Nathan Sloniowski's Blog Cabin

Folk and bluegrass musicians band together Oct. 28th for concert against uranium mine at Almonte Old Town Hall

Almonte – Oct. 24th, 2007: Help protest through song! Mining exploration on the Mississippi watershed has so far inspired an ongoing hunger strike by a grandmother named Donna Dillman (see pic below), a protest flotilla down the Mississippi River to Parliament Hill, and multi-million-dollar lawsuits and counter-suits between mining interests  and private citizens or Native People. This Sunday Oct. 28th starting at 7pm at the Old Town Hall in Almonte, Ont., Ottawa Valley folk and bluegrass musicians are uniting behind this important cause  to help raise funds for the Native People and private citizens who are manning protest positions near the Frontenac County mining company site and running community awareness campaigns. Concert tickets are $20 for adults and $5 for youth and are available at the door.

Musicians who have agreed to play at the benefit concert include: Terry Tufts, Neville Wells, Joey Wright, Jenny Whiteley, Ric Denis, Jennifer Noxon, Nathan Sloniowski, Jim Kirkham, Frank Morrison and Morrison's wacky alias, "Dwain Scudder". Tufts, Wells, Morrison and "Scudder" have each written songs inspired by the anti-uranium mining issue and will be playing their new compositions at the Sunday concert.

Frank Morrison, the first landowner to raise awareness regarding mining prospecting plans at the headwaters of the Mississippi River, will MC the concert.

For more information, please contact Kathryn Briggs or Terry Tufts by email: bluenorthernmusic@gmail.com or call Frank Morrison himself at 613-479-8016

Wilbert Munro, the life-long love of Florence ("Mrs. Munro") passed away this week. More than 70 years of marriage. Well over 90 years of living. And all if it, near as I can tell from knowing three more generations of their wonderful family, was time as well spent as anyone could ever aspire to.

Florence and Wilbert Munro

I'd never make a living in one of those Nashville songwriting cubicles. I'm just not a "tunes-on-demand" guy. But after over a year of working on it with some great musicians Chris corralled to compliment Terry's immense talents on just about anything with strings, I wanted that damn record done and out there as much as anyone.

So in March 2004 I woke up, and the house, normally a hive of activity with three kids under 12, was uncharacteristically quiet. I could hear water dripping off the roof. The sun was surging through the windows like a waterfall of light. You just knew winter was ending, finally. I cranked open a window to let in some fresh, unfrozen air, and wondered what Wilbert and Florence might be up to that day. How glad they'd feel at their age to bid farewell to another Lanark County winter. I could imagine them sharing that feeling with a few tentative steps out in the melting snow, Florence holding Wilbert's arm.

I hadn't seen them for six years. I went out to their family homestead on the Munro Line right in the middle of the ice storm of 1998. Gail Barr, Wilbert's great granddaughter, was worried sick about them as was her mother Ev. So off I drove in a Japanese four-banger with Gail's husband George Yaremchuk and another buddy, Barry Lyon, to see if they were OK.

Other than the hydro workers cutting down wires and clearing fallen trees, and the very occasional plow, we were the only idiots out there. But it was a good cause. What should have taken 20 minutes stretched into a couple of hours as the ice kept coming down and we marveled at the bent and broken treeline along the road. When we got to the Munro homestead, it was dusk.

Leaving the car at end of the laneway, we were all a little scared. Power was off everywhere and we couldn't fathom how Wilbert and Florence might have fared. We did spot a wisp of smoke coming from the small chimney of their depression-era farmhouse, the "new house" on the property (the "old house" was the backdrop for the cover of "No Wicked for the Rest"). As we trudged further up the lane, we also spied the glow of a kerosene lamp in one of the windows.

We knocked on the door, heard two hearty voices beckon us in, and there they were, pretty much like you see them in the picture above, but bathed in the gold of a kerosene lamp. Wilbert on one side of the kitchen table, a beer in his hand, with Florence right across from him, clutching her own brown bottle. The wood stove was blazing, and both of them were smiling and laughing like a couple of kids. They wondered what the hell we were doing out on a day like that, teased us that they'd lived half their lives without hydro, and insisted we sit down and share a beer with them.

That ice storm visit was the first time I met Wilbert and Florence, other than through family lore, but I could tell instantly that this hospitable, fun-loving, irreverent old couple had all kinds of home fires burning. They were clearly head over heals in love. Fully and completely nuts for each other after more than 70 years of marriage!

Meetings like that just stick with you. And sometimes, with the right combination of motivation and a beautiful March morning, they turn into songs. "Mrs. Munro" took oh, maybe 90 minutes to write start to finish. In the studio, it was Jeff Bird who really infused the musical soul on this one with his mandolin and guitar work, not to mention his bass. Stella Luna's harmonies lift it up to somewhere I hope Wilbert will always be able to enjoy.

