Surely you’ve heard of Elijah Page? A voice from the past, yes, but a voice you remember: he played guitar and stood up alone to sing about injustice and heartbreak in the days when it still seemed possible to change the world. Dylan, Guthrie, Seeger, Page – performing in clubs and at festivals, for ­audiences that took those voices to heart, that shaped their lives according to the songs they heard.
In reality, you are unlikely to have heard of Elijah (or Eli) Page, because W B Belcher invented him for his debut novel – but Page is a pretty convincing concoction. A compelling performer in his day, he vanished from the scene and, it seems, disappeared completely, as the narrator, Jack Wyeth, relates. Wyeth is a Page-obsessed folkie, a millennial with father issues (his guitar-playing dad left when he was five) who drops girlfriends and dead-end jobs like so much change from his pocket, never able to settle, never knowing what he wants.
One day, out of the blue, he gets a call from Eli Page’s manager. Page is ready to write a memoir; all he needs is a ghostwriter. Wyeth takes the job and goes to upstate New York but when he gets there he discovers, perhaps unsurprisingly, that his task is not as straightforward as he’d hoped.
The American folk scene offers a good canvas for the shattering of youthful illusions. It is hard to avoid comparing this novel to the Coen brothers’ haunting 2013 film, Inside Llewyn Davis , in which Oscar Isaac plays a 1960s folk musician based on a singer called Dave Van Ronk. Van Ronk gets a namecheck in Belcher’s book and, for those who love conspiracy theories, it may be worth noting that the writer who helped Van Ronk put his posthumously published memoir together was called Elijah Wald.
There’s more. Albert E Brumley’s 1929 spiritual “I’ll Fly Away”, which you can find on the soundtrack of the Coens’ O Brother, Where Art Thou? , also gets a mention here. This is the kind of knitting together that is intrinsic to folk on both sides of the Atlantic, where old tunes and new tunes circle each other and bind until it becomes hard to tell them apart.
Folk is – let’s be frank – always on the margins. If it weren’t, it wouldn’t be a place for rebellion and protest. Both Eli and Jack are marginal figures – even in their own lives, it seems. What brings them together is a need to escape from the confines of the present day, though that desire takes different forms. Eli has become a crank, a near ­recluse: imagine Bob Dylan crossed with J D Salinger and you’ll start to get the picture.
Belcher’s portrait of small-town life and the dark currents running under any surface is well done, and it’s clear that the author knows the drill. He lives along the same river, the Battenkill, that winds through the book; he is also on the board of directors of Caffe Lena in New York, the most venerable folk venue in United States.
Perhaps, at times, the material is a little too close to his heart. One of the strengths of Lay Down Your Weary Tune is its sense of mystery, but that mystery is stretched out just a little too long. What is going on with Eli? Who is responsible for the strange spate of crime in town? The story is a good one – laced with lost fathers and vanished daughters – but like those long, long Child ballads, it wouldn’t have suffered by losing a verse or two. And sometimes the similes get out of hand: wine glasses that “chirped like falsetto birds” when they clinked; a spine curved “like a lazy creek”. It’s lovely, but occasionally distracting.
The characters, however, are vivid and true. Jack becomes enamoured of Jenny, whose connection to Page is a puzzle right to the end of the book. Jenny is soft and strong and real, and her attachment to her ex-fiancé, a bullying local police officer called Cal, perfectly convincing. Eli stays just out of focus – but by design, dimmed to himself as well as to the people who try to get close to him. In the final pages, Jack finds a moment in which he sees: “Everything was perfect and everything was perfectly broken.” That may be the vision he has to live by. I’ll be happy to listen to the next song Belcher chooses to sing.
Lay Down Your Weary Tune by W B Belcher is published by Other Press, 408pp, £13.99
As the UK papers proudly boasted this morning, “Brits won big” at last night’s Golden Globe awards.
The Hollywood Foreign Press Association awarded accolades to Hugh Laurie, Olivia Colman and Tom Hiddleston for the BBC’s The Night Manager , while Claire Foy was celebrated for her turn in Netflix’s The Crown , which also won Best TV Drama. Aaron Taylor-Johnson surprised audiences by picking up the Best Supporting Actor in a Drama award for his performance in Nocturnal Animals.
So, yes, well done us. But aside from Taylor-Johnson’s unexpected win, all of these awards are for TV, not film, and so they don’t necessarily hint at Oscars glory for UK talent this year.
The US’s interest in British television has grown and grown in the last few years. British TV exports to the US rose 10 per cent to more than $800m in 2014. Downton Abbey became American network PBS’s highest-rated series in history , and Call The Midwife has also been popular on the network. BBC America has scored high ratings with Doctor Who , Sherlock , and Broadchurch, while The Night Manager and Tom Hardy’s Taboo are successful BBC co-productions with AMC and FX respectively.
Meanwhile, the growth of streaming platforms like Netflix and Amazon means British programming is more easily finding an international audience. US Netflix has hosted a number of British shows including Happy Valley , Peaky Blinders , The Fall , Luther , Lovesick , and Netflix originals like The Crown , while Amazon has found American audiences for Fleabag and Ripper Street – the latter was cancelled until Amazon helped fund its recommission.
So it is true that more British television is reaching a wider American audience than ever before – and scooping up more awards as a result.
But in terms of the film industry, Brits like Taylor-Johnson winning at the Golden Globes says nothing at all. As Mark Kermode wrote back in 2011 , “In truth, the movie industries of Britain and America are inextricably intertwined […] Sadly, there’s little that’s newsworthy about that arrangement.”

