What would it sound like if you crossed Gordon Lightfoot with Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull and threw in a few dollops of Bob Mould in case you needed still more vocal lilt?

Answer: Stan Rogers, Canada’s beloved baritonal bard, a Folk singer, strummer, storyteller, and deep soul whose musical gifts would not be denied even by an untimely death at 33 when fire swept through the airplane on which he was a passenger.

Born in Ontario to parents who had relocated from the Maritime provinces, Stan spent his childhood summers in Nova Scotia. The ocean’s lure hooked him at an early age and The Maritimes would inform his art; indeed, his music could be described as maritime since many of his songs concern life on and around the sea. A legend within Canada, Rogers continues to find new audiences around the world.

I was introduced to the greatness of Stan Rogers by my dear departed friend Pete Chambers who was a fine Folk singer in his own right. As I wrote in my piece “Connections” back in October 2017, Pete and I used to meet up weekly for espressos, philosophical discourse, and inspired listens to our vinyl records while our daughters attended kindergarten and first grade. Since I hosted, I had my entire collection at hand, while Pete brought his venerable carry-case which held about 20 LPs. We’d alternate our selections, choosing each cut based on something in the previous song.

During one of our sessions, I played Jethro Tull’s “Songs from the Wood”.  With a nod to that song’s exquisite moments of unaccompanied singing, Pete chased it with “Barrett’s
Privateers,” the famed rendition on Between the Breaks . . . Live! from 1979. I’d never heard of Stan Rogers. His completely a cappella bravura utterly stunned me. I was so moved that I felt tears well up in my eyes . . . at 10AM!

To simply call “Barrett’s Privateers” a sea shanty is like calling “Superstition” a mere Pop song. The tale is narrated by the sole survivor of the Antelope, a barely seaworthy sloop (“the scummiest vessel I’ve ever seen”) manned by unwitting local fisherman promised easy riches as pirates. With his booming baritone and distinctly “Celtic” inflections to his diction, Rogers belts out the stanzas, joined by his four bandmates on the rousing recurring chorus which describes their hoodwinking:

God damn them all!

I was told we’d cruise the seas for American gold

We’d fire no guns — shed no tears!

Now I’m a broken man on a Halifax pier

The last of Barrett’s Privateers.

In his liner notes to Between the Breaks . . . Live!, Stan wrote of “Barrett’s Privateers”: “This song has completely outgrown any expectations I had of its popularity. I get reports from all over the world of people singing this song in the strangest places and under the oddest circumstances.”

As I learned years later from my friend Abel Smith who grew up on the Tay River in Ontario, the singing of “Barrett’s Privateers” in Canada acquired an almost sacred aspect. Abel told me: “It was a rite of passage anthem for young men in Canada when I was growing up. Many a night at the pub ended on an a cappella chorus of that song.”

If you want another measure of how beloved this ballad is, Abel pitched “Barrett” as his daughter’s middle name and, after watching Stan and his mates sing the song around a kitchen table, his wife went for it.

Ariel Rogers, Stan’s widow, suggested that part of the song’s popularity just might be that “it allows you to sing ‘God damn them all’.”

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The Canadian Folk tradition reads like a roll call of the titans: Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Gordon Lightfoot. While Stan Rogers may not command the worldwide recognition of those first three he certainly merits it and in his native Canada remains revered. In material and approach, he shares a great deal with his fellow countryman Gordon Lightfoot. Stan’s music often celebrates Canada and its people, especially the working class. He’s very much “their guy.” You hear it in songs like “The Mary Ellen Carter,” “The Field Behind the Plow,” and “Northwest Passage.” The Canadian Broadcasting Company’s Peter Gzowski once conducted a poll asking his listeners for their choice of an alternative national anthem; a majority suggested Stan’s “Northwest Passage.”

My favorite Stan Rogers song is “The Witch of the Westmorland,” the first cut on Side A (or “First Set” as it’s labeled) of Between the Breaks . . . Live! It’s a cover of a ballad by Scottish Folk singer Archie Fisher. As Rogers explains in his liner notes, he “edited three verses from the original, and modernized the language a little for the sake of having the story understood by the average North American listener.”

With their acoustic guitars, mandolins, and fiddles, all Stan Rogers songs have a rustic, homespun air, but this song goes further back, conjuring an archaic world of gallant
knights, brindled hounds, enchanted forests, talking owlets,
and a witch who heals the knight’s wounds with goldenrod, a wildflower long used in folk medicine. If Stan and his mates hadn’t recorded this version, I’d have sworn it was a lost Jethro Tull masterpiece. It’s a song to which you don’t lift a glass, you raise a tankard.

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In July of 2021, Canada Post celebrated Stan’s legacy by issuing a beautiful commemorative stamp.