Canadian Music ~ James Keelaghan

 

BIO by James Keelaghan

A few years ago I went to my high school reunion. I wasn’t feeling a lot of terror about it. I am a successful musician. I have Juno awards and nominations, I felt, as an alumnus, I had done my alma mater proud.

I bumped into someone I hadn’t seen since graduation. I knew that she was respected in her field, well travelled, and successful. I asked what she had been doing since high school, and she ran down the list of degrees and foreign postings and the like. She asked what I had been up to. I gave the condensed version. I was a writer and performer, I sang, and played guitar.

She nodded slowly up and down… “So, you are still doing what you were doing, when you were a teenager then?”

Well, I guess, ya…sorta. I’m not playing as many stairwells now as I did back then, but it’s still pretty fun.

She made it sound like I was in a rut.

So just in case, you think that all I do is play and sing…

Since 2011, I’ve been the Artistic Director of the Summerfolk Music and Crafts Festival in Owen Sound, Ontario. and since 2018 I’ve been the AD at the Stewart Park Festival in Perth. The job has given me a new passion for programming. I have to book the artists and program  6 daytime and two nighttime stages. The walls of my office end up looking like this:

I was born in Calgary but have lived in Toronto, Winnipeg and now, a charming little town called Perth in Eastern Ontario. I’m trying to say at home more these days, as I have a couple of boys at home, aged 16 and 12. I want to spend as much time with them before they fly the coop.

If you know my music, you know that I love history. I studied at the University of Calgary, though I never actually completed my degree. I concentrated on the history of science, under the tutelage of the dear, departed Dr. Margaret Osler and was influenced and inspired by Dr. Shel Silverman – one of the great storytellers of our time.

While I read a lot of history on many different topics, my areas of specialty remain science and World War One, especially the Battle of the Frontiers, 1st Marne and Verdun.

I prefer Irish to Scotch but never developed the drinking gene, so I am good for about 1 shot if I ever have the urge.

I am omnivorous. My favourite meal is breakfast. Followed by lunch and then dinner.

I’m more comfortable on the plains than in the mountains.

I once met Harry Belafonte in an elevator in Saskatoon.

I am a fellow of the Royal Canadian Geographic Society. I was added to the college in the same year as Margaret Atwood and had the pleasure of singing her a song on her birthday at the annual Fellows dinner.

I’ll add more factoids as time passes, or feel free to lob a question my way.

BIO by Roddy Campbell

Contemporary folk songs, at their very best, offer an insight into the hardships, attitudes, and resolve of characters and events that shape our day-to-day lives. You can dress these songs up in inspired arrangements and intricate instrumentation but, at their very essence, the archetypal folk song is all about stories. Stories and people. Something such compelling songwriters as Eric Bogle, Si Kahn, Ewan MacColl, and Stan Rogers … all understood and mined so effectively.

 James Keelaghan, too, burrows into that same rich seam with equal ability and comparable conviction. To quote Eric Bibb, the award-winning American acoustic bluesman, after listening to Keelaghan perform: “[You’re] a joy to hear, just beautiful.  Reminded me of the best of the best of another time – Liam Clancy, Tom Paxton etcetera.” Less colourful but more succinct, Dave Marsh, the eminent Rolling Stone critic, simply described Keelaghan as “Canada’s finest songwriter.”

Truly, throughout a career that now spans almost four decades, the Juno and Canadian Folk Music Award winner has created a repertoire of incalculable importance – a unique body of work, either inspired by or drawn from the folk tradition. Ten solo albums flush with enduring lyrical relevance. Take the beautiful but heartbreaking ballad, Jenny Bryce, for example. From any point of view, it’s indistinguishable from the numerous traditional tracks covered on his disc A Few Simple Verses.

What’s more, various other originals from the Keelaghan cannon  must surely enter the domain of traditional folklore. Most notably, Small Rebellions (highlighting the 1931 slaughter of peaceful striking miners in Bienfait, SK); Hillcrest Mine (a prelude to the worst coal mining disaster in Canadian history); Kiri’s Piano (a triumph over adversity amidst the shameful, racist treatment of Japanese-Canadians during WW II); Cold Missouri Waters (a harrowing portrait of the 1949 Mann Gulch Fire in the mountains of Montana) …

A relentless musical spirit, Keelaghan has surrounded himself with a variety of crackerjack companions down through the years that have largely included the late, innovative, free-spirited fiddler and composer, Oliver Schroer, the exuberant, Chilean, Latino-fusionist guitarist, Oscar Lopez (with whom Keelaghan made two albums under the banner of Compadres), or the ubiquitous, former Spirit of the West anchor and multi-instrumentalist, Hugh MacMillan. Scrupulous audiences from Alberta to Australia bared witness to the sum of these resourceful parts.

There have been several mouth-watering collaborations in the writing department, too. Celebrated names in the folk world such as Karrine Polwart, Jez Lowe, Catherine MacLellan, David Francey, Lynn Miles, Dave Gunning, Cara Luft and J.D. Edwards … all contributed to notable Keelaghan releases.

“I love co-writing,” he says, “it’s the spark that gets me motivated – the fresh approach to a lyric or a different way of forming a melody for a song is so stimulating. Besides, it’s also a great impetus to finish the damn song.”

James Keelaghan grew up in a bungalow in northwest Calgary, AB, with six siblings, an Irish father, and an English mum. His brother Bob would develop into a noteworthy guitarist with the excellent, but now defunct, Agnostic Mountain Gospel Choir. From his father, Jim, James developed a love of history. The family record collection provided further inspiration. Traditional folk LPs by the likes of The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem, Séan Ó Riada, and Harry Belafonte certainly caught young Keelaghan’s ear. He still cites Belafonte At Carnegie Hall as a recording that changed his life at age six!

Incidentally, Tommy Makem and Liam Clancy would live in Calgary in the mid-‘70s where they recorded a weekly TV show that James and his father routinely attended.

“They were stunning performers,” says James. “I can still hear aspects of Tommy Makem’s sound in my voice. He was a fabulous singer, fabulous.”

And so, another link in a storied musical chain was forged. James Keelaghan, as they say, is “a man you don’t meet every day.”