The song's written from Wilbert's point of view, a tribute to a wife who loved him so very much. And now I guess it's a tribute as well to a life so very well lived.

We'll all miss you Wilbert, but nobody so much as Mrs. Munro.

Nathan

P.S. If you don't have a CD and want to listen to "Mrs. Munro", I posted it tonight at my CBC3 site. It sometimes takes a day or two for the tunes to show up, but it'll be there soon.

For about 15 years starting in the late-70s, I fooled around on the fringes of the Ontario music scene. It started in a three-piece "we'll hang from rusty nails on tall crosses before we play covers!!!" punk band called Herbert Trench. Relying on the first-band standbys of distortion and attitude-phasers-on-stun lyrics, we actually recorded and got gigs, and our last one at the Dalby House in Elora, Ontario ended in an insanely Spinal-Tappish rock-em-sock-em melee that involved several of the local constabulary.

Kosovar Benefit Concert

The Ragged Flowers Love to Burn CD Cover

During the mid-90s I joined the dot-communist egotariat, became a minor Internet guru with a book and CBC Ottawa Radio column, but in a far more lasting way (!), got involved in The Ragged Flowers. Our family had picked up sticks from Wakefield to go across the Ottawa river to the arts-and-crafts community of Almonte, Ontario.

I headed straight for the coffeehouses and in 1997 got an open stage going at a now-defunct but very sweet little place on the edge of town called Nipperkins that was run by Helen McEwen. At the opening jam I played with Ian Douglas and Ric Denis for the first time. It was an awesome experience and we did it again, and again. As our audiences grew (at one gig in a 40-seat restaurant they went down the street to the Legion to commandeer another 30 chairs for everyone who showed up) we attracted Steve Reside and Rob Riendeau to make it a very eclectic fivesome.

The Ragged Flowers story be told CD Cover

(This review first appeared in theHumm, the Ottawa Valley's Arts, Entertainment & Ideas monthly newspaper.)

By Nathan Sloniowski

Near the start of the recording sessions for his current CD, a 30-ft. tree limb smashed through his daughter's bedroom just moments after Terry Tufts lifted her from her crib. It was an arboreal grace note not lost on a songwriter who worships the wilderness and has spent most of his life massaging gem-like sounds out of wooden instruments.

Terry Tufts at Broadcast Lane Studios

The house roof repaired, six months later fate struck again. Listening to board mixes and returning from a wake on an icy winter night last year, Terry made way for an oncoming motorist only to spin out into a ditch, totaling his van. Upside down and miraculously unharmed as he wrestled his prized Martin guitar out of the wreck, he might have been forgiven for wondering if his CD title was perhaps better suited to a David Cronenberg movie.

The Better Fight has been fraught with far less peril since its launch before the folknicenti at Kingston’s Ontario Council of Folk Festivals conference in October. Totally unscathed by reviewers, audiences, airplay, trees or vehicles, Terry Tufts is supremely motivated, and thankful.

With five others under his belt, his latest “make-or-break” CD is making it. He’s relentlessly touring his new music to enthusiastic club, coffeehouse and house concert audiences right across the country and into the States. He also kicked off 2006 with 20 anointing minutes on CBC’s Sounds Like Canada national radio show in January.

The new 13-song CD’s stocked in chains like HMV, selling out locally, and has full-on support from a respected record label (Borealis Records’ co-founder Bill Garrett not only backed it, but decided to produce it).

Fresh from a string of performances up and down the left coast and speaking from fellow guitar ace Dave Clarke’s (of bluegrass band Steel Rails fame) home in Victoria, Terry’s enthusiasm lights the wire when he gauges reaction to The Better Fight:

“When I’m doing interviews eyes are opening up a lot wider because my bread and butter has been acoustic folk. With this one it was all about serving the song, so while the acoustic guitar is present because that’s the core of what I do, there are Motown influences where there need to be as well as jazz and other influences. A three-minute tune called Black Velvet Elvis (aka Live Right) is getting a lot of attention because it’s short enough to block a show around, and it moves.”

The song, co-written with Terry’s wife Kathryn Briggs and friend and fellow songwriter David Francey, offers a whimsical art-as-life lesson on making choices with the refrain: “Toss up a coin. What’ll it be? Black Velvet Elvis or Georgia O’Keefe?” Fronted by Terry’s six-string, held down with unapologetic rhythm by John Dymond on bass (John Geggie plays on most other tunes) Ross Murray on drums and Rob Graves on percussion, and topped with the flourishing keyboards of Mark Ferguson and backing vocals of Montreal folk-rock legend Jesse Winchester, Black Velvet Elvis is a signature song for this record. It’s got a great groove. It’s got a lyric that lifts you higher. And it lets Terry riff on a low-down southern-fried electric lead as well as his exacting and melodic finger-style acoustic orchestrations.

