The Last Best Place

by John Demont

  In my view the best shrine to his life and career is in Blue Rocks, at Graham “Buz” Baker’s house, which is perched atop a little hill across the road from the water. Baker is a rough-hewn Renaissance man, a seascape painter, fierce Red Sox fan and Lunenburg’s harbour master. He is also an articulate expert on the history of country-and-western music. If anyone acts as the keeper of Hank Snow’s flame around here it is this tall, raw-boned, slightly dangerous looking redhead. Throw a Stetson on him—which is what he wears when he’s fronting his country blues combo—and he’s the mirror of one of those hungry-looking Steinbeck cowboys who showed up on the stage of the Opry the same time as Snow. Like his hero and hundreds of other Maritimers, Baker grew up in the sway of the hillbilly music of the rural South, which he heard camped in front of the radio listening to nighttime broadcasts from the Allegheny Mountains. “I think the hard times we’ve always experienced in the Maritimes breeds an interest in country music,” he says when I ask why Snow, Wilf Carter and so many other top-notch old-time C&W talents emerged from these hard-scrabble shores. “When people don’t have the money to go out and do anything else they have to entertain themselves. I’m firmly convinced that coming from here led to the blossoming of these talents. Country music is the music of the people who work close to the earth, the fishermen, the farmers, the lumberjacks, the miners, all of whom had difficult lives. Country music is just the blues with a twang.”

  And Clarence Eugene Snow was born to the blues. He came into this world in a tiny house in Brooklyn, a milltown sixty miles west of Blue Rocks, in 1914, the fifth of six children born to George Lewis Snow and Marie Alice Boutilier. For some reason his schoolmates started calling him Jack. The name stuck until he began recording in 1936. By that point, he knew first-hand about struggle, misery, disappointment and the other standbys of the country songwriter’s stable. His parents had split when he was six and he became the responsibility of an abusive grandmother who forbade him to see his mother and had him put in jail when he rebelled. By the time mother and son were reunited she had hooked up with a sociopathic fisherman who liked nothing better than to bounce the youngster off the four walls of their decrepit house.

  To escape the abuse he got a job on a Grand Banks schooner sailing out of Lunenburg. He was twelve at the time, small for his age and fragile at that. But he stuck it out for four years, enduring the storms and the backbreaking work, marvelling at the sharks that followed their ship and the icebergs that seemed as high as mountains. At sea he often entertained the crew by playing the mouth organ, doing a sort of tap dance he’d made up and singing songs he had learned from his mother, including “Was There Ever a Pal Like You” and “The Wreck of the Altoona,” which he heard on the family Victrola. When the crew really liked the performance they’d give him pieces of homemade fudge and throw him the occasional nickel. He spent the $5.95 earned from his first voyage on a guitar through the Eaton’s mail-order catalogue.

  Back on dry land he hustled like everyone else to cobble together a living in the Depression, trying bootlegging and diving off the wharf at Blue Rocks for nickels and dimes thrown by tourists. Once he nearly cut off his hand while splitting kindling wood and had to walk four miles in the dark to see a doctor in Lunenburg. But he was young and ambitious, dreaming of the big time, a full belly and fame. His first musical gig was a minstrel show in Bridgewater, which he performed in blackface. He was nineteen, wearing his best suit of clothes and lugging his guitar (now upgraded to a $12.95 model) when he bluffed his way into the offices of CHNS Radio in Halifax. After hearing him play, the station’s chief engineer asked him to come back that night at seven to do a live fifteen-minute show. When the station offered him a Saturday-night spot he decided to change his stage name to Hank Snow the Yodeling Ranger after his idol Jimmie Rodgers. Soon he was spending his mornings trying to sell Fuller brushes in the slums of Halifax before heading to the radio station for a noon-hour spot as part of a combo set up to raise the profile of a company that sold a potion with “laxative qualities.”

