post-1017631

None of which answers why Shakey should come into my mind just before I find this article. I don't listen to radio or watch much TV, so I don't think I heard about him that way.

Time to finish with a song:
 
Shakey himself is a mystery to me.
 
Shakey himself is a mystery to me.
It seems his family was a mystery to him...!
How Shakin' Stevens new album led him to the brother he never knew
By Mark Savage BBC Music reporter

Pop star Shakin' Stevens discusses how researching his family history for a new album led to some surprising revelations.

Incredible though it may seem, Shakin' Stevens was the UK's biggest-selling singles artist of the 1980s.
He had 28 top 40 hits, including four number one singles - from the festive juggernaut Merry Christmas Everyone, to This Ole House - a song inspired by a grisly death in the US.
It was originally written by "singing cowboy" Stuart Hamblen, who found a dead body lying in a deserted shack while he was on a hunting trip with John Wayne.
The lyrics play with the gospel concept of the mortal body being a "house" for your soul, that gets left behind when you go to "meet the saints".
"I imagine people don't think about that when they dance along to it," laughs Stevens, reflecting on the first of his four number one hits.

But while he's fondly remembered for those 80s chart successes, Cardiff's answer to The King says he doesn't want to trade on his former glories.
"YouTube gets annoying when they keep putting up the old videos because I've been trying to move forward for a while," he says.
Key to that plan is Echoes Of Our Time, Stevens' first album in almost a decade.

Released last month, it's a rootsy, blues-inspired record that's aeons away from the denim-clad, hip-thrusting heart-throb of yesteryear.
"I've been using slide guitar, banjo, stuff like that for yonks," he protests. "But if people haven't seen me live on stage, they wouldn't have heard me with these instruments."

The songs earn their dark, rumbling arrangements by delving into Stevens' family history to tell some particularly harrowing stories.
Opening track Down In The Hole talks about his grandfather, born in 1865, who was sent to work in Cornwall's copper mines at the age of 10.
"The conditions were horrific," he says. "There was arsenic and God knows what else down there. Terrible, terrible, terrible."
The singer even visited the site of the mines, in Gwennap, to get a feel for the environment. There, he found pictures of the miners, who would spend an hour every morning climbing down a vertical shaft to work in the pitch black "with just a candle on top of their heads".
"They'd be down there for six or seven hours and then climb back up. And they'd be so tired at the end of the day, they'd fall off the ladder. It was shocking," he says.

The singer was prompted to look into his family's history by his partner and manager, Sue Davis.
He knew next to nothing about his parents and relatives, who stoically kept their personal problems to themselves.
"If my mum wanted to talk to her sister, she would say, 'go out and play'," he recalls. "Children were to be seen and not heard."

As he started examining birth certificates and electoral registers, the singer uncovered a few family secrets.
"I mean, I didn't know that my dad was married before he met my mum," he says.
"He was married for a year and he had a son. Even when I was grown up, that secret was still not let out."

Intrigued, Stevens tracked down his half brother and his father's ex-wife in Lincolnshire - but they were as tight-lipped as his parents.
"I said to them, 'We're not here for anything but a few stories,' but they showed us one photograph and that was about it, really."

The singer doesn't blame his parents for keeping him in the dark. Their generation was simply more private, he says.
For example, his father, who was gassed in the trenches of World War One, never spoke of his experiences.
"He had medals in the drawer but all he would say is, 'they should give them to the people who died'," says Stevens.

He pays tribute to his father on Echoes Of Our Times's title track, singing, "We will always remember the sacrifice you made to hold the line".
The song also reflects on his uncle, who lied about his age to join the armed forces, and met a gruesome end.

"My uncle Leonard was a gunner in the artillery and he got blown up. It took him eight days to die. And his son was born 11 days after he passed, so that was horrific."

Making the album has given Stevens a more solid sense of his place in the world, he says. The exercise was so rewarding, in fact, that he delved further into his roots for a BBC Radio 2 documentary, Who Does Shakin' Stevens Think He Is?, broadcast this week.

Born Michael Barratt in 1948, Stevens was the youngest of John and May Barratt's 13 children, living in a cramped three-bedroom council house in Cardiff.
"There was no money at all. There were five in the back bedroom, sleeping head to toe. The room at the front was small, as well.
"We used to play 'jump in the hay' and 'ball in the street' and stuff like that. Basic, fun things. But we were happy, you know? We didn't know any better."

His musical education came from the records his eldest brother, Jackie, played on a "wind-up gramophone", to which the whole family would sing along.
After school, he worked as an upholsterer's apprentice, singing as he stuffed old armchairs, and then a milkman - but "all I wanted to do was sing".

"I was in several bands, and we just started off doing the clubs and dancehalls in the valleys - and eventually moved on to the colleges and universities."

In 1969, aged 21, he formed Shakin' Stevens and The Sunsets, borrowing his stage name from an old schoolfriend, Steven Vanderwalker.
They supported the Rolling Stones in concert and were signed to John Peel's Dandelion record label, but their albums never troubled the charts.

