A new kind of chanty

Home In Halifax; Stan Rogers

My favorite attraction at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida, has always been the film “O Canada!” at the Canadian Pavilion at Epcot Center. To view the film, Disney World guests enter a circular room that has a designated front and back. Nine silver screens surround the room on which is shown the 360 degree film “O Canada!”; displayed in such a way that the viewer experiences the illusion that he or she has been transported to the Calgary Stampede, the Victoria Gardens, Vancouver Harbour, the frozen Ottawa River, the Canadian Rockies and many other places. When guests face the acknowledged front of the room, they see where they are going. The view to the rear of the room shows where they’ve been. Glance to the left and right and they see where they are.

During a segment about Nova Scotia, they focus on a famous fishing and racing schooner called the Bluenose. The Bluenose was built in 1921 and celebrated for her reputation in the racing world. After World War II, fishing schooners became obsolete in Canada and the United States. She was acquired by a fishing company in the West Indies and foundered on a reef off the coast of Haiti and sank in 1946.

In commemoration of her glorious history and because of the reverence that the people of Nova Scotia still had for their sleek and beautiful racing ship – even as late as 1963 – a local company built a replica using the same exact plans of the original, calling her, naturally, Bluenose II. Bluenose II has mostly promotional, state and tourism duties. Over forty years later, she continues to sail during the summer out of Lunenburg in Nova Scotia.

The soundtrack, at this point of the film “O Canada!”, includes a spirited song that immediately sets the tone for a coastal setting. As the lyrical and musical personification of the sea-going vessel whose bow rises …

Free of Mother Sea

In a sunburst cloud of spray

That stings the cheek while the rigging will speak

Of sea-miles gone away

She is always best under full press

Hard over as she’ll lay

And who will know the Bluenose in the sun?

This song, "The Bluenose", haunted me for many years, with the singer’s powerful voice relaying the sentiment of robust and stalwart seaboard folk who know the labor required to thrive in the fishing industry and to buoy up the kind of speed that wins racing cups out in the cold and briny depths.

In 2007, Walt Disney World announced that “O Canada!” at the Canadian Pavilion would play for the final time on August 6 of that year. It had played for twenty-five years. A new travelogue type feature debuted on September 1.

In an effort to hear the song, outside of its place in the film, I did some research to find out who wrote and sang the song. As you can imagine, the singer and the song-writer were the same person. Canadian folk singer Stan Rogers wrote traditional-sounding songs that were frequently inspired by Canadian history and the daily lives of hard working people who lived in the Maritime provinces.

At about the time that he began to garner international recognition for his singing and writing craft, he was a victim of a fire that sprouted aboard Air Canada Flight 797 on the ground at the Greater Cincinnati Airport in June of 1983. He died, most likely, of smoke inhalation at the age of thirty-three. He was on his way home after performing at the Kerrville Folk Festival near Kerrville, Texas.

In 1993, the Fogarty’s Cove Music label released Stan Rogers’ live album that he had recorded in 1982. Through this album and many others, Mr. Rogers’ influence on Canadian folk music has been deep and lasting. I have become a fan of his music, but my favorite starts like this:

Once again with the tide she slips her lines

Turns her head and comes awake

Where she lay so still there at Privateer’s Wharf

Now she quickly gathers way

She will range far south from the harbour mouth

And rejoice with every wave

Who will know the Bluenose in the sun?

Credits: To Walt Disney World, for recognizing the talent of Stan Rogers’ and featuring him for twenty-five years. Thank you for Epcot Center. That’s a fun day out.

This is the seventeenth of my final forty-five CD’s.