Stan Rogers
Stan Rogers, a Canadian musician of towering talent, died in a plane crash at the tragically young age of 34 . In 2013, thirty years after his death, his fellow musicians remembered him in an event called Rise Again, a reference to a line from his well-loved ballad, The Mary Ellen Carter.
Stan wrote and sang of Canadian regions, history and experience. He captured the national obsession with the Northwest Passage in a song of that name, and he crooned ballads of the farmers, fishers and other ordinary folk in their daily work.
Lies is a heartfelt paean to an aging ranch wife and mother, with her life of "toil and care." Looking into the mirror, she sees the lines of encroaching age, but soon shakes off her mood, telling herself the mirror is telling lies as she thinks about the Legion dance she'll soon attend with her husband.
The Field Behind the Plough is another great classic, portraying, as it does, the life of a farmer who thinks about his dead ailing fellow farmers, his tight finances, and his wife and kids as he ploughs the field to "put another season's promise in the ground."
Fogarty's Cove a song of exuberant return to the fiddle and dance culture of his Nova Scotian roots and Barrett's Privateers is a rousing historic ballad about the perils of piracy.
Definitely among Stan's best loved tunes is Forty-Five Years, a love song to a wife whose smiling face he will still want to see "forty-five years from now." Tragically, Stan died long before reaching age of forty-five, let alone sharing a marriage of that length.
A year after his death, the Canadian Conference of the Arts posthumously awarded Stan Rogers the Diplome d'Honneur. Most strangely, he still has not been inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame, in spite of many public requests that this be done. Here's a video with a song by John Gorka expressing the public dismay at this astonishing omission.