Well I hate to disagree with you Art since you're mostly right, in this as in other matters...but without electricity you wouldn't hear much from any of those guys unless they're in your living room!

Aside from that, Ed McCurdy, Alan Mills and maybe JA Cameron were in the habit of playing solo--the others mentioned almost always had ensembles.

The other guy you're thinking of could only be James Keelaghan--who also has pretty much always had a 3-piece combo, but hasn't really expanded much beyond that. I think he's stuck pretty close to the original simple production style he's always had, which is devastatingly effective for his type of music. (Such as in "Cold Missouri Waters", you wouldn't want to mess that classic lyric up with a bunch of instrumentation. Which reminds me, he's another Albertan western cross-border songwriter e'nt he, at least part of the time.)

W-O