Help: Positive Ontario Music?

Subject: Positive Ontario Music?
From: Clinton Hammond2
Date: 25 Jul 00 - 04:32 PM

(This thread directed mostly towards Canuck Catters)

So, where the hell are all the folk songs about how good it is to live in Ontario??? Most of the songs that I've found that even mention Ontario are about how crappy it is to farm up north, how quickly one can die working on the great lakes, or about some carpet-bagging East Coaster wining on about how there's no jobs here either...

Are there no pro-Ontario songs out there at all?

(Not that I'm saying that Ontario is a fantastic place to be... That's a whole different thread...)

Any suggestions folks?

{~`

Subject: RE: Help: Positive Ontario Music?
From: Peter T.
Date: 25 Jul 00 - 04:44 PM

GIVE US A PLACE TO STAND, AND A PLACE TO GROW, A PLACE TO CALL ONTARIO, A PLACE TO STAND, A PLACE TO GROW, ONTARIARIARIO!!!!!!!! (I would have thought that would have killed off all positive Ontario songs in its grim shadow)....yours, Peter T.

Subject: RE: Help: Positive Ontario Music?
From: Mike Regenstreif
Date: 25 Jul 00 - 04:56 PM

Inspired by the song Peter T. quotes above, Stan Rogers wrote, "Ontario, you know/There's a place I'd rather be/Your scummy lakes and the city of Toronto/Don't do a damn thing for me."

Mike Regenstreif

Subject: RE: Help: Positive Ontario Music?
From: GUEST,John Leeder
Date: 25 Jul 00 - 05:44 PM

The Canadian Journal for Traditional Music, vol. 26, has an article on Toronto songs. Some of them are positive (believe it or not! -- no, I shouldn't be snide, I lived seven relatively happy years in Toronto, and have many good friends there). The article is by Michael J. Doucet, and is entitled "A City '...Waiting for the Sunrise...': Toronto in Song and Sound".

Subject: RE: Help: Positive Ontario Music?
From: Mooh
Date: 25 Jul 00 - 06:53 PM

...not in Mike Harris's mandate anyway...Mooh.

Subject: RE: Help: Positive Ontario Music?
From: flattop
Date: 25 Jul 00 - 07:49 PM

Before Raffi got into childrens' music, he used to sing a song called Yonge Street by Peter Mathieson. I think it's uplifting to those of us who don't live in Toronto. (I even like the song when I lived in Toronto.)

Yonge Street

See the Chevys row on row going by you with the flow
As they carry all the driftwood to and fro
See a thousand lonely faces press a thousand window panes
Searching for a reason not to go

Oh, don't you go to Yonge Street
It's bound to waste your time
Don't you go to Yonge Street
It's bound to waste your time

Them fancy dressing ladies they sure look so fine
Damn near enough to drive a man insane
Find the only girls you know in an arcade picture show
Pay your dime and pretend they know your name

Don't you go to Yonge Street
It's bound to waste your time
Don't you go to Yonge Street
It's bound to waste your time

Well a man sure needs a woman to help him through the night
To keep him keeping on when time get rough
But if I feel tomorrow the way I feel tonight
I feel I'll probably feel I've had enough

I'll probably go to Yonge Street
Try to waste my time

Trying to waste my time

Waste more of my time

Subject: RE: Help: Positive Ontario Music?
From: sophocleese
Date: 26 Jul 00 - 12:01 AM

Well Tamarack have written a few. You could check them out.

Subject: RE: Help: Positive Ontario Music?
From: GUEST,CBJames
Date: 26 Jul 00 - 12:12 AM

Don't Take me back to Toronna

I might go back there but I don't wanna

Give me Combermere, or Barry's Bay , or even Killaloe

But the City of Toronna

JUST WOn'T DO

They say it's cold there

They got no trees to block the wind

And when you waiting for the subway

its just like 'rginal sin

But when your waiting at the bus stop

and your feet have turned to ice

You won't think that Toronto's very nice!

Subject: RE: Help: Positive Ontario Music?
From: Clinton Hammond2
Date: 26 Jul 00 - 12:59 AM

Soph... I'm more than a wee bit familliar with Tamarak and the only one that leaps readily to mind is Fields Of Rock And Snow... Not exactily positive eh?

