A HILL-BILLY QUERY

Grey River Argus, 30 May 1938, Page 9

A HILL-BILLY QUERY

AVIATRIX DIES IN CRASH. NEW YORK, May 14. Judy Canova, the Jacksonville, Florida, girl, whose hillbilly songs have registered in the moviet, on Broadway and over the air, has just returned from her lirst trip abroad. With sisten Anne and brother Zeke, she went first to London, and got very fidgety over all the gas mask and war talk. So to Paris, where she didn’t get fidgety at all. “They, could talk gas masks and war all the time in Paris and it wouldn’t bother me a bit. I can’t understand a word of French.”

In London she met the King of Denmark. “He’s not,” she said, “what you would call a big King, but he’s an awful nice fellow.” And there, too, she learned something about the hillbilly songs from which she makes her living.

"You know what they told me?” she said. “They told me, ‘Why, those aren’t hillbilly songs at all. Those are old English ballads.’ I got ’em in North Carolina.” The only hillbilly songs the British would concede as genuine hillbilly were those manufactured specially for Miss Canova on Broadway. "Crazy, isn’t it, but the craziest thing is what happened to my brother Zeke. He went down to Caledonia market and bought himself a big collection of antique crockery shoes. Silly little things.” “Like that?” asked someone pointing to a finger watch she wore on her little finger. “Well,” she said belligerently, “this watch may look crazy, but it keeps time. I’d like to see Zeke walking around in his crockery shoes.” It was at the aviation country club in Hicksville, L. 1., a cozy little place where Long Island’s flying millionaires park their planes and wait for clear weather that the news of the death of Baroness Eva von Blixen Finecke in a motor crash near Bagdad, Iraq fell with crushing force in this country. That’s where she spent most of two months waiting for the humiliating day when Kurt Bjorkvall, who was supposed to be her co-pilot on a trans-Atlantic flight, should refuse to take her along with him. ■ She was a tall, blonde, hazel-eyed, clear-skinned girl (only 29 when she died), with a soft voice and a warm, rolling laugh. She made friends quickly. Her only trouble was that everything eventually bored her. She competed in Europe’s most dangerous cross-country auto races, and raced over ice with special nail-Studded tyres. She bunted big game in Africa and stunted in planes. I remember her telling me, "Gambling for stakes you cannot afford to lose is all that makes life pleasant.” The only stake she really could not afford to lose was her life. Now there can be no more gambling, and her restless search for the means to the end is over.—(N.A.N.A.).