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The Legendary Horseshoe Tavern. David McPherson
Читать онлайн.Название The Legendary Horseshoe Tavern
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781459734968
Автор произведения David McPherson
Жанр Музыка, балет
Издательство Ingram
The next thing you knew, Starr hired Burke and the rest of the band — luring them away from their regular gig at the Drake by offering them each the union scale of $110 per week. “That was really good money in those days, because before I got into music, I was working in a silkscreen printing shop for forty dollars a week, working ten hours a day, six days a week,” Burke recalls. “At the Horseshoe we did three, and later four, forty-five-minute sets a night, from 9:00 to 1:00, six days a week.”
The Blue Valley Boys had Sundays off, but for the rest of the week they backed every Nashville act who came through town: from legends and Grand Ole Opry mainstays like Bill Anderson, Conway Twitty, Little Jimmy Dickens, Stonewall Jackson, George Hamilton IV, Tex Ritter, and Ferlin Husky to the new breed of burgeoning 1960s outlaw country acts, Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson. Burke remembers when Tex Ritter appeared one Saturday night; the lineup on Queen Street stretched for several blocks — all the way down to Peter Street.
The local country and western fans made the Nashville artists feel right at home in Canada; the Horseshoe was one of the most welcoming venues they played on the touring circuit, which included stops at places like the Golden Nugget in Las Vegas and the Palomino Club in Los Angeles. George Hamilton IV was a regular at the bar; he especially loved Canadians, and playing the Queen Street tavern was always a treat. He sums it up in the liner notes to Canadian Pacific, the 1969 tribute album to his northern neighbour that features covers of songs written by Canadian folksingers such as Gordon Lightfoot and Joni Mitchell:
Toronto is one of the great cities of the world and one of my truly “special places.” (Along with Winston-Salem and Nashville.) It’s becoming quite a booming music center and is even often referred to in country-music circles as the Nashville of the North. Two network Canadian country-music shows originate in Toronto (The Tommy Hunter Show and Carl Smith’s Country Music Hall ) and there are several clubs in the area that feature country music fulltime and a twenty-four-hour a day country music station — CFGM.
Another anecdote from Burke’s four-year ’Shoe run involves Little Jimmy Dickens: “One afternoon Jimmy [Dickens] came in, and the fiddle player was playing a fiddle tune and I was playing bass just with my left hand, and I was hitting the snare drum with my right hand. Little Jimmy said, ‘I like that!’ so I played the whole week with him that way, which was a pain in the ass!”
Dottie West, who, along with Loretta Lynn and Patsy Cline, is considered one of country music’s most influential female artists of all time, also played the Horseshoe. West arrived at the tavern in 1964, bringing with her the top ten hit “Love Is No Excuse” she had just recorded with Jim Reeves (who died tragically later that year in a plane crash). Burke recalls, “[West] asked me to learn Jim Reeves’s part. Every time she came to play the Horseshoe, I did Reeves’s part on that song with Dottie, which was a thrill.”
Another night, the band who was appearing at the Horseshoe (their name escapes Burke all these years later) happened to have their set scheduled right in the middle of a Stanley Cup playoff game. Montreal was playing Toronto. Burke and the Horseshoe house band played a set before the game started, but by the time the headliners were set to start things up, the puck was dropping in the good ol’ hockey game. The crowd protested; they wanted to watch the game. So, naturally, the musicians put down their instruments, sat with the rest of the audience, and watched the Maple Leafs battle the Canadiens on the one little TV that was perched in the corner over the bar. “If you couldn’t see it, you would just wait for the screams,” Burke recalls.
In 1967, Burke left the Blue Valley Boys and formed East Wind; the new band had a couple of appearances at the Horseshoe as the guest of the week in the early 1970s. While he hasn’t played at the Horseshoe since those dying embers of the club’s country music days burned, the East Coast musician hasn’t stopped playing — he still plays with East Wind today. He’s also been inducted into both the Canadian Country Music Hall of Fame and the New Brunswick Country Music Hall of Fame.
Fellow New Brunswick musician Norma Gallant later filled the vacancy Burke left in the ’Shoe’s house band. Gallant had moved to the Big Smoke in the 1960s to pursue a music career, changing her name to Norma Gale — she was yet another travelling musician and East Coast migrant who found a temporary home at Toronto’s Horseshoe Tavern.
Of all the East Coast migrants who found success and called the Horseshoe home, no one left more of a legacy or set more records than Mr. Charles Thomas Connors, better known as “Stompin’ Tom.” “If you ever had to put one thing in a time capsule to explain the Horseshoe, Stompin’ Tom would be the one thing I would put in,” says journalist Peter Goddard. In the next chapter, you will learn how and why this man from Skinners Pond, Prince Edward Island, came to define the next era in the legendary bar’s history.
3
Tom’s Stompin’ Grounds
Come all you big drinkers, and sit yourself down
The Horseshoe Tavern waiters will bring on the rounds
There’s songs to be sung
And stories to tell
Here at the hustlin’
Down at the bustlin’
Here at the Horseshoe Hotel
— Stompin’ Tom Connors, “Horseshoe Hotel Song,” from the gold record Live at the Horseshoe (1971)
Drifter, outsider, larger-than-life, and patriotic to the core — there was no one else like Stompin’ Tom Connors.
Many consider the musician to have been a national treasure. His catchy songs with simple lyrics, which are easy to memorize, are still sung from coast to coast by generations of Canadians. Who doesn’t know the refrains to his timeless tunes such as “Sudbury Saturday Night,” “Bud the Spud,” or “Big Joe Mufferaw,” about everyday characters who embody the spirit of our country? Mark Starowicz captured the essence of Tom’s patriotism in a feature for the Last Post in 1971:
I never thought that nationalism was so deeply ingrained in this country until the first time I saw Connors at the Horseshoe. I’ve seen a packed crowd go wild over a singer before, but I’ve never, never seen so much unrestrained joy and applause as when this rumpled Islander got up and started strumming.
Jack Starr (left) celebrates with Stompin’ Tom Connors on the occasion of the Horseshoe Tavern’s twenty-fifth anniversary in 1972.
As the 1960s started to set, making way for the 1970s, the country singer from Skinners Pond, Prince Edward Island, made up his mind that he wanted to perform at the Horseshoe regularly. So he kept coming in and asking Starr to give him a chance. Again and again he’d get his courage up, only to have it knocked down by Starr. But eventually the young musician’s persistence paid off. Jack Starr saw something others didn’t in the fellow outsider.
Today, Connors’s legacy is as legendary as the tavern itself. You could say, for a while, it became Tom’s bar. “Tom made a big mark in that place,” recalls Johnny Burke.
As this chapter unfolds, it will become clear that those eight words of Burke’s are definitely an understatement. Dick Nolan’s biographer, Wayne Tucker, shares the following anecdote that foreshadows Connors’s lasting legacy:
Willie Nelson played the Horseshoe in the 1960s, backed up by the Nolan-led Blue Valley Boys. Dick was around Willie every night and they raised a few glasses together.