misc.

Sreenivas Paruchuri (sreeni@ktpsp2.uni-paderborn.de)
Mon, 24 Nov 1997 15:49:20 +0100 (MET) 

Greetings!

Just back from a short trip to India! Seems there wasn't much activity 
on the list in the past 4-5 weeks. Lets hope that it changes in coming days.

As far as search for vintage music; esp. Ghantasala songs, was concerned,
I 'd say that its a very fruitful trip! Sometime in early October, 
Suryam gaaru wondered on this list if those innumerable programmes on 
_All India Radio-vividbhaarati_ were recorded by someone. At that time 
I said that there are very good chances. In this trip I could get hold 
of plenty of such ones, including programmes presented by G himself (!). 
It was such a pleasant surprise to find that there are people who recorded 
interviews with literary stalwarts like SreeSree, chaa.sO (chaaganTi 
sOmayaajulu), tilak etc. etc dating back to 60s also.

BTW, I have two more songs to add to G's pre-1950 songs list. 

One interesting finding in this trip was that: G was quite influenced by 
S.P.  lakshmaNa swaami, a leading stage&film actor of yester years 
(SasirEkhaa pariNayam-1938, a.k.a maayaa bazaar & tenaali raamakRshNa-1942). 
Just to quote one e.g. G's "aa mogal raNadheerula ......" rendition was 
unmistakably influenced by SPL's "kaangres paaTa".Also, G's verse reading 
had lots of similarities to SPS's readings (e.g. SPS's songs from tenaali 
raamakRshNa).

Met so many die-hard G fans, who spend a lot of their time AND money
trying to keep G alive in peoples memories, esp. introducing him to younger
generation. More on these people in a later posting! IMHO, these people need
some kind of support (moral, and if possible financial) from us. These people
also catalogued (in this case: two sec. school teachers near rEpalle) all G's
songs (incl. the ones in other languages!) so meticulously that we just need
to photocopy their note-books and wRITe them.

Also met Sri Bhairavabhotla Narayanarao (Hindi lecturer, Jyoti College,
Vijayawada), who helped many a researchers on Telugu cinema with his
tremendous collection of film related material; i.e. old song books,
magazines etc, and who was instrumental in bringing out the complete works of
aatrEya (a 4 vol set!) and C. Narayana Reddy's film lyrics (an on-going
project). I hope that one day we can put all the information collected by him
in electronic format and present on Net.

All in all (as far as G is concerned!) its a very pleasing and encouraging
trip, making me more motivated to continue the activities on Net.

Regards,
Sreenivas

-- 
E-Mail: sreeni@ktp.uni-paderborn.de