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Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame - article in Toronto Star (long)
Nov. 30, 2003. 10:43 AM
Our tower of song
A new hall of fame honours Canadians who have composed some of our top popular music
GREG QUILL
ENTERTAINMENT COLUMNIST
"Across the board, economically, politically, in terms of status and recognition in the culture, songwriters are usually the low men on the totem pole, and from the industrial standpoint, under-recognized, underpaid and untrumpeted."
This has been the mantra of veteran Canadian music publisher Frank Davies for 30 years or more. The British expatriate — who founded The Music Publisher and built it into the largest independent organization of its kind in Canada — is perhaps the most successful and best-liked song peddler in the country. He is a vigorous and exhaustingly thorough purveyor of popular music, and a particularly fierce defender of Canadian songs and songwriters.
On Wednesday, Davies will witness the inauguration of an institution that has been his obsession for most of his professional life, the Canadian Songwriters Hall Of Fame. It will come into existence with a gala ceremony at CBC Toronto's Glenn Gould Studio, where Canadian songwriter icons Gordon Lightfoot, Félix Leclerc, Hank Snow, Madame Bolduc and Alfred Bryan, as well as 12 of the most influential Canadian songs of all time, will be honoured in what Leonard Cohen might call our first official "Tower Of Song."
The gala, hosted by Musimax's Sonia Benezra and CBC Radio's Shelagh Rogers, will feature performances by Blue Rodeo, Tom Cochrane, Ron Sexsmith, Molly Johnson, Marc Jordan, Sarah Slean and Jean-François Breau, among others. A two-hour version of the event will air on CBC Radio's OnStage next Sunday on Radio One at 8:05 p.m. and Radio Two at 2:05 p.m.
"For every performer who's also a songwriter, there are a thousand songwriters who remain unknown, but whose work adds as much to the fabric of our lives as do novelists, filmmakers and playwrights," says Davies.
"In 1982, I was made aware that Ruth Lowe, who wrote the Frank Sinatra hit `I'll Never Smile Again' in the 1940s, lived in Toronto. She was virtually anonymous in the music world and in the Canadian creative community, and I realized there had to be others like her."
Davies' own research yielded hundreds of candidates for membership in a Canadian institution that would honour its songwriters in the same way that the American Songwriters Hall Of Fame honours U.S. composers.
"We borrowed some of their ideas and discarded others," he says. "We developed guidelines that in broad terms accept songwriters ... whose achievements are not confined to record or sheet music sales, but reflect the public notoriety of their work and the level of its acceptance in the culture. ... With the help of some professional researchers, who've been working on this project since the beginning of this year, we've been able to find contenders from as far back as 1866."
A small committee of Canadian songwriters and music publishers came up with the first group of inductees and songs — "Red River Valley" (traditional), "While The World Is Waiting For The Sunrise" (Eugene Lockhart/Ernest Seitz), "What A Friend We Have In Jesus" (Joseph Medlicott Scriven/Charles Converse), "Peg O' My Heart" (Bryan/Fred Fisher), "I'm Movin' On" (Hank Snow), "I'll Never Smile Again" (Lowe), "Black Fly Song" (Wade Hemsworth), "If You Could Read My Mind" (Lightfoot), "Snowbird" (Gene Mac-Lellan), "Aquarius" (Galt McDermott), "Born To Be Wild" (Mars Bonfire), and "Four Strong Winds" (Ian Tyson) — representing the depth and variety of popular music composed in Canada in the last 150 years, Davies says.
"We're paying tribute to songwriters for their body of work, and to individual songs that may or may not be part of a body of work, but which have made a particularly strong impression here and in the rest of the world."
The hall of fame has yet to find a physical home, says executive director Jody Scotchmer, but it will have a virtual existence on the Internet by the end of 2004.
"Until we have a permanent home, we are collaborating with various institutions on the possibility of a mobile exhibition in key museums and cultural centres across the country."
Since Davies's dream took root, it has been embraced by scores of Canadian composers and songwriters, many of whom are eager to offer interpretations of the work of the inductees. Here is what they plan for the gala:
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MOLLY JOHNSON
"I Didn't Raise My Boy To Be A Soldier"
On the eve of a flight to Paris to promote her first concert engagement there, Johnson says, "Choosing one song from Alfred Bryan's enormous catalogue wasn't easy. A majority of them are vintage World War I-period, patriotic songs, rah-rah tempos and marches for men heading off to the front.
"Out of respect for the writers, we can't change the lyrics or the gender of the singer, but eventually we found this song called `I Didn't Raise My Boy To Be A Soldier.' It seems a particularly Canadian sentiment, and quite timely. The rhythm is strident, and I'd like to bend it slightly into a sort of New Orleans funeral march, but the lyric is quite plaintive, written in two parts: the first sung by a man setting the scene; the second by a mother who's determined not to lose her son. The refrain is defiant: `There'd be no war today/ If mothers all would say/ I didn't raise my boy to be a soldier.'
"I love that chorus."