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SMITHTOWN, N. Y. (CBSNewYork) — The film “La La Land” is inspiring even those with two left feet to get up and dance.
Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone dance effortlessly like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, bringing movie buffs in for lessons.
“We specialize in teaching people who have never danced before,” said Kimberly Parker, of Fred Astaire Dance Studio on Long Island.
“She says, ‘what would you like to do?’ I said, ‘I want to do what he does, I want to whirl around the floor. I don’t want to stand still, I want to move around,’” said Farmingdale resident Robert Marin.
Marin, a retired police officer, and his wife, Carol, just celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary, doing the foxtrot and rumba, thanks to recent twice-a-week training.
“Love that movie and we keep telling our friends to go see the movie,” Carol said. “Want to take dance lessons with us?”
Since the film’s release, dance teachers at Fred Astaire studios report a new set of first timers strapping on their dancing shoes.
“It’s always something I’ve wanted to do, and now I’m doing it,” said Smithtown resident Joy Sepe.
“I am a kid with learning disabilities, I have ADD, so I want to inspire other people with ballroom. And ‘La La Land’ is a joyous film, you can’t help but get up and dance,” said 19-year-0ld Madison Sepe.
“I think it’s bringing a lot of people to the field or to the sport that weren’t in it before,” said Smithtown resident A. J. Caro.
Would the Marins say it’s keeping them young?
“Yes it has, and it’s brought us together,” Carol said.
“If you don’t challenge yourself once in a while, why get out of bed in the morning?” Robert agreed.
Some studios in the area have renamed some classes “La La Land,” and say those lessons are the first with waiting lists.

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TV listings for the week of Jan 8 – 14, 2017 in PDF format
This week’s TV Movies
Casey Affleck talks about the way Kenneth Lonergan uses everyday language to convey deep emotion in “Manchester by the Sea. ”
For her role as Jackie Kennedy, Natalie Portman says, “It’s not a fashion story,” but the clothes do tell a story.
Joel Edgerton talks about staying truthful to the real-life story of “Loving. ”
Director Nicolas Winding Refn and composer Cliff Martinez discuss their “Neon Demon” collaboration.
“Manchester By the Sea” director Kenneth Lonergan discusses writing a quiet character and working with actor Casey Affleck to bring him to life.
“Manchester By the Sea” director Kenneth Lonergan discusses writing a quiet character and working with actor Casey Affleck to bring him to life.

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That’s the newest estimate, thanks to rocks and soil collected by the Apollo 14 moonwalkers in 1971.
A research team reported Wednesday that the moon formed within 60 million years of the birth of the solar system. Previous estimates ranged within 100 million years, all the way out to 200 million years after the solar system’s creation, not quite 4.6 billion years ago.
Stunning images of the perigee moon, or “supermoon,” around the world
The scientists conducted uranium-lead dating on fragments of the mineral zircon extracted from Apollo 14 lunar samples. The pieces of zircon were minuscule – no bigger than a grain of sand.
“Size doesn’t matter, they record amazing information nonetheless!” lead author Melanie Barboni of the University of California, Los Angeles, said in an email.
She noted that the moon holds “so much magic… the key to understand how our beautiful Earth formed and evolved.”
Some of the eight zircon samples were used in a previous study, also conducted at UCLA. Barboni said she is studying more zircons from Apollo 14 samples, but doesn’t expect it to change her estimate of 4.51 billion years for the moon’s age, possibly 4.52 billion years at the most.
“It would be more a double-checking than anything else,” she explained. She and her colleagues – whose work appeared Wednesday in the journal Science Advances – are eager to learn more about the moon’s history and, in turn, the evolution of early Earth and the entire solar system.
Apollo 11’s Alan Shepard and Edgar Mitchell collected 92 pounds of rocks and used tubes to dig up soil while exploring the moon’s Fra Mauro highlands in February 1971. They conducted two spacewalks, spending nine hours altogether out on the lunar surface.
It’s the second major moon study this week.
On Monday, Israeli scientists suggested our Earth’s constant companion may actually be a melting pot of many mini-moons. Rather than one giant impact that shaved off a chunk of Earth and formed the moon, a series of smaller collisions may have created multiple moonlets that eventually merged into one, according to the researchers.
Barboni said regardless of how the moon came to be – one big strike at Earth, many smaller ones or even none at all – “you still end up at the end solidifying the moon as we know it today.”
The giant impact theory holds that the resulting energy formed a lunar lava ocean that later became solid. It’s this solidification age that Barboni and her team have now ascertained.
“We finally pinned down a minimum age for the moon formation,” she said, “regardless of how it formed.”

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