sierra leone the lion mountain as the first explorers call it stands expectant as the royal yacht britannia sails up the estuary to freetown sierra leone is an independent member of the commonwealth and britannia brings queen elizabeth ii their own queen and head of the commonwealth the guns of the royal sierra leone regiment thundered out a salute before britannia had dropped anchor freetown’s famous bulumbots sailed out in force to give the traditional welcome of this sea going people to their sovereign
all freetown including members of the government and the governor general throng the waterfront to greet their royal guests the prime minister sir milton margaux greeted the queen and duke on board britannia [Music] as they stepped ashore he welcomed them again to sierra leone and formal presentations began then with her personal enzyme as queen of sierra leone flying for the first time from her car her majesty with the duke of edinburgh drove through the clamorous streets of the capital to fort thornton the governor general’s residence where
she was to stay during her visit the mayor of freetown received the royal visitors at a brilliant reception in victoria park where they met members of the city council the diplomatic corps and leading citizens of the capital the mayor presented her majesty with a golden key which she told him had unlocked the hearts of the people of freetown and would in the future military parade where she inspected the
first battalion the royal sierra leone regiment [Music] [Music] she also presented new colors to the battalion may abide in thy peace and obedience to thy will [Music] amen the supply of fresh water to freetown and its adjacent regions has always been a grave problem that problem is now near to solution the duke of edinburgh visited the gruma valley where a great dam is being built financed mainly by the sierra leone
government and the colonial development corporation due to be completed in 1965 it will meet all the freshwater needs of the capital and its neighborhood [Music] on sunday the queen and duke accompanied by the prime minister attended divine service at saint george’s cathedral in freetown where they were welcomed by the bishop of sierra leone [Music] but freetown is not the whole of sierra
leone so the queen and duke would the prime minister travel to bell the capital of the southern province though hospital is the oldest in the provinces of sierra leone and serves a population of four hundred thousand in the boat district as well as the whole of the southern provinces the pleasure of the royal visit can be seen among both patients and staff though government secondary school founded in 1905 is one of the oldest in west africa its 360 boys devised the most interesting and original welcome for their queen
an hour-by-hour demonstration of a day in the life of a beau schoolboy many members of the government and of the civil service are among the school’s former pupils [Applause] life at beau is evidently not all work this worry game seemed to fascinate the
visitors [Music] and at last lights out and the end of a busy day from the academic quiet to the pump of a royal derba for this occasion the southern province’s paramount chiefs discarded modern forms of transport born as is their right in hammocks they file past the queen duke and prime minister margaret [Music] groups all have their attendant devils whose diabolical antics find a royal response [Music] [Music]
[Music] each paramount chief was received by the queen and presented with a commemorative medal [Music] the members of each group are illustrating a village activity these are the hunters [Music]
[Music] kenama in the eastern province is celebrated for its agricultural show started 12 years ago by the sierra leone department of agriculture this year in honor of the royal visit an entire model village has been laid out so that their queen can see how some of her people of sierra leone live all villages everywhere have their moments of relaxation this is one of them the object of this game is to flick your opponent’s top off the map right sierra leone
is not a rich country but considerable increases in the output of diamonds have greatly helped the national economy they have recently become sierra leone’s biggest single export alluvial diamond digging such as these at hangar are leased to private individuals who sell all their stones to a government agency [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] her majesty was obviously fascinated by the processes that yield these exquisite gems but diamonds are not the only source of revenue here at marampa the royal visitors saw sierra
leone’s great iron ore workings the most modern equipment enables this vital mineral to be excavated and dispatched by diesel electric train to ocean-going ships at the port of patel this visit provided yet another opportunity for her majesty to meet more of her people of sierra leone [Music] [Applause] [Music] these great earth-moving machines yearly excavate two million tons of high-grade iron ore
[Music] in the northern province paramount chiefs again gather to meet their sovereign while the dancers of many societies side with each other to do her honor [Music] back in the capital at freetown the queen and duke attended what was perhaps one of the most delightful of their many public engagements a children’s rally and citizens parade [Music]
[Applause] hello [Music] [Applause] [Music] oh [Music] so [Music] [Applause] the obvious enthusiasm with which these young people greeted their queen must surely have warmed her heart [Applause]
the history of the university college of sierra leone for a bay goes back to 1827 students from all over west africa come to study at this famous college which is closely associated with durham university the queen is visitor of the college and now she comes in person to present degrees accompanied by her husband and the prime minister the university college houses 380 students of which one-third are women [Applause] [Music] when the candidates are assembled before