  The Gaiety Theatre in downtown Halifax offered him a three-day job performing solo before an afternoon kids’ matinee. I love the image of him showing up the first day, wearing a white satin shirt his mother made with full sleeves, a big wide collar with a red star on each tip and another big red star on each breast. The shirt had black silk laces that ran up the front just like the shirts Gene Autry the singing cowboy, wore in the movies. Snow added black dungarees with a white cotton strip sewn down each leg and an orange and red neckerchief. On New Year’s Eve he was scheduled to appear at the exclusive new Capitol Theatre. The manager took one look at his outfit and ordered him to change into an usher’s uniform before he could step on stage.

  In 1936 he signed with RCA Victor and made his first records. Back in the Maritimes he started to develop a following in places like Lockeport, Shelburne, Riverport, Hubbards Cove, Chester, Sherbrooke and Ecum Secum, where he toured with his band throughout the 1940s playing in church halls, Legions, movie theatres and garages. He added a trio of black entertainers who tap-danced and did a comedy routine. Then he got hooked on the idea of making it in the States, moving to Wheeling, W. Va., where he bought a trained horse named Shawneee, outfitted him with an expensive silver saddle and began a travelling road show. Finally he landed a job on the Grand Ole Opry. Even that didn’t help his sad little career. When Snow happened in 1950 to mention to an Opry official that he was thinking of buying a house, he was urged to hold off. In truth, Snow was on the verge of getting fired when a 45 he had written and recorded, I’m Moving On, took off like crazy, going number one on Billboard magazine’s charts for an unprecedented forty-nine straight weeks. Hank Snow had finally arrived.

  “He did have talent,” Baker says, walking me through his collection of the Great Man’s memorabilia: the covers of the albums spanning the thousand-or-so songs he recorded, photos of him being inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame and the Songwriters Hall of Fame and performing at the Hollywood Bowl and the London Palladium. “But you have to remember that he is a Taurus. He has this tenacious perseverance to see something through to the end. And that is what really carried him through difficult times. And I mean he did have difficult times. Out of school when he was in grade five, a broken family, and I’ve even heard him say on stage that he carries the marks on his body from the beatings by his stepfather. Times were tough and here he is in this backwater of a place trying to make a name for himself as the Singing Cowboy. And I think that if he hadn’t known such hard times he would not have been able to sing with such passion about it.”

  I take his point. Nova Scotia left Snow one hurt, wounded man; how could it have done otherwise? Even someone as untutored in country-western music as I am realizes you’ve got to live all those things—all the pain, poverty and loneliness—to sing songs that resonate like Snow’s. Whether the price was worth it only he can say. He had no choice, of course. You can’t escape who you are; you can’t escape the place you call home; all you can do is make your peace with it.

  Fourteen

  Tales from the Fog City Diner

  OUR HOUSE IN HALIFAX IS A LITTLE LIKE A TIME CAPSULE. WHEN I LOOK OUT our living-room window I can see the classroom where I attended grade one and the steps where, when I was extra-good, the teacher let me clean the chalkboard erasers after school. Sometimes I’ll see the sister of the guy who that same year used a baseball bat to provide the rakishly handsome scar I bear over my left eyebrow. Sometimes standing on our back deck, performing the timeless male ritual of charring red meat over open flame, I see one of my oldest friends walking his dog on the field where we both shivered in the dark as kids sipping our first beer. Once, as I was coming out the front door, I was greeted with the wonderful sight of my old Cub leader, now in his late seventies at least, screaming down the street at the wheel of a motor scooter.

  Normally I am not one to dwell too long on the past. It can be a paralyzing thing to meet one’s history at every corner, i
n every closet and cupboard. Sometimes the best thing to do is just face it head on. One day in the grip of an unusual nostalgic reverie, I asked the phys-ed teacher at my old high school, which is just blocks from our house, whether I could visit the locker-room where I once dressed as a weak-shooting guard on the Queen Elizabeth Lions “A” basketball team. I discover the interior still looks like a Jackson Pollock painting—fifty years of names layered over each other to form this psychedelic pastiche of colours. Man, I wasted a lot of time down here when I should have been in class memorizing the kings of England, conjugating French verbs and cutting up crayfish. Yes, I would be a better, brighter, more stable person today if I had never discovered this dungeon; we all would be. I have to look hard amongst the names on the walls, but find some from my years: football players who became television actors or reborn Christians, hockey players who sell cars or were shot dead in drug feuds, basketball stars who work in the dockyard or drive blue Mercedes sedans with leather interiors.

