FROM AN INTERVIEW WITH STEPHEN FEARING BY JEFFERY PEPPER ROGERS IN ACOUSTIC GUITAR MAGAZINE:

Would you talk a little about Willie P. Bennett and the songs that Blackie started with?

Fearing We got together when I first moved to Ontario from British Columbia. I phoned up Colin Linden because I had this idea in the back of my head: to record a tribute album to Willie P. Bennett. Willie P. Bennett is a contemporary of Bruce Cockburn and Stan Rogers and those guys; he's very unknown even in Canada, and yet his work is known to a certain degree. Willie is in Fred Eaglesmith's band and has been for years. But he is a great songwriter in his own right and probably has influenced Fred as much as anyone. We felt that his music was underappreciated. It was at a time—seven or eight years ago—when the tribute album was at its height. We didn't want to do a tribute record that was like all the others, where you get 12 artists together to do 12 songs. We wanted to be a cover band that did Willie P. Bennett. Colin felt that we needed one more voice to adequately cover the material, which gives you a sense of the breadth of Willie's stuff, and Tom Wilson came in. What started as a one-of deal; make an album of Willie's music and that's it, no touring plans, nothing; just grew and grew and grew. The chemistry between the three of us was very strong.

We named the band after one of Willie's songs,"Blackie and the Rodeo King," and the sound we make comes from congregating around his music, which is hard to pigeonhole. It is quintessentially Ontario music, in the same way that you can identify singer-songwriter stuff from Texas. It's very Canadian, because it's not country only and it's not folk only but it taps into all these things.