Free in the harbor

 Strange the paths we follow...I was watching a documentary on YouTube about Air Canada Flight 797 and the fire that forced it to make an emergency landing at Cincinnati.  Most of the passengers survived but one who didn't was a singer/songwriter I'd never heard of.  And so I followed up by looking into the career of Stan Rogers.  Already established in Canada, he was beginning to be noticed in the States and was returning from Dallas to Toronto forty years ago today.  He was thirty-three.

As soon as I began listening to his music, all of which is happily available on YouTube, I felt the grievous loss.  Rogers was from Hamilton, Ontario, but spent vacations with his grandparents in Nova Scotia where he learned to love the maritime life.  Many of his best songs memorialize fishermen and sailors whose way of life is ending because of industrialization or changing times; he wrote with almost erotic intensity of the relationship of men to their boats ("The Jeanie C," "The Mary Ellen Carter" and especially "The Last Watch").  He reached into Canadian history with songs like "Northwest Passage" and "Barrett's Privateers" -- some people assume the latter is an authentic sea chantey.  His painfully small body of work can stand beside the work of Pete Seeger and Bruce Springsteen, though less overtly political and a better singer than either.  

I tracked down a biography from 1993 by his friend Pat Gudgeon, long out of print but a used copy can be found.*  It's very short, filled out with the lyrics to Rogers' songs, a discography and even some old family recipes.  A more complete study would be welcome, but we have the songs.

If I had to choose one it would be "The Lock Keeper," a dialogue between a merchant captain and a lock-keeper set sometime in the past.  The captain can't believe a man can be happy living beside a lock his whole life.  The lock keeper doesn't understand how anyone could leave his home and family for years at a time.  Rogers was hurrying home to his wife and son when he died, but he gives both men their due in a song of Schubertian intensity.  What he could have given us in the past four decades.

*Chris Gudgeon, An Unfinished Conversation, foreword by Sylvia Tyson, Viking, 1993