While Terry and his hand-picked band provide many pleasures on The Better Fight, what’s most satisfying about this CD are the songwriter’s vocals, coaxed out by long-time collaborator and sound engineer Ken Friesen at Almonte’s Signal Path studios.

Tufts confesses that in the past his recorded vocals have been sometimes forced or “churchy”. But with trust, friendship, humour and an insistence that it’s often the first take that makes the song, Friesen captured the essential Terry Tufts - the one who can convince you to change your life’s path or weep with joy at the kindness of strangers in the span of one live set. What you hear on the new CD is someone giving marrow and soul to his music - from the stunning dynamics and almost shocking intimacy of Appalachian traditional Awake Ye Drowsy Sleeper to the righteous anger of his own anti-war anthem Embracing the Addiction.

The Better Fight is the culmination of Terry Tufts' career as a gifted and passionate songwriter. Whether he's tackling the dilemma posed by an unjust war or savouring moments in time most of us don’t make time for, he displays a boxer's heart wrapped inside a troubadour's spirit. That said, may he thrive and delight us with another 50 years of his inspired life, and the last word, from his new CD’s title track, goes to him:

“If I live to be 100, I may never get it right. But there’ll be no small consolation, for having fought the better fight.”

Nathan Sloniowski lives undercover in Almonte as a Ukrainian folk-rock activist and performer

Record Review by Nathan Sloniowski

Stephen Fearing. If you'd asked me 10 years back I'd have identified him as one of those great singing but unsung Canadian folk icons hiding out in BC with Valdy. Multi-Juno nominations. A solid rep for melancholy, soulful songwriting. A cult following among other musicians. A master of the six-string. And, as too often goes with that territory, no real radio hits or fan-base in the mainstream.

That underground and (likely) underpaid stance started to change with Fearing's move to southern Ontario in 1994, which had far more to do with pursuing a woman (he is now married to her) than pursuing fame.

But it turned out to be a good move for his career as well. He was situated inside a much larger performing arts scene, was the "new new folk thing" from the Left Coast and, perhaps most importantly, hooked up with blues brother Colin Linden (guitar sideman for Leon Redbone, David Wilcox, solo artist and prolific producer of Bruce Cockburn and Colin James), and rocker brother Tom Wilson (Florida Razors, Junkhouse, assorted Neville Brothers and Nashville projects).

This talent-rich, road-tempered trio share a love of Willie P. Bennett, who in the early 70's was, well, a lot like Stephen Fearing in the early 90's. In honour of Willie (who thankfully, didn't give up music despite being ignored by almost everyone except musicians, and is now enjoying a resurgence as both a solo artist and the hardest-working mandolin player in Fred Eaglesmith's band), Fearing, Linden and Wilson formed Blackie & the Rodeo Kings (BARK). BARK has gone over BIG on radio stations and in concert halls across North America. The band's second CD in 2000, Kings of Love, won the music-biz-anointing Juno that Fearing has been personally nominated for a handful of times.

While I totally dig Linden's gorgeous lead guitar work and Wilson's deep-as-the-earth vocals and gritty lyrics, in my books Stephen Fearing is the secret caramel hidden inside the BARK chocolate.

To know and understand BARK is to begin to understand Stephen Fearing's new CD, That's How I Walk. Linden co-produced it and Wilson co-writes (as do several others, who undoubtedly nudged the sometimes lyric-starved Fearing to ride the train while the glory's good). It in no way resembles an underground folkie statement made only for the ears and accolades of other musicians.

Instead, I think it's Fearing's most ambitious, fearless effort ever, and should find a wide and supportive audience on both sides of the border. Not to say there's "no folk inside" this new CD, but what's also inside is some swampy slide-guitar Americana (Like the Way You Said), cutting political commentary on the oxymoron that is "Free World Democracy" (Rave on Captain) and loving instrumental touches with horns (Town Called Jesus) and strings (Showbiz, Glory Train, When My Baby Calls My Name).

Fans of the "pure folkie Stephen" will be happy to know that the instrumentation, which also includes liberal use of Hammond-style organs and stick-drums, never puts Fearing in the back seat of his own artistic wheels. His trademark silky laid-back vocals are up in front of the mix where they need to be on all 14 tracks, as is his often stunning and rhythm-centred guitar work.

What we have with That's How I Walk is a courageous earful of a best-to-date album from an artist who's not afraid to break his own mold. How's it going to do? Well, StephenFearing.com shows a gruelling touring schedule. As important, in Canada the record's been picked up and promoted by Bruce Cockburn's label, True North. And in January, 2003 it comes out in the USA on that country's powerful folk-roots label, Rounder Records.

Stephen Fearing, unsung no more.