the queen her majesty formally confers on them their degrees and diplomas at a state banquet the queen addressing especially the young people of sierra leone paid this moving tribute to their prime minister sierra leone can count herself truly fortunate but while gaining her independence she has found a leader wise experienced and devoted to her people [Applause] to you prime minister more than to any other single person gives the credit for quickening the political consciousness of sierra leone and of uniting her
peoples yours is a record of selfless service and singular achievement which will always stand as an inspiration to your country the following day with age-old ceremonial which emphasized the links between parliament and westminster and this vigorous new member of the commonwealth her majesty visited the house of representatives when she received a loyal address i [Applause] a memorable visit drew to a close with a
garden party given by the prime minister at his official residence [Music] [Applause] [Music] and now as britannia waits at the queen elizabeth the second key the queen and the duke of edinburgh take their leave of this happy friendly land but first sir milton mugai makes his farewell gifts for the queen an example of the country’s famous diamonds [Applause] [Music]
[Applause] [Music] for the duke a gift of a boy constrictor which will soon be presented to the london zoological society of which he is president goodbye god bless you and come back soon [Music] you
QQ4 Bob Dylan and Keith Richards have been close friends for nearly 40 years. The friendship began on a live television program in November of 1986 in the 11 seconds after Bob Dylan called Keith Richards music derivative on camera. Keith Richard’s response to that assessment, one sentence said without anger, without performance, with the specific directness of a man who has nothing to prove and knows it made Bob Dylan laugh.
Then made Bob Dylan go quiet. then made Bob Dylan say two words that people who know Bob Dylan say he almost never said to anyone. This is the story of those 11 seconds and the 40 years that followed them. The program was a live music interview special broadcast on an American network on the evening of November 3rd, 1986. The format was simple.
Two musicians, a host, an hour of conversation about music and the state of it. The producers had assembled the pairing of Bob Dylan and Keith Richards with the specific calculation of television producers who understand that two people with equally strong and potentially incompatible views about what music is and what it should do will produce better television than two people who agree about everything.
The calculation was correct, though not in the way the producers had anticipated. Bob Dylan was 45 years old in November of 1986. Bob Dylan had released Empire Burlesque the previous year and had been on the road for most of the intervening period as part of the True Confessions tour with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.
Bob Dylan was in November of 1986 in one of the most prolific and restless phases of a career that had consisted almost entirely of prolific and restless phases. A career that had moved through folk, rock, country, gospel, and back again, that had been declared finished at least six times by the music press, and at each time continued with the serene indifference of a river to the opinions of people standing on its banks.
Bob Dylan had been redefining what music could be. Since 1962, Bob Dylan had invented and reinvented himself so many times that reinvention had become his defining characteristic, not in the superficial sense of a performer changing costumes, but in the deeper sense of a musician who had never allowed his work to settle into a form that could be anticipated or categorized from the outside.
Bob Dylan understood influence and originality and the relationship between them better than almost anyone alive in 1986. Bob Dylan had spent 24 years thinking carefully and specifically about where music came from and where music was going and what it meant that those two things were always in constant conversation with each other.
Keith Richards was 42 years old in November of 1986. Keith Richards had been playing guitar professionally since 1962. Keith Richards had built a career on a foundation of American blues and rhythm and blues. A foundation that Keith Richards had studied with the systematic devotion of someone who understood that the tradition he was building on was not incidental to the music he was making, but essential to it.
that you could not understand what Keith Richards did without understanding where Keith Richards had come from and what Keith Richards had been listening to since he was a teenager in Dartford with American Import Records and a secondhand guitar and no teacher except the recordings themselves. Keith Richards had never pretended otherwise. Keith Richards had in fact spent considerable energy across his career making the lineage explicit, naming the artists, citing the recordings, insisting on the acknowledgement of influence that the mainstream music
industry had a long history of suppressing or ignoring or crediting to the wrong people. If anything, Keith Richards was more transparent about his sources than most musicians of his generation. Keith Richards had always said openly that the Rolling Stones came directly from the blues, that Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson and the specific tradition of the Mississippi Delta were not background influences, but foundational ones.
The music Keith Richards made was in direct and sustained conversation with that tradition, something Keith Richards considered not a limitation, but a responsibility and a form of respect. The interview had been running for 8 minutes when the host asked Bob Dylan about the current state of rock and roll.
Bob Dylan answered with the density and the indirection that characterized Bob Dylan’s responses to direct questions, turning the question over, approaching it from an unexpected angle, finding his way to what he actually thought through a series of observations that moved like a river rather than a road. Bob Dylan was not a straightforward interview subject.