Instead, Stevens' big break came when he was cast in the title role of Elvis, a West End tribute which won best musical in 1977. [I never knew that!]
Initially, he was worried the role would overshadow his own music - "but in the end I needed the money", he says.
"It was an incredible success. It ran for 19 months. Carl Perkins came to see it, so did Susan George and David Bowie. It was the biggest musical around at that time."

The show led to a solo career, which got off to a shaky start (no pun intended).
"I had a flop, then I had a hit, then I had a flop, and then I had This Ole House, which was huge throughout Europe and internationally," he says matter-of-factly.

Then aged 33, his success came late in the day - but he fought to sustain it, releasing three albums in just two years.
However, he says he was still "naive" when it came to business decisions.

"On one of my albums, I'm wearing tuxedo on the cover," he cringes. "You do what your manager tells you, so you put this thing on even when it strangles your neck.
"And then they said, 'We're going to call it Give Me Your Heart Tonight' and the thing is, it gives the wrong impression.
"People see the tuxedo and think it's a different kind of music. What that record should have been called was 'Don't Judge This Album By Its Cover'."

The star looks back on the 1980s with a combination of pride and mortification.
"My first five albums, for what they were, I quite like them," he says. "But I've been trying and trying and trying to move on.
"You know, you look at your old holiday photographs and you think, 'oh no, did I look like that?'" he laughs.

"So my favourites are here," he says, tapping on the cover of his new CD. "This album here is very, very personal to me."

Echoes of our Time is out now. You can listen to the documentary Who Does Shakin' Stevens Think He Is on the BBC Radio 2 website.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-37628772
 
I go through boughts of this...forgive me, but as of right now I keep waking up with this song stuck in my head.
 
Just a thought - can you get a song stuck if you don't know all the words?
 
Just a thought - can you get a song stuck if you don't know all the words?

Yes, I have songs going round my head all the time that I don't know the exact words to, I just get an approximation of what it sounds like. Mostly it's the tune that's the attraction rather than the words.
 
Do you think if you had sung them out loud, that might have got you a mention in the Strange People thread? ;)

I once absentmindedly sang, "I'm just a sweet transvestite..." through three floors of my university's student certain, before it was pointed out to me.

My friends were dicks...

One time I had the Three's Company theme stuck in my head for a week. It was horrible.

I've actually found that the best cure is to listen to the song that's stuck in your head, and really get into it! Sing along! Move around!

That's the only real cure I've found (and I've routinely get earworms*) is to drown out. Play ad infinitum the song until you can sing it from memory.

*The weirdest time was when I conflated David Bowie's "Station to Station" and his "Because You're Young" into one song:

It's too late to be grateful

It's too late to be late again
It's too late to be hateful

It's love back to front and no sides
 
My current earworm is Seasick Steve's 'That's All'.
 
If my husband hears once 'It's all about da base', it gets stuck in his head for days. When the song was a lot on the radio, it was for weeks on end!
In my case, it's always some lame pop songs I don't like, like the Spice Girls' or something of that type, which is haunting me and not stuff I really like.
 
Humming Deep Purple's Hard Lovin' Man, when it suddenly tuned into Nazareth playing Joni Mitchell's This Flight Tonight. Weird.
 
I would say yes, IME.

I tend to get only one or two lines of the song, endlessly looping.

I have a weird mental mash-up of the Specials singing Monkey Man and Stiff Little Fingers doing Suspect Device:

Aye aye aye, aye aye aye!
Tell you baby,
Su-su-su-spect device!

Just those few lines. Over and over and over and... :banghead:
 
I have a weird mental mash-up of the Specials singing Monkey Man and Stiff Little Fingers doing Suspect Device:

Aye aye aye, aye aye aye!
Tell you baby,
Su-su-su-spect device!

Just those few lines. Over and over and over and... :banghead:

Oooh, I've had that happen!

Sometimes I'll try to get rid of an earworm by 'overlaying' it with something else and end up with the two at once. It is extremely annoying!
 
Dunno why people complain, music in your head is fun and natural. You'd be lost without it
 
But it's the horrible things that stick! I could have been listening to Brahms all week but some stray reference on a website will trigger an attack of "A finger of fudge is just enough . . . " :eek::eek::eek:
[Raises eyebrow, Spock-like]
 
Bang up the lot of them! The ones that created the ad. should be locked in a room with it playing 24 hours a day. :evil:
 
Dunno why people complain, music in your head is fun and natural. You'd be lost without it

It's a double-edged sword, when you have something you really like bopping around in there, it's a tonic, but I have certain songs I just need to hear three or four notes of and then I'm stuck with them for hours or days, and they're rarely the ones I like. No, I'm not going to say what they are (just in case).
 
It's an interesting topic. I find Motorhead clears most ear-worms (top notch) and Oliver Sack's book' Musicophilia has many examples of people with ear-worms of a particular tune, that can only be stopped by another specific tune to the point where they 'cure' one with the other on a regular basis.
 
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