Stompin' Tom and the Accents of Canada

Two things I have read this last week strike chords--whether the chords are related or not, I have had an inkling, but no clear idea. Here is where the investigation begins.

First, was something attributed to Stompin' Tom Connors:"I think people should die without their dreams being fulfilled, so maybe they can have an excuse for coming around again." It's a curiously happy thought in the week of his death: I wish him many unfulfilled dreams and many happy returns.

The other was a line by 97-year-old Harry Bernstein, who had recently had his first book, The Invisible Wall, published. Pat Fagan tells the story in the most recent Writer's Digest that he had been sitting literally at the feet, looking for feedback on some writing he had been doing. Bernstein had asked "Who're you trying to write like," and Fagan had answered "Rick Bragg." Bragg is from Alabama, and was raised the hard way in tough times. Bernstein observed: "Probably bleeds red dirt. A fella' like that just has to open a vein and his whole culture comes out barefoot. You're from the North. Write what comes natural. You can't fake place."

"You can't fake place." That's the line that made me sit up and pay attention. That and, "You don't try to write like somebody you're not."

Maybe, but we are a lot of different people in the course of a lifetime, or in the course of a lot of returns to unfinished work for other lifetimes. And we can be in and from a lot of different places. If he's right, and I hope he is, Connors has to come back to collect a whole lot of new parts of himself, to fill out his voices. And the rest of us had better hope we can do something to fill the void until he does come back to work.

Stompin' Tom followed another piece of Bernstein's advice without ever hearing it, and was doing it long before Bernstein gave it: Bernstein told Fagan to do just what Connors did by necessity, to get off the interstate and poke around in the unfamiliar. Stompin' Tom travelled the whole of Canada for the whole of his life, and picked up bits of himself in us, everywhere he went, so in the end he was everyone he wrote about and sang as. He was the tobacco picker in Tillsonburg, Bud the Spud, a hockey fan, and all the other kinds of Canadian dirt he bled from on top of his stompin' board.

The many voices of Tom Connors are what made his voice authentic every time out. They made him such an original that the New York Times ran an obituary, fascinated in part with his success as an entertainer who made has name by and for shunning the U.S. star-maker machinery.

Douglas Martin's March 7 obit marvels:

         Canadians who sought American success, [Connors] said, were  “border jumpers.”

          In 1978, Mr. Connors began a decade-long retirement to protest what he saw as the Americanization of Canada’s music industry. A particular gripe was Canadian songwriters who rhapsodized about places like Alabama and Tennessee. [Bernstein would have loved that line.] He returned only after a new generation of Canadian punk performers had discovered his music. 

        With three-quarters of Canadians living within 100 miles of the United States border and flooded by American media, many Canadians strive to preserve a distinct cultural identity. Mr. Connors seemed eager to lead the fight. In a letter he had asked be published after his death, he said that all his work had been inspired by “Canada, the greatest country in the world.” 

Paul Thompson, the artistic director at Passe Mureille early in the 1970s used to audition actors by asking then to give him five Canadian accents. Most at that time could not name five Canadian accents, let alone deliver lines, let alone perform characters in them. He used to complain that when he asked for a rural Canadian, he got Paul Newman doing Hud. 

But the accents were out there. In 1970 or so, I once stood in line in a highway construction camp in northern BC, just east of the Alaska panhandle. The heavy-equipment operator ahead of me in line placed his supper order to the cook. I said, "Melfort, Saskatchewan."  He answered "Carrot River." They are maybe twenty minutes apart. A generation ago, Thompson's and a community of like-minded theatres like like Twenty-fifth Street House Theatre and Theatre Network, and The Mummers, used to go out and collect those accents, those voices telling their stories.

And the accents are out there now. This is a country in constant revision of itself, in which new stories are happening all the time, and new accents are coming to life to tell them, as we migrate inter-provincially or inter-regionally (mostly from East to West these days--or from south to north).

Ours is now, as it always has been and I hope always will be, a country with an opening for a voice collector or a whole community of voice collectors to do the rounds off the Trans Canada Highways, and to come around and come around and come around again, poking around gathering stories in their authentic accents.

Stompin' Tom's 61 albums are part of the proof. In every place and at every time, Canada has work for someone in and on every corner, someone getting that dirt worked into veins willing then to be opened so our "whole culture comes out"--barefoot, work-booted, moccasined, loafered, sandaled, and shod every which way.