Every year, countries in search of musical glory select artists to represent them on the global stage. If provinces got the same shot, what song would we choose to represent Ontario?
This summer, we’ll find out. In TVO Today’s Ontariovision Song Contest, 16 beloved standards and newer classics will go head to head — and you’ll get the chance to back your favourites.
So kick back, relax, and listen to some trademark Ontario tracks. Voting begins in August, and in September, we’ll reveal the province’s signature song.
Song: “Sudbury Saturday Night”
Album: Originally released on The Northlands’ Own Tom Connors
Year: 1967
Artist: Legendary country and folk singer Stompin’ Tom Connors (1936-2013) is known for his patriotism and small-town anthems. He wrote and recorded more than two dozen albums during his lifetime, was made an Officer of the Order of Canada and inducted into Canada’s Walk of Fame, and earned two SOCAN Awards and six Juno Awards (which he subsequently returned in protest of what he saw as the organization’s preference for awarding artists who’d moved abroad).
Stompin' Tom Connors: "Sudbury Saturday Night" (Live at The Horseshoe Tavern)
Some may say Stompin’ Tom Connors is hokey, but, as he sings in “Oklahoma Okee,” he doesn’t care. Others, like music writer Michael Barclay, say Connors was “more punk rock than 99 per cent of musicians using that term.”
Born in Saint John, New Brunswick, on February 9, 1936, Charles Thomas Connors had a rough upbringing; when he was a child, he had a brief stint in jail, joining his mother during her incarceration. Eventually, he was seized by the Children’s Aid Society and sent to an orphanage. He was adopted by a family from Skinners Pond, Prince Edward Island, and lived with them until he ran away in his early teens. He then spent the next 13 years hitchhiking coast-to-coast across Canada.
Stompin’ Tom statue in Sudbury. (JasonParis/Wikimedia)
Connors wrote his first song, “Reversing Falls Darling,” as a teenager, but it wasn’t until 1964 that he got his big break at the Maple Leaf Hotel in Timmins. As the story goes, Connors was a nickel short for a 40-cent beer when the bartender suggested he play some songs to cover his tab. “No microphone, no stage; they just cleared away one of the tables in the corner and stood me there to sing. They gave me a bed and one meal a day. I stayed for 14 months,” Connors toldNerve magazine in 1986.
In 1965, he released a single, “Carolyne,” about the love interest of a miner in Timmins. He spent much of his early career playing in small-town bars, and his catalogue references many of these communities. He took this referential approach in his songwriting “in part because he knew it would bring the audience in, but also, he had a really strong belief that we didn’t celebrate our own stories enough in Canada,” says Charlie Rhindress, an actor and writer who penned an unofficial Stompin’ Tom biography.
“He’d talk to people and go to the local library to find out about a town,” says Rhindress. That’s how one of Connor’s most famous songs, “Sudbury Saturday Night,” came to be. Connors wrote the song in the mid-1960s during the third week of a three-week stint at the Towne House Tavern in Sudbury. The gig started off with small crowds, but “when he returned two months later, he got much bigger crowds drawn by stories of a stage he had destroyed with his stomping in nearby Chelmsford,” writes Rhindress. “They may have shown up to see the stomping, but they were won over by ‘Sudbury Saturday Night.’”
Sudbury was founded in 1883 during the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway, and its growth was spurred by the discovery of nickel and copper deposits. By the 1970s, more than a quarter of the city’s population was employed by the mining company Inco (now known as Vale Limited), which Connors references in his song about the hard-partying lifestyle of Sudbury’s hard-rock miners.
“Well the girls are out to bingo and the boys are gettin’ stinko/We think no more of Inco on a Sudbury Saturday Night,” Connors sings in his gravelly voice in the song’s opening lines. “It’s appealing to the working-class people who lived for the weekend, and he captures that so well,” says Rhindress.
“There’s a line that I love,” he adds. “‘The songs that we’ll be singing/they might be wrong, but they’ll be ringing’—that’s a big part of his persona. It’s like, if we make a mistake, who cares? We’ll just keep going. We’re just having fun here.”
Sudbury Celebrates Stompin' Tom On A Sudbury Saturday Night
But Connors was serious about Canadian culture. He won six Juno awards in the early 1970s, including five for country male vocalist of the year and one for country album of the year, which he returned in 1978. In a letter directed to the Juno’s board of directors, he argued that the organization was giving preference to artists who moved to the United States, instead of recognizing those who stayed home: “I feel that the Junos should be for people who are living in Canada, whose main base of business is in Canada, who are working toward the recognition of Canadian talent in this country,” he wrote, adding that he would not accept any more Juno awards.
During the same period, Connor staged a one-year media boycott because of what he saw as a lack of support for Canadian music, and he retired to spend more time on his farm in Ballinafad. Then, in February 1986, Dave Bidini of the Rheostatics and other young musicians crashed Connor’s 50th birthday to present him with a petition imploring him to return. Two years later, with the release of his album Fiddle and Song, he did, garnering attention from a younger generation of fans.
The NDP Caucus Sing "Bud the Spud" in a tribute to Stompin' Tom Connors
Connors died of kidney failure in 2013 at the age of 77 with his grudge against the Junos intact. He made his wishes clear: he did not want the award show to memorialize him after he died (the organization honoured his request). However, he was celebrated posthumously in the foyer of the House of Commons with a rendition of “Bud the Spud,” led by NDP MP Charlie Angus. Connors is also commemorated with a life-size bronze sculpture in Sudbury.
Rhindress sees a direct line from Connors to the Rheostatics to the Tragically Hip, bands whose music, like “Sudbury Saturday Night,” contains nods to Canadian locales. Bidini, writing in the National Post in 2011, says that “what this country owes to the singer from Skinners Pond can’t be written on a plaque. His words, his music and his soul are buried in the deep crude loam of our nation.”
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