  I slip into the halls of the school, which take on the soft-lens quality of a movie dream sequence, all the time waiting for the background music to swell. Summer vacation, so the place is empty. All the better to imagine the sorry figure I cut back then, clomping around in my construction boots, even though I had never done anything remotely resembling labour, and sporting jeans wide enough to blot out the sun. No doubt I will burn in eternal hell for wearing a leisure suit to my grade twelve graduation ceremony. We spent a lot of time in cars—just friggin’ around, heading for a gym to play basketball, to the Sahara for pizza and to the movies. On summer weekends we drove down the loopy stretch of highway for Queensland Beach. We’d use fake IDs to sneak into the South Gate (now an office tower) or the Lighthouse (now a peeler bar, but still called the Lighthouse). Sometimes we’d just drive aimlessly through the streets with the windows down, the radio turned up full, pretending the dash was a keyboard. Everyone doing the Billy Preston cross-over move, crooning “Come on world/join in/come love/love train” as if those were actually the words.

  Nostalgia is a truly dangerous thing. Going home to recapture your lost youth can only end badly—even in a place like Halifax, which to the eye has not changed appreciably in a long, long time. But of course it has. And thank God for that, since so much of what you so fondly remember was simply being a kid with life and the world out there ahead of you. With the wisdom of age I can now appreciate that when I grew up here Halifax’s energy lay buried, sunk beneath a provincial regard for authority and a misty-eyed longing for bygone days. This was the kind of place where you could never escape your past. Where growing up white and Protestant in the South End meant a good frat at Dal, an overpriced cottage on the South Shore and an early partnership at one of the old law firms. Once this had to be one of the most homogeneous cities on the continent.

  Now look at it. Sometime between when I left and returned everyone under the age of twenty-five seems to have landed in Halifax. Along with the youth, the place has a more cosmopolitan look and feel: growing numbers of eastern Europeans and Asians stroll about; Birkenstock-shod baby boomers, here for the lifestyle, push carriages; young blacks and whites mix freely; female lovers walk arm in arm; no one bats an eye at the middle-aged man wearing the pumps and the nice conservative blue dress. The city still has the appearance of being stodgy and staid at the top: the same old canny Irish pols running city hall and the same well-fed lawyers running the provincial government. But that’s all very deceiving, really. Halifax, for the first time in my life, has real sizzle. Something more is going on here than an influx of yuppies who know the difference between Java the computer language and a caffè latte. There’s a sense of breathless liberation out there, the type that can only come from years of pent-up repression and slavish obedience to convention.

  Inside a coffee shop, say. Not one of the trendy new ones where the technonerds bash away on laptops over double cappuccinos. But in Perks, sandwiched between the ferry terminal and the city’s law courts, where on any weekday the self-styled “waterfront intelligentsia” are well into their usual groove. Halifax, technically, is a city, the fourteenth largest one in the country by last count. But spiritually it is a small town, full of places like this: bars, coffee shops and greasy-spoon diners where the clientele is fixed and the talk a loose banter based on an intimate knowledge of everyone else’s business. I’m a virtual stranger here. But even I sense things falling into their practised rhythm: the stockbroker and Tory bagman arguing golf clubs with a corporate lawyer; the president of the provincial Liberal party who stops by to pick up a paper and trade political gossip. Yet look over there—at the blues-loving Italian-Canadian judge with the Al Pacino beard and haircut, at the writer freshly returned from Vancouver to work for one of the burgeoning film production houses ordering her morning hit, at the music promoter in the midst of putting together a summer comedy festival for the thousands of tourists who flock to the city to see what the buzz is about.

