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Split Shift: Songs and Poems of the Workplace
SONG LYRICS ARE LITERATURE. ALMOST all of the song lyrics we hear in British Columbia are imported. But the Vancouver Industrial Writers Union has marked its tenth anniversary by joining forces with Fraser Union, a folk music ensemble, to release Split Shift: Songs and Poems of the Workplace (Octopus Books, $10), a cassette of mostly British Columbian songs and poems about daily working lives.
Four of the songs were adapted or collected by B.C. folklorist and author, Phil Thomas, including the Pender Harbour fishing shanty, 'Bank Trollers', with lyrics by Bill Sinclair. As the Pete Seeger of B.C. musical history, Thomas has done more to collect and preserve indigenous B.C. lyrics than anyone in the province.
Born in Victoria, World War II veteran Thomas was suspected of being a communist while teaching at Delta Senior High School in 1949. It turned out to be a very lucky break for the history of B.C. musical literature. Forced to take a remote teaching job in Pender Harbour, Thomas befriended his next-door neighbour, the once famous. B.C. novelist Bertrand 'Bill' Sinclair. Although Sinclair had achieved unprecedented sales with set-in-B.C. novels like Poor Man's Rock, he had taken up full-time commercial fishing in 1932.
"In those days Bill Sinclair was bothered by the fact that he didn't know any distinctly B.C. songs," Thomas recalls, "and yet we had all sorts of fishing songs about Newfoundland and the Maritimes. He started making up his own songs and' broadcasting 'em over the fishermen's frequency in the mornings. Pretty soon most of the other one-man trollers on the West Coast of Vancouver Island took to listening in."
Thomas, on the lookout for meaningful music to teach local students, wrote down the lyrics to one of Bill Sinclair's sea shanties. Twenty-five years later Phil Thomas found himself donating an invaluable collection of 5OO made-in-B.C. folk songs to the provincial archives. Included in his archives were more Sinclair manuscripts and the original lyrics Sinclair had printed in B.C. Fisherman magazine. As B.C.'s leading folk music historian, Thomas also published two books, Songs of the Pacific Northwest (1979) and Twenty-Five Songs for Vancouver, 1886-1986 (1985).
"After the war there was a folk song revival," he says, "We began to listen to Burl Ives, Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and Leadbelly. I started to write down songs like 'Pender Harbour Fisherman', songs that came out of working." Thomas bought a guitar, which he couldn't play at the time, to encourage others to sing for him. Then while attending night classes at Vancouver Art School in the 1950's, he met an art school model named Ray Hall. "We thought Ray's poetry was terrible but we used to love to hear him sing. Pretty soon our little musical get-togethers evolved into a regular thing."
That regular thing evolved into the Vancouver Folk Song Circle in 1959, founded by Thomas, his wife Hilda, Rolf Ingelsrud and AI Cox ten years after Thomas had met Sinclair, the singing ex-novelist. In the decades that followed Thomas set out to find out how the west was sung. He took instruments and a tape recorder to places like Williams Lake, Fort St, John, Nakusp, Mayne Island, Smithers, Windermere, Kelowna and mining communities on Vancouver Island. It turned out there were several people who had quite a reputation. The Linsley Brothers out of Revelstoke. The Kehoes of Anarchist Mountain. Bill Lore, who became mayor of Tahsis. One person would refer me to the next."
It wasn't always easy. Some of the singers needed to be reassured that Thomas wanted their music for the right reasons. And many of the working class composers were migrant workers, habitually moving from one job to the next. Once, in a Windermere beer parlour Thomas heard about a celebrated local singer named Buster Tegart. A fishing guide and mountain man who organized pack trains, Tegart lived deep in the Rocky Mountains.
After a long and arduous drive, Thomas found the local singer, only to discover Tegart was too inebriated to sing a note.
"A common theme is accepting one's destiny as a miner, fisherman or whatever," says Thomas, "Minor hardships are often made a grim joke in songs of places: the winters of the East Kootenays, the rains of Ocean Falls or Holberg. 'The bitter struggle of miners fighting for the right to have their own unions produced several B.C. songs, one of which was recorded 50 years after the events that sparked its creation."
Thomas says that the richest folksong tradition in B.C. probably lies with the native peoples. Other non-English speaking groups such as the Doukhobors and the Finnish settlers of Sointula have also continued and developed extensive musical cultures.
To mark its 30th anniversary this year, the Vancouver Folk Song Circle is hosting a celebration on September 20th at the ANZA club, at West 8th and Ontario in Vancouver. It's open to the public, by donation.
Coincidentally Dale McIntosh of the University of Victoria has published History of Music in British Columbia (Sono Nis $27.95), a reference guide to B.C.'s musical ensembles and major musical personalities from 1850 to 1950. Last year Ellen Schwartz also published a book about the lives of seven Canadian female singer-songwriters, Born a Woman, (Polestar) which includes interviews with Rita MacNeil, Sylvia Tyson, Ferron, Connie Kaldor and others.
