In 1960, with the help of my tall oak of a grandfather, my parents bought a house in northwest Edmonton, at 12221 81st Street, a working-aspiring-to-middle class neighbourhood, where I attended Eastwood Elementary for Grades 5 & 6, the new school and neighbourhood a step up from inner-city Edmonton, where we had rented for a year, and where I attended Sir John A. McDougall school in Grade 4 befriending all of the tough kids in school, helping them with their in-class & their homework, in exchange keeping me safe — to say it was a rough neighbourhood is to dramatically understate the matter. Still, I made it out in one piece, and was glad for the move.
As I say, my mother loved country roots music, the music of her youth, the music she sang, and the music that most spoke to her, that I believe kept her alive and her mind and spirit active — amidst the three back-breaking jobs she always held down, working at a puff wheat factory overnight for the entirety of our three-year tenure in Edmonton, working at a local bakery during the day, and the Swift Meat Packing Plant in the late afternoon and throughout the evening, ambitious and anxious to get ahead, or at least keep hers, and our heads above water, my father continuing his work at the Post Office, and surprising to everyone stepping up to the plate as our increasingly competent and loving father, to whom I’d help teach the ability to read, and with whom I’d spend endless hours quizzing him on aspects of his employment, in preparation for the quarterly tests of competence imposed by a draconian employer, the Canada Post Office.
Every now and then, though, my mother would get an evening off — she didn’t want to sit around the house “wasting time”, as she put it, she wanted to go out into the evening, be with people, to live and to feel free and to feel a part of the community, and if there was a country music concert at the nearby and walkable Edmonton Fairgrounds, all the better.
My mother loved to walk. One early Tuesday evening, she told my sister and I to put on our coats, that we were going out, saying to my father, “You’re coming along, too, to keep the kids out of mischief, to keep an eye on them so they don’t run away” — not that my sister and I ever did, we were homebodies, most evenings both my father and mother off at work, my sister and I at home watching TV or doing our homework, or visiting with friends in the neighbourhood, but back at home never later than 8pm.
On this particularly chill October 1960 evening, we made our way down to what appeared to us to be a deserted Edmonton Fairgrounds, although once inside the grounds and the closer we got to as our yet unknown destination, the clearer were the sounds of guitars being tuned up, and voices testing microphones — until we found ourselves arriving at a small tent, chairs for about 75 people, over the course of the half hour we waited for the evening’s festivities to begin, much to our mother’s displeasure, kicking around the sawdust on the floor, while looking around at the others who were in attendance, a few ragtag kids, but mostly adults in heavy, working class clothing, most drawn and seemingly weary with life, until …

Classic country music artists extraordinaire, The Wayfaring Stranger, Burl Ives; Montana Slim, otherwise know as Wilf Carter, and the Singing Cowboy himself, Hank Snow.