Those Black Hills…

When I do the ironing, a task I’m not that keen on although I don’t absolutely hate, I put the TV on and watch something I don’t need to concentrate on, ‘Homes Under the Hammer’, ‘Escape to the Country’, ‘Helicopter Heroes’… If it’s a programme I really, like I prefer to sit down and watch it, not be doing something else at the same time…

Yesterday, ironing board was up, iron in one hand, TV remote in the other, going through the channels when up pops Doris Day… yes, ‘Calamity Jane’. I don’t know when I first watched it, taken to the cinema by my parents when I was small I guess. I liked it because I was a bit of a tomboy, and in fact I actually thought I was a cowboy, I thought I was Roy Rogers, (being Tonto came later). I must have seen it several times because when I watched it yesterday it was so familiar to me. However, much as I enjoyed it, and I confess I did, I was watching it as an adult, and seeing a film which was released in 1953 and in some ways showed its age.Even so, I was newly amazed at Doris’s dancing skills, and the thigh-slapping songs, and the costumes…

I wondered about the actual Calamity Jane, and discovered that she was born in 1852, the eldest of six children; t the age of thirteen Jane and her family left Missouri and went by wagon-train to Montana. Her mother died when Jane was fourteen, and her father took the family to Utah. He died the following year, leaving Jane aged fifteen with her five younger brothers and sisters. She must have been a remarkable young woman because she took her family to Wyoming and worked at anything she could. When she was twenty-two she became a scout and involved in the sort of life she became famous for, earning money however she could, including prostitution… what a hard, hard life it was. She apparently had at least two children, and eventually died at what now seems a young age of fifty-one, in 1903.

We don’t have the Black Hills near us, but we do have the Blackdown Hills:

http://www.blackdownhillsaonb.org.uk/

… and here is Doris singing about her Black Hills:

http://http://youtu.be/p59nrGixAYY