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At Folklife, Expo 86, from August 4th, BC Day, through August 10th, Phil Thomas, wife Hilda and friends Barry Hall and Sheila Baker, performed the collected song heritage of British Columbia. A recording of two performances has been compiled into this rare Compact Disc. Photos from the live concert |
Phil Thomas and Friends
Songs from the PJ Thomas Collection, performed by Phil Thomas; vocals, banjo; Hilda Thomas: vocals, 12-string guitar; Barry Hall: vocals, mandolin, fiddle, guitar, banjo; Sheila Baker: vocals, bass.
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Produced by Cariboo Road Music 2004 Williams Lake, BC |
| At present the PJ Thomas Collection is accessible through a printed catalogue in the University of British Columbia Main Library, Special Collections; Indexes for the Philip J. Thomas Popular Song Collection, edited by Philip J. Thomas (2004) |
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 Vancouver, BC Folklife Expo 86BC Life in Song Songs of labour, retirement songs, topical songs, cowboy songs, love songs, homesteaders' songs, - any songs that express the lives of British Columbians. Phil Thomas began in 1951, when he was teaching at Pender Harbour, a small school where he taught several subjects to a class of Grades 6 - 10. His students were the children of fishermen and loggers, but the music they heard was what came over their battery radios. "They were receptive to all kinds of things," he says, "but they needed a bridge between their own lives and the broader cultural influences, between where they were and where they were going." Thomas wrote to the National Museum in Ottawa asking for songs that dealt with primary industries. "They wrote back that they didn't know I meant." So he started looking around for songs that spoke to the students' lives. He persisted in his search, following leads throughout the province, collecting enough songs for a record album, a book, Songs of the Pacific Northwest, the second edition is soon to be published, and a collection of 500 songs now held in the Provincial Archives in Victoria. The PJ Thomas Collection reaches into many aspects of Western popular culture through the centuries. The songs are predominantly in English, but French, Gaelic, German and other ethnic groups are also represented. "The best songs," he says, "are those that take you back to your roots, and also extend you. They are songs that make the ordinary extraordinary." |
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Notes on the Songs
1. Teaming Up the Cariboo Road A reworking of the popular minstrel song "Climbing Up The Golden Stairs" made to fit Ashcroft-Barkerville trunk road after the building of the CPR, c.1890. Sung in 1963 at Chase, BC, by Henry Currie's grandson, Gerald Currie. 2. Bonnie Are the Hurdies, O Scottish miner-poet James Anderson made this parody of Robert Burns' "Green Grow the Rushes - O" in Barkerville in 1865. The hurdies were 'dime-a-dance' partners, belonging to a troup traveling to mining camps. 'Hurdies' in Scots dialect also means 'buttocks'. 3. Far From Home Written in 1859 at Emory's Bar by a San Franciscan placer miner known only by his initials "W.H.D." Made for the 1851 popular tune for "Home Again"; here it has its own tune by Phil Thomas(1958). 4. The Kettle Valley Line Author Ean Hay recalled his father's tales of how locals hitched rides on the Kettle Valley Railway when it was being built and in the early days. Ean wrote the song for a radio programme. It was first given its present form by Stan Triggs on his Folkways album "Forecastle and Bunkhouse Songs of the Pacific Northwest". 5. Old Go-Hungry Hash House In the late 19th and early 20th century, many single men in BC ate in boarding houses some of which merited this broad satire. Some variants of this has "all" for "old". 6. The Truck Driver's Song Kerry Papov, a truck driver from Nakusp, tells of the reality of driving on industry's 'back roads'. He sang this for me in Nakusp in 1973. 7. The Wreck of the C.P. Yorke Stan Triggs, deckhand on a tugboat in 1961, was told of the tragic sinking of the 'C.P.Yorke', and made this song. Here the tug's final fate is more precisely told. 8. The Song of the Sockeye Ross Cumbers' verse, preserved in a glass-covered notice board at deserted Wadham's Cannery, was given a tune to make this song. Cumbers gillnetted both at Rivers Inlet and north at the Nelson Cannery near Prince Rupert for 17 years from the late 1930's. 9. The Grand Hotel Tommy Roberts' Grand Hotel, on Vancouver's Skid Road, welcomed loggers from the camps, and held their money until it was spent. He also looked after himself as the song tells. 