Stompin’ Tom Connors, an Appreciation

A few words marking the anniversary of his passing, March 6, 2013.

When Stompin’ Tom Connors died at the age of 77, just about every Canadian could quote one of his songs. That reward alone was enough for Connors whose final statement, issued March 7, 2013, thanked the fans not just for his success but also for his identity. “I want all my fans, past, present, or future, to know that without you, there would have not been any Stompin' Tom.” Ironically, in the first volume of his autobiography published in 1995, Connors writes, “I didn’t set out to create a special image. It was created for me, partially by the media. And, to be honest, I have sometimes enjoyed playing along.”

So, who was Tom Connors? He took that answer to the grave but we do have his 300 wonderful songs. His talent was to write songs about ordinary people and make those people extraordinary. Connors’s songs feature working-class characters: miners, truck drivers, tobacco pickers and hockey Moms. He was born in Saint John, New Brunswick, with fewer than 50,000 people, yet he wrote about small town Canada as if he was from the place he sang about, such as “Sudbury Saturday Night.” Or speaking from experience, he could express the pain of picking tobacco in his wonderful song, “Tillsonburg;” a job he actually held for a couple weeks when he was a teenager. The refrain closes, “My back still aches when I hear that word.”

I discovered him when I was around 12 years-of-age and I immediately liked him. Inspired by Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Two, Connors’ music was catchy and his look was cool, (black vest, black hat, jeans) but that piece of plywood under his cowboy boots was the best thing about his act. Stomping the 2 and 4 (beats) with his left foot while strumming his guitar. Oddly, many of his studio recordings don’t have that patented stomp.

Connors was a proud Canadian and he wrote dozens of songs about his love for his country, such as Unity, “unity for you means unity for me. Unity for all means all for unity.” His message was simple and charming, belted out by his tough baritone. He had little tolerance for people who weren’t loyal to Canada. On the liner notes to Believe In Your Country(Capitol) he boldly states “If you don’t believe your country should come before yourself, you can better serve your country by living somewhere else.” Connors wore his patriotism as a badge of honor on everything he did, particularly in his later work. I’m not entirely convinced his politics alienated some of his fans, but I do think his fans forgave such indulgence because of his sincerity.

As he says in Stompin Grounds

“Just take a little piece of PEI

Old Saskatchewan

Nova Scotia and New Brunswick

Quebec and Newfoundland

Alberta and Manitoba

Ontario and BC,

And you'll have found the stompin' grounds of all my friends and me.”

Beyond the patriotic bellowing was a remarkably clever author. Consider the chorus of To It And At It:

“He was at it and to it and to it and at it

You gotta tune your attitude in

If ya don't get at it when ya get to it

You won't get to it to get at it again

You won't get to it to get at it again”

It’s a good example of his alliteration, but also his keen sense of rhythm.

Another shining example from one of my personal favorites, The Consumer

“The Consumer they call us

We always get a fair shake

We buy a fridge that doesn't freeze and a stove that doesn’t bake

We can’t buy nothing lasting unless we get that raise in pay

And they’d only charge us more for the things that cost less today

The Consumer they call us

We’re fussy what we eat

We look at the price of T-bone steak and buy hamburg meat

And all those fancy packages we take down from the shelf

They’re always full of good fresh air when they’re full of nothing else

Oh yes, we are the people running in the race

Buying up the bargains in the ol’ marketplace

Another sale on something, we’ll buy it while it’s hot

Save a lot of money spending money we don’t got

We save a lot of money spending money we don’t got”

This isn’t High Art by any stretch but it succeeds because of its broad appeal.

That song was used for the debut of Marketplace, a consumer affairs program on CBC Television in 1972.

Connors had a great sense of what people wanted to hear; about themselves and their daily lives. He also had a facility for colloquial language: from Sudbury Saturday Night: “The girls are out to Bingo and the boys are getting’ stinko, And we think no more of Inco on a Sudbury Saturday night.” (INCO was the name of the nickel company that employed most of the town’s population.)

Connors celebrated the pleasures of the beer-drinking working class, which was a key part of his appeal. But he also understood the leisure class. In “The Bug Song”, for instance, he tells the story of every cottager’s nightmare on a warm summer evening. As music scholar Nicholas Jennings once wrote “entertaining and instructive, he reminds us of familiar characters and events from our past while rescuing from obscurity some that never showed up on our collective radar screen in the first place. That takes genius.”

His first album The Northland’s Own (Rebel) appeared in 1967, after years of performing in smoky small-town bars but it featured his first Canadian hit, Sudbury Saturday Night. I qualify it as a “Canadian” hit because Connors never played in the United States. He made his living in the country of his birth using all of his intuitive skills to create a unique sound with a huge inventory of stories to share.

Looking at the photos in the first volume of his autobiography, Stompin’ Tom: Before the Fame, I can’t help but see an old soul, even at the age of 19. He was starting out in the music business with a beer, cigarettes and a guitar constantly in tow. As a colleague of mine stated the day he died, “he was a combination of Hank Williams and Pete Seeger”.

Connors had the pathos of Williams and the clarity of Seeger, and he knew how to entertain. The fact that people could recite his songs easily at a hockey game or around a campfire says a lot about the man, the musician and the significance of his contribution to Canada’s identity. High Art, indeed.

Originally published on criticsatlarge, March 12, 2013. Revised ©2023.

Not so shameless self-promotion:

My latest book is Outside Looking In: The Seriously Funny Life and Work of George Carlin (Applause)