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* "left alone to hear the song...."

Raise your hand if you're familiar with the songs of Stan Rogers.

If your hand is up, there's probably about a 95% chance you're Canadian.

Either that, or Rogers was simply an artist whose name and work somehow managed to escape me all these years. But whatever the case, I got to know his music rather well this past weekend during a visit to Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Looking for some evening entertainment on our fourth/first anniversary (that's what happens when you get married on Leap Day), my wife and I stumbled upon Stan Rogers: A Matter Of Heart, a play currently being presented by Eastern Front Theatre at Alderney Landing in Dartmouth (across the bay by ferry from Halifax). A quick web-search indicated that Rogers, who died in an airplane fire on a runway in Cincinnati in 1983, was a man of significant respect and renown in his homeland; a recommendation from our longtime Canadian contributing editor Paul Cantin sealed our decision to attend the play.

Given the way Rogers died, it struck me as a bit eerie that his songs (as performed by singers Terry Hatty, Aaron Kyte, Julain Molnar and Cliff Le Jeune, with a three-piece backing band) almost posited him as a Canadian Jim Croce, in the way he deftly contrasts gritty character sketches against contemplative ballads. Croce's penchant for swaying from the likes of "Bad, Bad Leroy Brown" and "Rapid Roy (That Stock Car Boy)" into "Lover's Cross" and "New York's Not My Home" somewhat mirrored Rogers' ranging from "Night Guard" and "The Idiot" to "Forty-Five Years" and "Song Of The Candle".

Croce comparisons don't tell the whole story with Rogers, though; rather, it's just a starting-point to help convey his appeal, and to understand the high regard with which he's held in his home turf. Certainly he also brings to mind his countryman Gordon Lightfoot (and not just because both had signature songs about shipwrecks), but in the end Rogers stands distinct among Canadian songwriters, largely because of how deeply he drew upon the traditional aspects of daily living in the Great White North, especially along the eastern seaboard. From tales of maritime disasters to laments of fishing-trade changes to saluting the Northwest Passage to the obligatory hockey song, Rogers' oeuvre essentially serves as a classic blueprint for what might be termed "Canadiana."

And, as it turns out, there's a fairly direct connection between Rogers' legacy and the modern string-band scene that is the cover-subject of our March-April issue. Leonard Podolak, leader of Winnipeg band the Duhks, is the son of Mitch Podolak, founder of the long-running Winnipeg Folk Festival -- where, every year, the event is concluded with a rendition of Rogers' fictional anthem "The Mary Ellen Carter". Its uplifting chorus -- "Rise again, rise again" -- is adapted ingeniously as a thread running throughout A Matter Of Heart, a softly reassuring refrain revisited several times before the full song is belted out in a rousing finale.

You may well have to go to Canada to see it. And if you go -- while you're there, see what you can find out about Stompin' Tom Connors....

adios,
peter

Posted by peter on March 3, 2008 11:12 PM | Permalink