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MARC JORDAN
"I Didn't Raise My Boy To Be A Soldier" and "Peg O' My Heart"
Jordan, who is in the middle of assembling songs for his next CD, "a set of jazzed-up country songs," to follow his hit album Living In Marina Del Ray And Other Stories, will sing "I Didn't Raise My Boy To Be A Soldier" with Johnson and perform Bryan's best-known ballad, "Peg O' My Heart," solo.
"I listened to several recordings of `Peg,' all of them jaunty, and somehow none seemed to capture what I saw in the song. My arrangement is in the American Songbook Standard style — slow and jazzy.
"I never knew this song was Canadian. That reaffirms the theory that songwriters are always lost in the cultural background. It's a classic melody, very much of its time, and very well crafted. When you lay it out on the piano, the melody pattern is very close and clustered, not all over the keyboard. It's a lovely piece of work."
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TOM COCHRANE
"Early Morning Rain" and "I'm Movin' On"
Still buzzing from his participation in the recent historic NHL Heritage Classic outdoor game in Edmonton, where he performed his hockey-themed classic "Big League," Cochrane is eager to give Lightfoot's immortal "Early Morning Rain" his best shot.
"Gordon was and still is a huge inspiration to me, and this song is in the vanguard of his very best work," says the award-winning singer and songwriter. "I've always loved it. It has so many layers of meaning ... the conflict between the past and the future, between flight and impassivity. I'll play it the way he first played it, with a 12-string guitar and a stand-up bass."
Cochrane was also asked to perform Snow's signature song, "I'm Movin' On," and agreed, he says, before he knew how many verses the original contains.
"Hank was no Gene Autry, no Nashville cowboy. There's something vital and honest and East Coast in his songs. My take on `Movin' On' will be more rockabilly than he might have liked it, with an Appalachian vibe.
"Both songs are about travelling, and it seems to me that travelling songs have always been a big part of Canadian life."
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JEAN-FRANCOIS BREAU
"Bozo"
"I know many of Félix Leclerc's most popular songs, about one-eighth of his recorded repertoire, and this was always one of my favourites," says the popular Quebec star, who's preparing for the February world premiere in Montreal of the musical Don Juan, in which he's playing the lead.
"Leclerc is a solid pillar of French-Canadian life and culture, a patriarch among Canadian songwriters, a classic. His songs are still being sung by young performers at talent shows, by great concert artists, because they are not just about love. He was a great observer of the details of daily life, and made stories out of them. `Bozo' is such a beautiful song ... it doesn't need much, just a piano."
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SARAH SLEAN
"I'll Never Smile Again"
"I knew the Sinatra hit, but had no idea that the woman who wrote this song came from Toronto," says Slean, who has just emerged from 4 1/2 months in isolation — in a shack in the woods — with a slate of new songs for her second CD, which she envisages as "dark, orchestral pop with sprinklings of Disney, Judy Garland and Radiohead."
"And when I heard the story behind it — about her love for a man from Chicago who caught some disease, died on the operating table ... the devastation, waking up with the song fully formed in her head ... it just crushed me.
"The song has very delicate chords, and I see Ruth Lowe as a kind of Disney heroine ... that's how I'll approach the performance."
The Canadian Songwriters Hall Of Fame, Slean says, is "a great idea, a celebration of a very Canadian quirk — we're all such natural archivists."
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JIM CUDDY/BLUE RODEO
"If You Could Read My Mind" and "Golden Rocket"
"My feelings for Lightfoot grow stronger every year," says Cuddy, Blue Rodeo's frontman and composer with guitarist-singer Greg Keelor of the band's countless hits. Blue Rodeo contributed a country-rock version of the little-remembered Lightfoot song "Go Go Round" to the recently released tribute CD by Canadian roots artists, Beautiful.
"I don't have a lot of trepidation about doing `If You Could Read My Mind.' It's an obvious classic, one of those songs that have always been there, like `Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.' Nothing can hurt it. We'll take our best crack at it with a four-piece acoustic version of the band and a string quartet.
"Lightfoot's such an appealing Canadian character. His public persona is honest, straightforward, and he has never seemed overly conscious of his talent. His songs are like home to me. The first thing I ever learned to play was `For Loving Me.'"
Cuddy's not so familiar with Snow's repertoire, though having run through "Golden Rocket," he's eager to learn more.
"He was a real discovery for me, the Maritimes realism in his work. These were hillbilly songs in the Canadian roughneck tradition. He understood the way songs tie people together, not just as Canadians, but to all other human life and experience as well. It's a mystery to me that we're not further along in archiving these bits of our musical culture."
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RON SEXSMITH
"Snowbird"
"I've been playing it for years," says Sexsmith of the Gene MacLellan classic, Anne Murray's first hit, "and I'm always fascinated by the reaction. People assume it's coming from an ironic place, and when they understand I'm playing it straight, you see them change, their faces full of recognition, some kind of national pride ...
"When she heard me perform the song out east, Gene's daughter faxed me the full lyrics, extra verses Anne Murray never sang, and that's the version I'll do, just solo with guitar.
"It's a very sad and melancholy song with an identifiable yet indefinable Canadian quality."
Additional articles by Greg Quill
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