Allen Dob Releases New Music Video “Black and White 1912”
British Columbia’s Allen Dobb has recently released a music video for his new single “Black And White 1912”. The vision for “Black and White 1912,” the third single from his forthcoming Alone Together LP (out on February 9th), was around for quite a while before it finally came out as a song.
“I could see the freighter with the team of horses going up the hill out of the town of Clinton, BC on the old Cariboo Road, but I didn’t know the story. It turned into an interesting tale shaped around the recollections of an old cowboy during the period when horse drawn stages and wagons were being replaced by automobiles.
It struck me that the scene painted in my mind was full of colour, yet the black and white photographs taken in the period were biasing that view. I thought about my own grandparents’ wedding photograph taken out in the middle of a field during the depression era 1930s. They were young and beautiful, but they looked so austere in the black and white photograph. In reality, their world was full of vivid colour.”
“Of all the songs on Alone Together, I thought “Black and White 1912” had a strong visual element that could be captured in a video. It’s never easy trying to find the right visuals for a song, but the vision for “Black and White 1912” was clear. I had visited the Clinton museum and knew they had a great old horse barn and some furniture from the time period that I thought would make the perfect set.
I wanted to work with a local videographer, someone who was familiar with the area. I was lucky to find Rick Magnell who is based in Williams Lake, a couple hours north of Clinton. He really liked the barn, as well as the idea of intercutting live footage with black and white still photographs.
Finding the right photographs was challenging. The Clinton museum had some, but the sequence really came together when I found the Frank Swannell collection in the BC archives. He took beautiful photographs, and just happened to capture an accident involving a freight team and car – the exact image described in the song. It all came together then.”
