Not the Gloria Belle

The Pavilion Theatre at Dun Laoghaire, which has presented the Special Consensus and Chris Jones & the Night Drivers in the past, announces its autumn/ winter Monday night cinema season, beginning tonight with the film Gloria Bell.

Bluegrass fans should note that this is not a biopic of 'Gloria Belle' (Gloria Bernadette Flickinger, b. 1939), one of the pioneer professional women bluegrass performers, best known for her performances and recordings with Jimmy Martin. Biographical studies can be found in Wikipedia; in Richard Thompson's 2013 feature on Bluegrass Today; and especially in the chapter about her in Murphy Henry's Pretty good for a girl: women in bluegrass (2013). This ends with a brief fable - a rough and almost invisible path through the bluegrass woods has a signpost saying 'Groundbreaking women in bluegrass enter here' and underneath, in tiny letters, the words 'Path carved by Gloria Belle'.