{~`

Subject: RE: Help: Positive Ontario Music?
From: Joe Offer
Date: 26 Jul 00 - 04:03 AM

I suppose I'd get thrown out of the place if I mentioned that great song about Ontario wildlife, The Blackfly Song, so I guess I'd better not...
Seriously, how about Wade Hemsworth's Wild Goose? (click here for discussion of the song) - that song reminds me of the best of Ontario. Rick Fielding did a nice recording of it.
I was born in Detroit and my French ancestors came from Windsor - I have many happy memories of the beauty of Ontario. A summer on Lake Huron is my idea of heaven.
And the sweet corn is unbelievable.
-Joe Offer, now in Sacramento, California-

Subject: RE: Help: Positive Ontario Music?
From: flattop
Date: 26 Jul 00 - 07:36 AM

Actually, I think Toronto is a wonderful city - great parks and ravines, parks along the waterfront, Toronto Islands, lots of restaurants, clubs, music and theatre, a rich choice libraries and stores, lots of interesting people and friendly ethnic groups, safe streets to walk at all hours of the night. I could go on and on but I have to drive to Toronto this morning from Joyland Beach. You Toronto folks, take pleasure in this beautiful summer day.

Subject: RE: Help: Positive Ontario Music?
From: Willie-O
Date: 26 Jul 00 - 07:47 AM

The Wild Goose is a staple in my repertoire too--an underexposed classic. And if it ain't positive as such, it's extremely Canadian in its ambivalence.

For what its worth, check out my songs in the Mudcat Songbook, "Off To the Sugarbush Again" and "Spring on the Mississippi."

And then there's this one:

The Banks of the Don

"On the banks of the Don there's a dear little spot
A boarding house proper where you get your meals hot
You get fine bread and water and you won't pay a cent
Your taxes are paid for, your board and your rent

...

If you want to get into that palace so neat
Take tanglefoot whiskey and get drunk on the street
You'll have a fine family carriage to drive you from town
To that grand institution just over the Don

Our boarders are honest, not one of them steals
For we count all our knives and forks after each meal;
Our windows are airy and barred up beside
To keep our good boarders from falling outside

W-O

Subject: RE: Help: Positive Ontario Music?
From: Peter T.
Date: 26 Jul 00 - 09:11 AM

Anyone do this song Willie (apart from you)? Like to hear it. It's about the local jail, for furreigners. (Not the jail for foreigners, that is in another part of town).
yours, Peter T.

Subject: RE: Help: Positive Ontario Music?
From: Rick Fielding
Date: 26 Jul 00 - 11:09 AM

Ya know, a lotta people have dumped on Ontario over the years, but I lived in a lot of different places over the years and I always ended up coming back here. Yeah, I know, the current Government makes Newt Gingrich seem like a moderate, there's a heck of a distance between the verrry wealthy and the verrry poor, it costs a lot to live here, but there seems to be a kind of balance that I haven't found elsewhere.

I did a song on my Folk-Legacy album called "Lifeline" which is very positive about Ontario. There certainly have been "pop" songs about Ontario and Toronto, but they're of the "New York, New York" ilk, and that style of music has never interested me. Folk(ish) songs have never been wholly positive about an area anyway. "Scarborough Settler's Lament" is a great song, and typical of the genre...but not really "positive.

Good luck Clinton

Rick

Subject: RE: Help: Positive Ontario Music?
From: Willie-O
Date: 26 Jul 00 - 12:45 PM

"Positive songs" about a place tend to be ones that someone pays you to write...Alex Sinclair of Tamarack for example penned this stately ode which became the official anthem of the Ottawa suburb of Nepean... (nuh-PE-an)

Nepean, Nepean, what a wonderful place to be in,
Suburbia is not so bad, our great big backyards make us glad

etc... *(My response, as a Gloucester (GLOS-ter) native, (cross town from Nepean) is:) Gloucester, Gloucester, to live there it won't cost yer
As much as in Nepean, and it ain't any worse to be in.