10. Haywire Outfit Bill Lore, 'cat man' (i.e. tractor driver) knew what it was to face the frustration and dangers of a poorly financed and ill-equipped logging 'show'. His experiences around Princeton, BC, in the 1950's led to this song. 11. Where the Fraser River Flows One of several songs the Wobbly (I.W.W.) songwriter Joe Hill made in 1912 for the striking construction workers on Mackenzie and Mann's Canadian Northern Pacific Railway (later part of the CNR.) The original tune is "Where the River Shannon Flows", but this upbeat variant is now common in BC. 12. Annexation 1846 This British view of the boundary dispute between Great Britain and the USA was published in 1846 just before the agreement that the border was to be the 49th parallel west of the Rocky Mountains to Georgia Strait. Many Americans had chanted "54' 40" or fight" north to the Alaskan Panhandle, while the British wanted the border to be south of the mouth of the Columbia River. 13. Young Ted Brown All of this song is a spoof and doubtless amused the New Year's gathering in Barkerville in 1867. In reality a miner led his loaded mule, if he had one. 14. Klondike! A reworking of a London humorist's verse on the 1897-98 gold rush. Capt. Charles Cates learned it from his tug-captain father. 15. Drill, Ye Tarriers, Drill A well-traveled song with several Canadian versions, this came from the building of the Canadian Northern Pacific Railway (later the CNR). It satirizes the harsh and callous treatment of the workers by an arrogant abusive foreman. The tarriers were the railway navvies - either the foreman's so-called slackers or 'terriers' - diggers and tunnel workers. 16. PGE Song Made by Keith Crowe (c.1950 working on the planned extension north of Prince George) for the amusement of the crew. The Pacific Great Eastern (aka 'Provincial Government Expense', 'Past God's Endurance', etc.) became the British Columbia Railway (aka 'Better Call Roadmanter'), and in 2004 has been turned over to the CNR. 17. Bank Trollers My neighbour in Pender Harbour in 1951, the author-fisherman Bill Sinclair wrote a 147-line narrative verse using stanzas of 2 to lines. The poem was published on the centre-fold of a 1953 pamphlet of the Vancouver Peace Assembly. In 1978 using the form and text of Sinclair's first three stanzas, I made this 47-line adaptation as a song, which I sang at the first Vancouver Folk Music Festival. Trolling is to be distinguished from gillnetting and seining. 18. Banks of the Similkameen A parody of 'Lake of the Ponchartrain', placing the story on the banks of the Similkameen River which runs east across southern central BC. Variants of this BC version take the traveler from Grand Forks or Keremeos to Oroville, WN, and from Penticton or Okanagan Falls to Keremeos. 19. Hard Rock Miners Two men, meeting after years apart, talk of their mining careers from being lowly muckers to the singer becoming a certificated miner. They had been buddies for nine years, moving from Montana to Manitoba and Ontario, finally going their own ways. At the time of their meeting the singer is working at the Sullivan Mine in Kimberly, BC. 20. The Green Chain Song Jim Munro's song describes millworkers' lives from the point of view of the man at the end of the whole production line from the jack ladder to the greenchain. There he hauls, separates and stacks the 'green' boards. This dangerous exhausting job became mechanized in as mills modernized. Lynn McGown made this tune which is now well-known. 21. Logging Medley Put together these three little ditties depict west coast logging in the first part of the last century. Two of them were learned from Ed Dalby, born in Vancouver in 1886. One satirizes an ill-run camp at Monroe, WN, with its lazy foreman. The other is about hand-loggers headed out in search of the big Douglas fir - the 'pitch backs' - where they can be felled onto the shore to be bunched and floated off. This medley describes the feelings of the whistle punk, who in the days of steam logging pulled a wire to signal the movement of the logs. The safety of the operation and the lives of other men depended on his signals. 22. Are You From Bevan The chorus dates from the bitter struggle from 1912 to 1914 of coal miners on Vancouver Island for recognition of a union of their own choice. The verses partially rework the original "Are You from Dixie", and briefly tell the story of the strike. The "foul" was the calling out of the militia against the miners in 1913. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ```````````````````````````````````````````````````````````` |
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