“I wanted to emigrate”: The singular artist that made Ringo Starr fall in love with America
Playing rock and roll music isn’t always something that’s within the artist’s control. They can do whatever they can to enjoy whatever they want, but there’s something about the right guitar riff, vocal melody, or music video that alters something in someone’s DNA when they first fall in love with the music. And while Ringo Starr made millions of people want to see what Liverpool was like after The Beatles broke through, he was already infatuated with what was going on half a world away in America.
Then again, any kid who became a part of the British invasion had already seen the US in bright lights thanks to the early rock and rollers. There hadn’t been many true English rock stars yet, and despite the crooners from back in the day going over well on the radio, Starr would tune into stations like Radio Luxembourg to hear some of his favourite acts, finally getting exposed to people like Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis for the first time.
But Starr was willing to do a bit more homework than the rest of his bandmates. Every one of them were stretching themselves to find different influences, and while Starr had a lot of everything from R&B to rock and roll to soul music, he was always the resident country music fan whenever he sang one of their early songs.
Looking through their deep cuts, tunes like ‘Act Naturally’ were practically taken straight out of the country-and-western playbook, and even when Starr sang a cover of the rock and roll classic ‘Honey Don’t’, he does have that same hiccup in his voice you’d find out of the old country artists. But like all great American music, it all circles back to the blues in one way or another.
The biggest names in all American music had used those 12-bar songs as a template for where they wanted their music to go, and while it eventually branched out into everything from jazz to swing to country, Lightnin’ Hopkins was the kind of artist anyone could appreciate. There was a healthy dose of blues vocabulary in his music, but there was a tiny bit of twang in the way that the guitars are played whenever he got onstage.
Starr already had a plethora of great American music to work off of, but he knew that he could make himself at home in another country when listening to Hopkins, saying, “I had Willie Nelson records where he was wearing a suit in the late ‘60s. You know, he wasn’t always looking like a hippie. So I played a lot of that, and blues. At 19 years of age, I wanted to emigrate to Houston to be with Lightnin’ Hopkins, and I had a list of factories I could go to [to work].”
Then again, the first few years of The Beatles’ lives saw their homes stripped away from them to some degree. Every one of them had worked so hard to get to the top of the musical food chain, but once they had the adulation from screaming fans, it was a lot more difficult for them to get comfortable in any one place, often fluctuating between a hotel room and a car depending on what time of day it was.
Although the band sacrificed their nervous systems to become the best artists in the world, Starr never forgot his first loves from America, even going back to his roots by making country albums later on in his career. Liverpool may always consider Starr to be one of their native sons, but there’s a piece of his soul that’s always been called to the American South.
