http://www.mindentimes.ca/2012/11/27...string-guitars
Poets with 12-string guitars
Tuesday, November 27, 2012 5:07:08 EST PM
Stan Rogers on the telephone from home with Peter Gzowski, the singer wrapped in a full-length apron, dusting and mopping as they hobnob on the radio.
The years all run together now. Did he hold that dust mop yesterday, or was it 30 years ago?
Thirty years it must be, at least, for the great Canadian folk singer has been dead for almost that long. Gone too soon. Gzowski gone, too.
Gone, too, the rich voice of Ian Tyson, whose lyrics I borrowed from for that second paragraph, though his song was about Juanita and it was Fifty Years Ago.
Rogers, Gzowski, Tyson, Gordon Lightfoot. A neat package. Ghosts from another century, from a gentler Canada that used to be. Poets with 12-string guitars.
Lightfoot, back from a near-death experience a few years ago, survivor of a six-week coma, almost 80 now, still packing auditoriums. Tyson, still alive but croaking now, his vocal cords damaged beyond repair.
Poets? Rogers’ lyrics are in high school English textbooks. Tyson’s should be there, too, if they aren’t already:
“If I could roll back the years,
Back when I was young and limber,
Loose as ashes in the wind,
I had no irons in the fire”
You might want to add other voices to my list – Cockburn, Cummings, lang, McLauchlan, Mitchell, Sainte-Marie, Valdy, Young . . .
Some of them faded, some of them lightweights . . . Some of them gone to California, leaving Canada in their rear-view mirrors – and Rogers sang about that.
But he stayed behind. So did Lightfoot and Tyson and the three of them became musical legends anyhow, Gzowski’s Morningside on the CBC a tie that bound them, bound us all.
What tied them together was a sense of the country. A cousin-in-law of mine, farming near Rocky Mountain House, Alta., took Morningside with him on his tractor, plowing his endless acres.
Voices from Canso, N.S., and Orillia and from an Alberta cowboy, all mixed up on the radio, setting their country’s stories to music.
Their songs, the best of them alternate national anthems. Nathan Rogers singing his dad’s songs at the Haliburton high school the other night, the crowd joining him on Northwest Passage in full, exultant voice.
Tyson and Lightfoot opening the Calgary Olympics together, singing Four Strong Winds and Alberta Bound, alternate anthems, and all that came after them in those 1988 Games seemed like an anti-climax to me.
Their music lives on, at once simple and profound, reaching into the nooks and crannies of Canada, reaching beyond Bloor and Crescent streets onto fishing boats and into sagebrush corrals.
Lightfoot was Gord before Gordon. The first time I heard him, I was keeping a friend company overnight at a radio station in Richmond Hill. He put a new 45 on the turntable by some kid from Orillia.
Heard, I wrote, not listened. The microphone shut off, we talked right over the music. Which song was it, anyhow? But I listened to him later, at folk festivals, at Massey Hall, surely at the Riverboat, that Yorkville cathedral of Canadian folk.
I saw Tyson perform only with his then-wife, while Ian and Sylvia were an international phenomenon. Not at all and now probably never, since he went out to Alberta and became a cowboy poet.
Rogers was only a voice on my boom box (but what a voice), until an airplane fire in Ohio burnt him up at 33. Almost thirty years ago.
The three of them may seem like an odd trio to lump together, Lightfoot a commercial hit-maker on the one hand, Rogers exposing his Canadian roots on the other with Tyson in the middle, singing his cowboy songs.
But Lightfoot could make a hit out of a Lake Superior shipwreck and teach us our history with his Canadian Railroad Trilogy. Tyson sings of lost hopes and missed chances, of buckskin fillies and spring thaws.
Rogers got inside the heads of fishermen and oil-rig workers, let you see the joy and the desperation of the traditional family farm by putting you inside the skin of a young farmer in The Field Behind the Plow.
(Compare Murray McLauchlan’s The Farmer’s Song, a cheerful jukebox jingle, mere caricature. The musical wave of the future.)
The best of Lightfoot, Rogers and Tyson has a depth and meaning, an authenticity, that turns it into art. Canadian art.
Lightfoot-Tyson-Rogers
