One sentence about my Roots Music Canada experience on its fifth birthday
Roots Music Canada writer Paul Corby.
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It was all because Levon wasn’t feeling too well, so Colin came down to sound check At Massey Hall, and then the two of them got to talking, so Lucinda’s sound check got sort of delayed, so then during the show, David Newland got so impatient with Lucinda’s growly comportment that he put up a post complaining about Lucinda’s big book of lyrics being at center stage and yadda yadda, and Corby got ticked and wrote back something typically steely about how the TSO all had big books onstage, and that was so unprofessional and then when Steve Bell came to Hugh’s Room, Newland introduced him onstage, and Corby decided to take the edge off his comment by meeting up with Newland, whom he neither knew nor appreciated fully, and after that encounter Emma Jane told Corby that nobody wanted to write a review of Steve Bell because of his unstylishly ballsy Christian attitude, so Corby, who was deep into church at the time, did some typing and sent it along to Roots Music Canada, and Meghan toned down the steeliness so that when Steve Bell read it, he really liked it a lot and got his whole church to go online and like it too, and Roots Music Canada found out that their server had a peak “like” capacity of two hundred so Corby got to write more after that, about The Wheat Pool breaking up and Jerry Leger at a backyard party, and at that point, Newland got a new job, and his partner, Andy Frank, got sick, and then Gordy The Moose went underground strictly from hunger, so Corby just kept on writing on his blog, which apparently nobody read except Heather, who kept typing back, until one day in Ottawa the apparent became obvious, that RMC would be once again required to swerve upstream in pursuit of the sources and forces that affect roots culture in Canada, giving Heather the opportunity to revive Gordy and send Corby to Wimpy’s to have a burger with Suzie Vinnick and David James, who were just about to start shaking the love around themselves anyways, for an opening story posted five years ago this week, so that soon articles, news, pictures, links and general root-a-baggage were again being spread across the land in a timely and accurate manner, musing lovingly on the muscular recordings of dishy harmony trios, fiddle provocateurs, dubwise guerillas and blues grumblers, relaying reportage on activism and club life, and then, as opportunities for new missions began abounding at festivals and hootenannies, drawing in rootical investigative journalists like Bev and Elizabeth and Leonard and Ian and Jan and Flo, who all went mental into that good night, brandishing phones and cameras to take in the acoustic particulars of the many concert and campfire events that have traditionally carried the secret chord along, including blearily recalled weekends at the Canadian Folk Music Awards, Folk Music Ontario, Mariposas, powwows, Hillsides and kitchen parties, and a magical moosery tour of Folk Alliance in Montreal that brought Gordy into intimate proximity with…but let’s save that story for another post, and just for now wish many more candles to a gutsy little online publication that has kept a light on for all of us here in the musical struggle and illuminated our pathway through the ongoing thundersnow.
Congratulations Heather, and well done.
Suzie Vinnick at Wimpy’s, where she met Paul Corby for their first interview for Roots Music Canada. Photo credit: Paul Corby
