By Jim Hagarty
2004
Howwwwdeeee!
It’s just great that Canada has its own flourishing country music industry. And why shouldn’t we? Hearts get broken in Moose Jaw (real place) and Fredericton just as hard and as often as they do in Memphis, I reckon. (Isn’t it strange how, as soon as you start talkin’ about country music, the word “reckon” just starts rollin’ off your tongue, along with “in” where “ing” oughta be? Not to mention oughta.)
Heck, when my friends and I were teenagers in a small town in southern Ontario, our entire lives were country songs from one dateless weekend to the next. Hank Williams might have been so lonesome he could cry, but some of us would have gladly handed over all our Beatles records and jars of pimple cream to be merely half as lonesome as he was.
So there is not the least thing wrong with musicians from north of the border wailing and yelping and yodelling into microphones by way of stage, screen and studio to share their pain with the rest of the world. Where I do have a problem, however, with all this Canadian country crooning is with the manner in which it’s being done by some of the artists. Why, I want to know, does a performer raised in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, have to sing, talk and look like he was born on the outskirts of Skunk’s Hollow. Tennessee? If Saskatooners have an accent and a look all their own (which they do — I’ve been there), why not use that? Why does a country singer from Hamilton, Ontario, have to wear a 10-gallon hat that weighs more than a leather saddle? And mourn that ever since his baby left him, he’s been thankin’ and drankin’ way too much? Or tell a TV interviewer: “Well, ah figure mah next recurd oughta bay a bit morr purrsnul.”
And does it make a heap (there I go again; it can’t be helped, on this subject) of sense (give me a break; I could have used lick) for a boy from downtown Kitchener-Waterloo (population 140,000) to be singing about all his experiences as a cowboy when the nearest he’s come to a ranch hand’s woes was when the fly busted out of his denims at the high-school dance? And what about well-adjusted, happily married men and women from towns from Edson, Alberta, to Summerside, Prince Edward Island, singing about the pain of seeing their lover in the arms of another. (How is it all these country singers are always walking in on all this lovemaking in action? Have they never heard of knocking?)
It’s a fad, Jim, you say. Didn’t you have long hair after the Beatles were on Ed Sullivan, sideburns when Elvis was popular, a beard during the hippie years? Give them a break. They’re just hitchin’ rides on a trend or two.
You’re right, you’re right. I forgive them all. Darn it all, I like listening to most of them. But I just think genius lies in hearing the voices inside and giving expression to them and the voices inside a kid from Gander, Newfoundland, wouldn’t have an Alabama accent. Imagine the sounds we could make if we had the courage to be ourselves instead of pale imitations of some Texas cowpuncher or Memphis good ole boy.
On the other hand, as long as stage actors born in Moose Jaw speak with accents as British as Prince Charles and Winnipeg-born “Irish” singers sound like they spent 30 years locked up in a Dublin pub, our country singers can be forgiven the odd “howdy” and the now and then “ya’ll”.
Keep it up, keep it up. It’s awl rat with may!!!
Mawmaw!
(Brought to you by the words heck, yodelling, heap, lick, hitchin’, darn, and ya’ll.)
