On 7th May 1964, Granada TV filmed a programme of performances by touring US blues musicians including Muddy Waters, Otis Spann, Cousin Joe Pleasant, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee at the disused Wilbraham Road railway station in Whalley Range, south Manchester, which they dubbed Chorltonville and mocked up to look like a Southern style railroad halt, complete with a crate of chickens and tethered goat.
The show, The Blues and Gospel Train, is now on YouTube and clips from it regularly pop up in both blues and local history pages that I follow on Facebook, together with the same myths endlessly repeated before being debunked.
The programme was filmed at Chorlton-cum-Hardy station
This is understandable for a few reasons. Granada called the station Chorltonville (an actual area of Chorlton-cum-Hardy, the south Manchester suburb which borders Whalley Range) and Chorlton-cum-Hardy station, now a stop on the South Manchester Line of the Metrolink tram system, is on Wilbraham Road, a mile or so west of Wilbraham Road station, and famously mentioned in a Flanders and Swann song.
The show was part of the American Folk Blues Festival
The American Folk Blues Festival ran throughout the sixties, bringing US blues musicians, including some who appeared on the show at Wilbraham Road station, to European audiences in theatres and concert halls. It was organised by German jazz fans Horst Lippmann and Fritz Rau with Chess Records producer Willie Dixon a key contact in Chicago. The tour the musicians were on in 1964 was called the Blues and Gospel Caravan and was promoted by Newport Jazz Festival founder George Wein.
Members of the Rolling Stones were in the audience
By 1964 the Rolling Stones were an established act and were themselves on tour when the Granada TV show was filmed. The confusion seems to stem from their having travelled up to Manchester from London two years earlier to see the 1962 American Folk Blues Festival gig at the Free Trade Hall (where the musicians from the Wilbraham Road show also performed the following night in 1964).
The audience was racially segregated
Granada TV set up the filming with the artists on one platform and the mostly student and white audience, who had travelled there on a special train from Manchester Central Station, seated on another opposite it. The idea that it was racially segregated is usually voiced by Americans who think they're seeing an actual railroad station in the US South, where Jim Crow laws still segregated blacks and whites in the mid sixties, rather than a disused station mocked up to look like one in the south Manchester suburbs. Muddy Waters is playing on the opposite platform when the audience gets off the train at the start of the show, before crossing the track to rejoin the other artists, and there are photos from the tour of the black musicians happily mingling backstage with their starstruck teenage white fans.
And now for a few facts.
The gospel singer Sister Rosetta Thorpe, arguably the star of the show, changed her opening number from the, very appropriate, This Train to Didn't It Rain when she saw the unseasonably wet Manchester weather (pianist Cousin Joe Pleasant, who helps her down from a horse drawn carriage and leads her along the platform, had just performed in a torrential downpour, which gave the Granada sound technicians a few problems).
Filming had to be stopped on several occasions to let freight trains which still ran along the Fallowfield Loop Line to pass through the station.
Johnny Hamp who produced the show for Granada TV already had contacts in the rail industry from filming Little Eva singing her hit The Locomotion with a train background at the Longsight depot in south Manchester in February 1963.
The tour was managed by the twenty-one year old future record producer Joe Boyd. He describes it as his first and still best job in the music industry.
