Local History – Page 2

In my childhood, Wilf Carter was the only Canadian I heard on radio

From October 28, 1983

Any examination of Canadian Country Music would have to take into account the enormous influence of early American Country performers. In my childhood, Wilf Carter was the only Canadian I heard on radio; later of course by 3 years came Hank Snow,then Don Messer with Charlie Chamberlain, Duke Neilson and Ned Landry, but all the rest were US singers, morning, noon, suppertimes and late nights. Soap operas and The Happy Gang ( they were happily, Canadian) took up radio afternoons and into the evening dramas and comedy sketches the length of the diual from 7 p.m. to midnight. There was Fibber McGee and Molly, The Shadow, Amos and Andy and all other fabulous situation character epics that made up radio’s golden age.

Early mornings, in Eastern Canada, you could hear the WLS National Barndance stars such as Linda Parker, Bob Atcher and Bonnie Blue Eyes from six a.m.; perhaps you could hear them earlier but that’s when my father usually turned the radio on and I awoke and knew I had another hour before I had to get up for school.

At noon there were live or transcribed US country music shows and at suppertime, mixed with the news broadcasts, nearly every station had a request country music program.

There were singers like Jimmy Rodgers, Hank Snow’s avowed patron saint for whom he named his only son, Jimmy Rodgers Snow and Gene Autry who made” Silver Haired Daddy of Mine” a stock song of nearly every country singer in Canada. There was blind Georia-born tenor Riley Puckett, whose many solo recordings included “Rock All Our Babies to Sleep”, later recorded by WIlf Carter and which is reputed to be the first disc to feature a country yodeller. Gid Tanner’s Skillet Lickers created an international hit with “Down Yonder” and Jimmy Davis gave the world “You are My Sunshine” and won an election as Governor of Louisiana in 1944 with it. He inscribed it indelibly in every Canadian country singer’s repertoire for many years to come.

Then late at night there was WWVA Wheeling with all-night disc jockeys and live music mixed. Saturday nights were special; that’ is when you could tune in the great WWVA World’s Original Jamboree with such top country personalities as Doc Williams whose “Old Brown Coat And Me” was recorded by many Canadians; Wilma Lee and Stoney Cooper who made “Walking My Lord to Calver’s Hill a show finale with many Canadian travelling groups; Lulu Belle and Scotty who wrote and recorded “Good Old Mountain Dew”, “Have I Told You Lately That I Love You” and other great international country favourites.

Earlier on Saturday Night there was the Duke of Paduca, Amer’ca’s crown prince of country comedy and the inspiration for many Canadian travelling shows comedians; Judy Canova had her own radio program and who became the prototype of numerous standup girl comediennes both American and Canadian; Red Foley the first country star to have his own US network TV show.

Countless great US country music stars crowded the dial including the Grand Ole Opry with Roy Acuff who made the “Wabush Cannonball” as well known in Canada as in the US. (I’ve even heard a Norton area place name version of it.), Ernest Tubb, a Jimmy Rodgers disciple who arranged Hank SNow’s Grand Ole Opry debut and those two early bands, the Crook Brothers and the Fruit Jar Drinkers who inspired and influenced the creation of many early Canadian country bands. There was an endless procession of performers, each possessing his own magic. Never to be forgotten either are the National Barndance Saturday night roster, Patsy Montana, the girl who wrote “I ant To Be A Cowboy’s Sweetheart” and was the inspiration of a host of Canadian girl singers such as Terry Parker and Marie King. Irene was Arky The Arkansaw Woodchopper who sang many lumberjack songs familiar to Eastern Canadians and America’s favourite comedian for two decades, and on and on.

How could any single Canadian fledgling country singer not have been influenced by them? It would only have been possible to escape the i9nfluence if he or she had been raised in a completely isolated backwoods area without radio or phonograph.

I lived in a veyr rural section of N.B., ten miles by horse and wagon to the nearest town. Neither electric lights nor pavement reached us but the telephone did. We had the last phone on the line and it was my job toi run up Jordan mountain and “hollar” the message across to our neighbours.

Yet we did have a battery radio, one of the old timers, operated by a pack of telephone “round cells” . And we had entertainment over it that not even the King of England or the most wealthy potentate in the east could have commanded 30 years earlier in spite o their power and riches.

That was the first wave of American influence, you might say, the radio wave.

Then there were the movies….the “B” Western was 100 per cent American.

Ken Maynard was the first cowboy to sing on the silver screen. The songs he did were rough, rowdy renderings of authentic western plain songs such as “Get Along little doggie”, “The Trail to Mexico” and “Home On The Range”, songs almost every Canadian was soon singing.

He was followed quickly by Gene Autry,. Maynard featured Autry in his first movie rold “In Old santa Fe” (1934). He brought to celluloid the rest of the Jimmy Rodgers school of song writing and singing with professionally written songs, professionaloly staged and sung with phantom strings and choruses that seemed to issue from the sagebrush, probably from a vand of hidden Cherokees.

After him came a host of others, including Roy Rogers, Jimmie Wakely, Tex Ritter, Dick Foran and many more. There had to be a musical interlude or two in all these movies. It seemed to be an unwritten law; it was part of the receipe of success. Those who couldn’t sing pressed the services of Bob Nolan ( a boy who grew up in N.B, and who wrote “Tumbling Tumbleweeds” “Cool Water”, “Wanderers of the Wasteland” and dozens of other classic western songs) and the Sons of the Pioneers, or Roy Williams and the Riders of the Purple Sage, or a number of other groups of their kind who, in the guise of cowpunchers or dance hall performers, would gather at the round-up campfire or the parlor social hour to sing the latest western hits or a newly composed song the group had written for the occasion.