Bob Dylan had been asked about rock and roll in hundreds of interviews across 24 years and had developed the habit of treating the question as an invitation to think out loud rather than a request for a prepared position. The producer Gerald Sherman said afterward that in the first 8 minutes of the interview, he had been slightly anxious, not because anything was going wrong, but because nothing was going anywhere in particular yet.
The interview had the feeling of two conversations happening simultaneously. Bob Dylan’s internal one and the external one visible to the cameras. And Gerald Sherman was not certain in those first eight minutes that the two conversations would converge into something. Bob Dylan talked about influence. Bob Dylan talked about originality.
Bob Dylan talked about the difference between music that absorbed a tradition and transformed it and music that absorbed a tradition and reproduced it. And then Bob Dylan made his assessment. And then Bob Dylan said with the precision of a man making a musical assessment rather than a personal judgment that the Rolling Stones work, and Bob Dylan was specific, naming Keith Richards as the guitarist whose approach he was discussing was derivative in a way that Bob Dylan found limiting.
Bob Dylan said it without hostility. Bob Dylan said it as a technical observation about the relationship between source material and the work that came from it. Bob Dylan said that Keith Richards played the blues the way the blues had already been played, rather than using the blues as a starting point for something that had not yet been played.
Keith Richards had been listening to this with the specific attention Keith Richards gave to things being said about music by people who knew music. Keith Richards did not interrupt. Keith Richards did not shift in his chair or display any of the visible signals of a person preparing a defensive response. Keith Richards listened to Bob Dylan’s complete observation all the way to its conclusion without interrupting and without displaying any visible signal of preparing a response.
Then Keith Richards said one sentence. The sentence was not a rebuttal. The sentence did not defend Keith Richards music or argue for its originality or challenge Bob Dylan’s characterization of what the blues meant in the context of rock and roll. The sentence was something else entirely, something that required a specific kind of confidence to say.
The confidence of a person who has spent long enough thinking about the same things as the person they are talking to that they can locate the exact point where their thinking diverges and say something useful about that point rather than simply defending their own position. The sentence acknowledged everything Bob Dylan had said, the assessment, the distinction Bob Dylan was drawing, the specific musical concern underlying the observation, and then turned it 90°.
Keith Richards took Bob Dylan’s own framework, the one Bob Dylan had used to analyze Keith Richards relationship to the blues tradition, and applied it back to Bob Dylan’s work with the same precision Bob Dylan had used to apply it to Keith Richards. Spare aimed. The sentence asked Bob Dylan something about Bob Dylan’s own music, about the relationship between Bob Dylan’s sources and Bob Dylan’s output that Bob Dylan had not been asked on television before.
The sentence did not attack. The sentence illuminated. Bob Dylan laughed. The laugh was not the polite laugh of someone responding to a joke. The laugh was the involuntary laugh of someone who has been genuinely surprised. The specific kind of surprise that a person of exceptional intelligence experiences when someone else’s intelligence exceeds their expectations.
Bob Dylan laughed for 4 seconds. Then Bob Dylan stopped laughing. Then Bob Dylan was quiet for 3 seconds in the way that Bob Dylan was quiet when Bob Dylan was thinking rather than performing thought. Then Bob Dylan said, “You’re right.” The producer in the booth, a man named Gerald Sherman, who had been working in television for 14 years, said afterward that in 14 years of live television production, he had never heard Bob Dylan say those two words in a public forum.
Gerald Sherman said he had worked with Bob Dylan on two previous occasions and had observed Bob Dylan in numerous other contexts and that you’re right was not a phrase that Bob Dylan deployed easily or often because Bob Dylan had spent 24 years being right about music in ways that other people eventually caught up with. And the experience of being right ahead of everyone else does not generally produce a man who says you’re right readily when someone else makes a point.
The host of the program, a journalist named Patricia Wells, who had been interviewing musicians for 12 years, said afterward that the 11 seconds between Bob Dylan’s assessment and Bob Dylan saying, “You’re right,” were the most extraordinary 11 seconds of television she had been present for. Patricia Wells said that what she witnessed in those 11 seconds was not a debate or a confrontation or a celebrity exchange of competing opinions.
Patricia Wells said what she witnessed was one musician recognizing another musician as an equal, which was in the specific context of Bob Dylan in 1986, not something that happened in public very often. The interview continued for another 42 minutes after those 11 seconds. The conversation between Bob Dylan and Keith Richards in the remaining 42 minutes was described by everyone who watched it as fundamentally different from the first 8 minutes.
The host, Patricia Wells, who had been conducting music interviews for 12 years and understood the difference between the performance of conversation and actual conversation, said that at approximately the 9-minute mark, something shifted in the studio. That the formal interview, architecture dissolved, and what replaced it was something less structured and more genuine.
