Fešáci

The band 'Fešáci' was established in the early 60th of the last century and very soon became the best of 'bluegrass' music scene in former Czechoslovakia. Then the band started to play also different kinds of country music. That happened to be the reason of the big popularity not only in the Czechoslovakia or Czech Republic, but in the other countries in Eastern Europe too. It wasn´t easy to travel abroad in this communistic era. Fešáci band was allowed to play in USA in the year 1980 and was very successful there. There were new invitations for more concerts in USA, but they wasn´t allowed to leave the home country. In that very time they performed songs of Bob Dylan, Kris Kristofferson or John Denver, sung in English. But because of the fact that people here mostly did not understand English, Fešáci had to translate those lyrics into the Czech language with keeping the original meaning as much as possible. The band visited only some socialists countries in Europe, like Poland, Bulgaria and DDR. Later, after the „velvet“ revolution in 1989, when the world became open for everybody, the band „Fešáci“ performed in Austria, Australia, Greece – Crete, Switzerland, Sweden and Norway – and with a big success, too. The musicians grew older, but the enthusiasm and pleasure of playing and singing of country music stay up to these days. New young musicians have come to strengthen the band, but keeping´ the same typical sound of music like before. The band worked hard in many recording studios during the passed years. There were recorded many songs for many records, for example were issued 4 SPs, one set of singles (Christmas with Fešáci), 4 LPs, 9 album CDs, 1 DVD and 4 video cassettes. In Fešáci band rotated about 65 musicians and sound technicians, but the band lives very well and plays music in its best tradition. The most representative performance has happened on the stage of the famous venue 'Palace Lucerna' in Prague this year. The band celebrated its 35th anniversary of playing and performing there. The line-up of the band Fešáci is about 10 men: Antonin Kny – guitars and leader, Jan Turek – entertainer, Frank Patek – player on dobro, Tom Linka, J. Stahlavsky and R. Moucha – singers and about six musicians playing drums, bass, piano, dobro, autoharp, harmonica or steel-guitar. The group aims to play as long as possible to make smile on the faces of the people everywhere. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.