How could anyone not be influenced? Nearly every radio program record and movie bore the “made in the USA” stamp and most Canadians consumed a large portion of them daily.

Playing Hockey On ‘The River’ Could Be Hazardous!

“Watson get out of the water! You’ve got your new clothes on! Your father is gonna kill you!”

These were the words we heard before we could even see the dam and river. But, I’m getting ahead of my story…you have to understand certain things first!

In Sussex from at least the 1930’s to the early 1950’s the favourite unofficial rink in Sussex was a stretch of quiet water above the filtration plant dam on Trout Creek. The dam created a deep pool about 30 feet wide which, because it was not as free-flowing as other river channels within the town, was always the first to freeze over in late fall..

It was the rink where most of us in that area got our early hockey instruction from older kids, no coaches or referees, seldom an audience. My apprenticeship began at eight when my grandfather bought me my first pair of tube skates. That was 1942; until then my skating had been done with bob-skates on garden patches of ice.

Like most everyone who played on ‘the river’ in those years I couldn’t afford a pair of shin pads or hockey gloves until my final years of high school. Just buying a stick and an occasional puck bent my budget and most of us still have bumps and scars as reminders of those happy days when we’d play from early morning to after dark Saturdays and Sundays and almost every afternoon after school when the weather permitted.

It was pick-up hockey with usually ten or more aside but with a number of those always ‘temporarily winded’ or recovering from minor injuries ‘off ice’ it made the number on each side usually just about right…a couple of defense men, a goalie and a number of forwards. Anyone coming late to ‘the game’ was picked up alternatively by the sides.

The big problem with the location, however, was losing pucks. All we ever had at the dam end as a barrier were wide planks on their edges and pucks lifted over a foot high that missed the net went over the dam and were usually not retrievable until the ice broke up in late March or April and water levels dropped. Those who took the time to fish them out became the suppliers of pucks the next fall but that stockpile usually ran out as all of them, of course, could ever be found, washed downstream and under banks. I remember one year retrieving 38 of them myself and others found some as well.

But the biggest thrill of all any fall was to be ‘first on the ice.’ You sort of felt you owned that river rink for the next few months if you were. But qualifying for that honour was not without its dangers as some found out. Thankfully there was never a fatality, but there were nail-biters.

I lived on Magnolia Avenue from 1939 until a couple of years after high school, a street that at our mid-stretch, had only a government yard and shed…a long tin covered structure housing bridge materials and road maintenance machines… between it, the river and dam. Winter Street which parallels Main in that part of Sussex ends right across from where the filtration plant and the dam once existed.

One afternoon I was walking home from school with Delbert Thorne, a friend in my class who lived on what was then the far end of Magnolia Avenue in the last of what were, originally, identical houses called the Seven Sisters. When we reached the end of Winter Street Delbert said suddenly: “It’s been pretty cold the last few nights, lets see if the river has iced up yet.”

As it turned out his sudden thought proved providential. We crossed the Avenue, walked along the side of the filtration plant and rounded the end of the tin shed to see a sight that afterwards the four of us would laugh about but could have easily ended in tragedy. Paul Watson who lived nearby had broken through the ice and was holding on to the edge. He was a grade younger than we were and his next door neighbour, a year younger than him, was running around yelling “Watson, get out of the water! You’ve got your new clothes on! Your father is gonna kill you!”

Well, Delbert and I quickly got a plank from the lumber piles in front of the shed, and between the three of us we were able to get Paul out, dripping and cold but uninjured. Paul’s father owned a fairly successful hardware and had taken him and his brother to Saint John recently for new winter outfits, one of which Paul was wearing. As the neighbour, who was his constant companion in those days, said he’d been so concerned about what Paul’s father was going to do to him he just hadn’t thought about helping him get out and, well, he knew Paul was a good swimmer.

That was the big danger of being ‘first on’: the dream of being that year’s celebrity could result in a quick cold splash back to reality. And if any of us had, unfortunately, gone through and came up under the ice we would have met the same fate as the young hockey player in Stephen King’s Dead Zone. If you’ve read that book or seen the movie that scene may already have come to mind.

My own icy water baptism occurred a couple of years later but not during a try at being the ‘first on.’ When it snowed we… us kids…would shovel off our river rink but when a thaw came and the river refroze with shale and ridges, as it sometimes did, we’d borrow a force pump with hoses from the filtration plant and flood the tennis court across the river in O’Connell Park.

One Saturday morning, after a late Friday night of hockey by moonlight I overslept, wolfed down breakfast, pulled on a jacket and hat, grabbed my skates, stick, a couple of pucks and ran across the open space…where the new Sussex Public Library now stands…which led directly to the river a few hundred feet upstream from the dam, jumped down. Unfortunately a few days of higher temperatures had weakened the ice under the snow and I was in water up to my waist before I knew it and still sinking. Luckily my reflexes were much faster then than they are now and I was able to catch an overhanging tree limb and pull myself out.

Then it was a fast run back to the house, dripping water all the way, a quick change of clothes and footwear and I was off again on the longer but safer route around by Main Street’s turreted bridge. And really thankful to find, on reaching our tennis court rink, that no one had witnessed my drenching or my dripping exit from the river

I’ve often thought that my two sons, who were transported in heated vehicles to indoor rinks with dressing rooms and toilets facilities during their dozen school years in organized hockey and never played a skirmish game on an open pond or river, missed so much in physical conditioning! All the fun of walking a couple of miles to play other area teams and often helping shovel an outdoor rink when you got there for a game at which we’d be lucky to have a referee, never even expect a linesman. It sure helped built self-reliance, certain survival skills and endurance, though, if nothing else!