  I know what you’re saying. What about the depressed, downtrodden blacks who still wallow in poverty and hopelessness? What about the paucity of women holding political power, partnerships at the big law firms and high-level executive jobs? The only way I can respond is to say that you had to grow up here, like I did, go away to give yourself a little distance, then come back. To say Halifax is emerging from the Dark Ages is too severe. So let’s just say that somewhere along the line the conservative capital of Nova Scotia rediscovered a lost youth to go with its penetrating sense of history. Maybe you can’t go home again—if home means the exact place you left behind. Because both you and it have inevitably changed. So don’t even bother looking. Just look at the place fresh as if for the first time. Consider it on its own merits; draw your own conclusions.

  Opening my eyes wide I found Halifax now had charm, eccentricity and style along with a salty past. At some point the city went from being this colonial outpost port on the edge of the continent to the kind of place the rest of North America, whether it realizes it or not, fantasizes about being. I roll the words around my tongue, almost in disbelief: Halifax the hip. And what I wonder, staring out at the waterline through the coffeeshop window, is how did it happen?

  Daybreak is the time down here. When the morning fog still cools the air and no one else is around down on the waterfront. Then, as the mist clears, and the outlines of the harbour emerge as in a Polaroid snapshot, I like to picture the scurvy-ridden British pioneers arriving, the booty-laden privateer ships that plundered all the way down the eastern seaboard coming to dock, and the Second World War convoys massing before leaving for Europe. I sometimes like to come down in the early morning and stare into the same green waters as the admirals who once plotted Britain’s campaign to hold on to the New World. From here I can see the spot where a German submarine torpedoed a Canadian minesweeper and the place where the French steamship Mont Blanc and the Belgian steamer Imo collided, causing the biggest manmade explosion the world had seen until the horrors of Hiroshima. I can see the spot where the Pony Express news packet from Europe was dropped over the side of a Cunard steamer onto a boat at the harbour entrance and then passed to a rider on shore who galloped through town towards Digby. I can throw a rock to the beach where the makeshift gallows once stood, the bodies dangling in the air as a warning to all who entered the great, long harbour.

  Halifax is a long time coming. There is nothing flimsy about it. Wander around awhile and you have a sense that it is firmly planted on the ground, that its wooden homes and brick buildings can withstand anything the North Atlantic can throw at it. It is built to last. Here, in a place with 250 years of rollicking, myth-laden life, the past so overlays the present that history is vibrant and alive. You get the sense that it comes from a tradition, a sense that begins with the name—stodgy, upright, just reeking of Empire—but is just as evident in Government House, the Lieutenant Governor’s residence, and the other old buildings, now occupied by the people and preoccupations of the present, but where I’m certain
the ghosts of the past still lurk.

  Once it was reputed to be the wickedest town in North America, full of whorehouses, waterfront blind pigs, marauding press gangs, duels, drinking bouts and gambling dens. A murder ten years after the Red Coats arrived illustrates the wide-open frontier feel to the place: three gentlemen, Lieutenant Collins, Captain Sweeney and Dr. Johns, spent the night boozing at the house of one John Field and then went in search of whores up on Barracks St. Johns and Sweeney testified that they knocked at a door and “inquired for Polly.” But since they were pounding on the wrong door, Polly was unavailable. When, according to one chronicler, “they waxed strong over this flouting of their legitimate desires and diversions the householder, one Lathum, discharged a musket and killed Lieutenant Collins. Captain Sweeney promptly called the town guard and the spirited Lathum, a baker, was tried and hanged.”

  The hangman at the time was probably a character known as Tomahawk who lived in a lonely hut at the city’s farthest North End. He was a busy man, since in those days a person could be strung up for stealing a sheep or anything else worth four shillings. Say this for Tomahawk, though, he had a heart; he hated his work so much that he drank himself to death trying to dull the pain. And here’s a story that will warm your heart: some young lads discovered his body. Instead of calling the undertaker, they threw a noose around his neck and dragged it across the street to the ruin of a blockhouse. There they pitched what was left of old Tomahawk into the latrine. For years his bones lay there, a persistent attraction for the curious townspeople who often came for a peek at the remains.