Chatham, Ontario – my home town.

#1 - Chatham, Ontario (Mp3)

I guess everybody’s life has a soundtrack. I know mine has and it started back in Chatham, Ontario – my home town.

Chatham had been a terminal on the Underground Railroad, so there were a fair number of black folks ’round there, in Dresden and around Kent County. Back in the 50’s when I was coming into my teen years there was an unspoken kind of segregation going on. There was a black restaurant and a white restaurant. No signs were put up but everybody knew. White, middle-class kids went to one restaurant and black kids and rebels and working class kids went to the other.

The music we were exposed to at home was mainly classical and mainstream stuff. My mother had trained in opera singing and piano. My dad loved classical music and opera. He thought that black Gospel singing was screaming. He loved opera which I thought was screaming, so we had a sort of a stalemate there.

I came to change my mind about opera but he didn’t change his mind about gospel singing, unless it was Mahalia Jackson or Judith Anderson on a recognized TV network.

In his younger days he had worked in sales at the Heintzman piano factory in Toronto and taught himself to play piano by ear. When Aimee Semple McPherson, the evangelist, was in town he was hired to play at the Revival Meeting. His specialty was “Almost Persuaded” which was used to lure the shy up to the front so they could be publicly saved.

At night, in Chatham, when the AM signal was better, you could hear the black radio station signal from Detroit, Michigan – some 50 miles away. That sound would come trolling down into southern Ontario and it was very, very different. I stuck with it, learned to understand it a little. I even began to imitate it. This was several years before Elvis hit the airwaves and popular music was very, very white – with some notable exceptions like Nat King Cole. Little Willie John singing ‘I’m Glad’ over the AM radio waves coming from Detroit, late at night defines this whole musical period for me.

I went to the library a lot. My first job was working as a page in the school library in Grade 6. Then, I went on to work in the main Public Library. I started to get out books on folk music. I brought them home and my mother would play them for us on the piano and I’d learn the tunes. I plucked some of the easy ones out on my ukulele. They were, as I say, folk tunes which were the best tunes for me because they had 3 chords, if you really stretched it there might be 4 or even 5 chords for the fancier numbers. But mostly it was 3 chords and Chunka, Chunka, Chunka and away you go. That’s maybe why the bit of guitar I do play now is mostly rhythm.

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