[BCBW Autumn 1989]
Four of the songs were adapted or collected by B.C. folklorist and author, Phil Thomas, including the Pender Harbour fishing shanty, 'Bank Trollers', with lyrics by Bill Sinclair. As the Pete Seeger of B.C. musical history, Thomas has done more to collect and preserve indigenous B.C. lyrics than anyone in the province.
Born in Victoria, World War II veteran Thomas was suspected of being a communist while teaching at Delta Senior High School in 1949. It turned out to be a very lucky break for the history of B.C. musical literature. Forced to take a remote teaching job in Pender Harbour, Thomas befriended his next-door neighbour, the once famous. B.C. novelist Bertrand 'Bill' Sinclair. Although Sinclair had achieved unprecedented sales with set-in-B.C. novels like Poor Man's Rock, he had taken up full-time commercial fishing in 1932.
"In those days Bill Sinclair was bothered by the fact that he didn't know any distinctly B.C. songs," Thomas recalls, "and yet we had all sorts of fishing songs about Newfoundland and the Maritimes. He started making up his own songs and' broadcasting 'em over the fishermen's frequency in the mornings. Pretty soon most of the other one-man trollers on the West Coast of Vancouver Island took to listening in."
Thomas, on the lookout for meaningful music to teach local students, wrote down the lyrics to one of Bill Sinclair's sea shanties. Twenty-five years later Phil Thomas found himself donating an invaluable collection of 5OO made-in-B.C. folk songs to the provincial archives. Included in his archives were more Sinclair manuscripts and the original lyrics Sinclair had printed in B.C. Fisherman magazine. As B.C.'s leading folk music historian, Thomas also published two books, Songs of the Pacific Northwest (1979) and Twenty-Five Songs for Vancouver, 1886-1986 (1985).
"After the war there was a folk song revival," he says, "We began to listen to Burl Ives, Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and Leadbelly. I started to write down songs like 'Pender Harbour Fisherman', songs that came out of working." Thomas bought a guitar, which he couldn't play at the time, to encourage others to sing for him. Then while attending night classes at Vancouver Art School in the 1950's, he met an art school model named Ray Hall. "We thought Ray's poetry was terrible but we used to love to hear him sing. Pretty soon our little musical get-togethers evolved into a regular thing."
That regular thing evolved into the Vancouver Folk Song Circle in 1959, founded by Thomas, his wife Hilda, Rolf Ingelsrud and AI Cox ten years after Thomas had met Sinclair, the singing ex-novelist. In the decades that followed Thomas set out to find out how the west was sung. He took instruments and a tape recorder to places like Williams Lake, Fort St, John, Nakusp, Mayne Island, Smithers, Windermere, Kelowna and mining communities on Vancouver Island. It turned out there were several people who had quite a reputation. The Linsley Brothers out of Revelstoke. The Kehoes of Anarchist Mountain. Bill Lore, who became mayor of Tahsis. One person would refer me to the next."
It wasn't always easy. Some of the singers needed to be reassured that Thomas wanted their music for the right reasons. And many of the working class composers were migrant workers, habitually moving from one job to the next. Once, in a Windermere beer parlour Thomas heard about a celebrated local singer named Buster Tegart. A fishing guide and mountain man who organized pack trains, Tegart lived deep in the Rocky Mountains.
After a long and arduous drive, Thomas found the local singer, only to discover Tegart was too inebriated to sing a note.
"A common theme is accepting one's destiny as a miner, fisherman or whatever," says Thomas, "Minor hardships are often made a grim joke in songs of places: the winters of the East Kootenays, the rains of Ocean Falls or Holberg. 'The bitter struggle of miners fighting for the right to have their own unions produced several B.C. songs, one of which was recorded 50 years after the events that sparked its creation."
Thomas says that the richest folksong tradition in B.C. probably lies with the native peoples. Other non-English speaking groups such as the Doukhobors and the Finnish settlers of Sointula have also continued and developed extensive musical cultures.
To mark its 30th anniversary this year, the Vancouver Folk Song Circle is hosting a celebration on September 20th at the ANZA club, at West 8th and Ontario in Vancouver. It's open to the public, by donation.
Coincidentally Dale McIntosh of the University of Victoria has published History of Music in British Columbia (Sono Nis $27.95), a reference guide to B.C.'s musical ensembles and major musical personalities from 1850 to 1950. Last year Ellen Schwartz also published a book about the lives of seven Canadian female singer-songwriters, Born a Woman, (Polestar) which includes interviews with Rita MacNeil, Sylvia Tyson, Ferron, Connie Kaldor and others.
[BCBW Autumn 1989]
Submitted on June 15, 2004 in By David.