W-O

Peter, I haven't actually gotten around to learning "Banks of the Don"; its in Collected Reprints from Sing Out, 2nd volume (1964-73). Doesn't Rick play it? he seems to do all the ones I've ever thought about learning. Edith Fowke recorded O J Abbott singing it on "FOlk Songs of Ontario".

W-O

Subject: RE: Help: Positive Ontario Music?
From: Clinton Hammond2
Date: 26 Jul 00 - 02:28 PM

Thanks Rick...

And believe me, I wan't intending to 'dump' on Ontario... Grew up on the North Shore of Superior, THE great lake... So Ontario, especially Northern is my home, and that never goes away... I find that most of the bashing of ontario is about South Ont. And well I can't say as I'm surprised... after 4 or 5 years of living in Windsor, I'm really looking forwaqrd to moving back to Canada in the next couple of years...

(American Brothers, I like ya find, I just don't want to be you!)

The Black Fly song was the inspiration for naming the Folk Club in Sault Ste Marie, The Black Fly Jam Club... see if they still sell the Blackberry jam at the gigs... If they do, tell whoever is behind the table to tell RICK D. that I need some! LOL!!!

[~`

Subject: RE: Help: Positive Ontario Music?
From: GUEST,John Leeder
Date: 27 Jul 00 - 10:17 AM

There was a Black Fly Club in North Bay in the '60s. I saw Mike Seeger there -- he had laryngitis and did all instrumentals. Any connection with the Soo club?

Subject: RE: Help: Positive Ontario Music?
From: GUEST,Roger the skiffler
Date: 27 Jul 00 - 10:21 AM

Yes, Rick, Pete & the rest of the Mudcat Toronto Chapter, but what's all this I hear about spending money on plastic moose [is there a song in that?] while neglecting to purify the water supply? Sounds just like Bracknell Forest Council!
RtS

Subject: RE: Help: Positive Ontario Music?
From: Peter T.
Date: 27 Jul 00 - 10:31 AM

Yes the city of Toronto has an outbreak of plastic meese, which is a copycat (copymoose?) of what has been going on in Chicago and elsewhere. The problem is that the mooses have antlers, and they are easily wrenched off and pinched. So we are in the midst of a city with emasculated moosies. The water supply in Toronto is just fine: the quality of the rest of Ontario's water supply is moosterious.

yours, Peter T.

Subject: RE: Help: Positive Ontario Music?
From: black walnut
Date: 27 Jul 00 - 10:33 AM

ugh.... the moose.

absolutely can't wait til they vanish, each and every blasted one of them....

~'nut from toronto

Subject: RE: Help: Positive Ontario Music?
From: Clinton Hammond2
Date: 27 Jul 00 - 10:50 AM

Black Flies in North Bay? The Sault Connection, I cannot coment on... I do not know... but it bears investigating...

{~`

Subject: RE: Help: Positive Ontario Music?
From: GUEST,Roger the skiffler
Date: 27 Jul 00 - 10:58 AM

Peter, you moost stop doing that- you've had me spluttering in mirth over my PC to the puzzlement of my cubicle neighbours!
RtS

Subject: RE: Help: Positive Ontario Music?
From: Marion
Date: 27 Jul 00 - 01:21 PM

Mike, do you mean that Stan was inspired to write "Watching the Apples Grow" by that song? Or just that you were inspired to mention it?

There's a song we sang as kids:

(Sample verse)
They say that in the army, the food is very fine
A pea rolled off the table and killed a friend of mine

Oh, I don't want no more of army life
Gee mom I want to go back to Ontario
Gee mom I want to go home.

I can't decide if Stomping Tom's "Big Joe Mufferaw" is Ottawa-positive, Ottawa-negative, or Ottawa-neutral. I like it.

Marion

Subject: RE: Help: Positive Ontario Music?
From: GUEST,John Leeder
Date: 27 Jul 00 - 06:10 PM

Ontario had an advertising slogan: "Ontario: Is there any place you'd rather be?" I believe Stan's song was a response to that slogan rather than the "Ontari-ari-ario" song as such. But the song may have been used in the advertising campaign. Anyone remember?