"Waiting for a Train" with Toshio Hirano

As a added treat on Monday night's PBS independent lens series showing of the Muscle Shoals film(previous post), it was followed by a "short".  That was a time warp.  Was I back in Danville circa 1959 at the Rialto on lower Main Street, hanging on for a "short".  What about cartoons beforehand. 

The 20 minute film was "Waiting for a Train" and it was more or less the adult life story of Toshio Hirano, a player and devotee of pure country music.  Growing up in Japan he was always into music, especially country music, which he thought at first was something like the Kingston Trio.  An avid record collector, he found bluegrass at some point and couldn't believe what he was hearing, both the sound of the banjo and the violin that made such strange sounds.

He made a trip to America to hear more varieties of the music, was hooked, and came back a few years later, in the early 1970's, to cover much of the country on a bike with a guitar on his back and his possessions somewhere, not sure how he did that.  He rode and must have performed.  He was astonished at West Virginia and went further south, then somehow ended up in Minneapolis for three or four years, a hotbed of country?  Then on for a period of time to Texas.  He finally ended up in San Francisco, got married, they had two children, and he continued playing his favorite song most nights, Jimmie Roger's "Waiting for a Train".

While I'm sure that he went back to Japan from time to time as he must have come from some means to accomplish all of this, he never went back to live, and remains in the bay area.

Rarely, if ever, is a film or book laid out here in detail like this.  But this was a "short", so in this instance the joy is all in seeing and listening to Toshio and feeling his pure exuberance for the music and his life.  The short film may be able to be found on Google or YouTube.