Bob Dylan and Keith Richards talked about influence and originality and the blues and what it meant to build on a tradition without being consumed by it. They talked about specific recordings and specific musicians with the specificity of two people who had spent their entire adult lives thinking about these things and rarely found another person who had thought about them with equivalent care.
They talked about where music came from and where music was going and whether those two questions were actually one question or two. Patricia Wells said afterward that she had asked approximately four questions in the remaining 42 minutes because Bob Dylan and Keith Richards did not require questions. They required only a room and a camera and the shared understanding that what they were saying together was worth recording carefully.
She said it was the best interview she had ever conducted and that she had conducted the smallest part of it. After the program, Bob Dylan and Keith Richards were in the corridor outside the studio when the host Patricia Wells passed them. Patricia Wells said she did not stop because she did not want to interrupt.
She observed them for approximately 30 seconds from a distance. She said they were talking with the ease of people who had known each other for years rather than people who had met for the first time 2 hours earlier. She said that something had shifted between them during the broadcast that the broadcast had made permanent rather than temporary.
She continued down the corridor and did not look back. She said in her account of that evening that she had decided in that moment not to interrupt the conversation because some conversations are more valuable than any question a journalist might ask and that the conversation she had observed for 30 seconds in the corridor outside the studio was one of them.
She had been a music journalist for 12 years. She recognized the difference. Bob Dylan and Keith Richards have maintained their friendship across four decades. They have appeared together at various events, most significantly at the concert for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995, where people who were present described them as inseparable for most of the evening, occupying the same corner of the backstage area and talking with the concentrated attention of people who only have a limited amount of time together and intend to use it
well. Bob Dylan has spoken about Keith Richards in interviews with the specific thoughtful care that Bob Dylan reserves for musicians whose work Bob Dylan considers genuinely important rather than merely culturally prominent. Keith Richards has spoken about Bob Dylan in similar terms with the specific respect of someone who recognizes in another person a commitment to music that goes deeper than career.
Neither Bob Dylan nor Keith Richards has made a public statement specifically about how the friendship began or about the November 1986 interview. Bob Dylan has not mentioned the 11 seconds. Keith Richards has not mentioned the sentence. The interview exists in the archive. The 11 seconds are there. The laugh is there. The two words are there.
What is also there for anyone who watches the interview from its beginning and pays attention to the shift that happens at the 9-minute mark is the specific moment when two people who thought they were appearing on a television program discovered they were actually talking to each other. What Keith Richards said in that one sentence has never been officially reported.
The people who were in the studio that evening, Gerald Sherman, Patricia Wells, the floor crew, the two camera operators, the makeup artist who was watching from the side of the set, have described the sentence in consistent terms. They have described its effect. They have described Bob Dylan’s laugh and Bob Dylan’s silence and Bob Dylan’s two words.
They have not repeated the sentence itself in the specific understanding that the sentence was said between two musicians on a television program and that its power resided in the specific context of that exchange and would not survive removal from it intact. What can be said is this. Keith Richards said something to Bob Dylan about Bob Dylan’s music that used Bob Dylan’s own observation about Keith Richards as its starting point and arrived somewhere that Bob Dylan had not anticipated.
Keith Richards turned Bob Dylan’s assessment 90° and showed Bob Dylan something about the music they had both spent their lives making that Bob Dylan recognized immediately as true. And Bob Dylan said, “You’re right.” Two words said by Bob Dylan in public on live television in 1986 to Keith Richards in response to a single sentence Keith Richards had said about music.
Two words that Gerald Sherman, who had worked with Bob Dylan on two previous occasions, said he had never heard Bob Dylan say in a public forum. Two words that Patricia Wells, who had been interviewing musicians for 12 years, said were the most significant two words she had heard in those 12 years. Not because of their content, but because of who said them and what it cost to say them and what it meant that Keith Richards had produced them in 11 seconds from a conversation that began with Bob Dylan calling Keith Richards’s music derivative. And Keith Richards and
Bob Dylan have been close friends for nearly 40 years. The sentence did its work in 11 seconds on the evening of November 3rd, 1986. The work has been ongoing ever since. If this story moved you, subscribe and leave a comment below. Have you ever said something to someone that turned a potential disagreement into an unexpected and lasting connection? Tell us about it in the comments below.
Share this with someone who needs to be reminded that the right sentence said at the right moment can completely change the entire direction of a relationship. Ring the notification bell for more untold stories about the extraordinary human beings behind music’s greatest legends.
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