Mike, Mark & Jack, New Westminster’s The Rhythm Pals, Canada’s best country group
In the 1950s my mother sang with the The Rhythm Pals, a New Westminster-based country music trio that was all the rage in the late 1940s, 50s and into the 1960s, in 1965, 1967, and 1968 winning the Juno Award as best Canadian country group, a few years after which they were inducted into the Canadian Country Music Hall of Honour, in 1989.
In my household growing up, it was Mike, Marc and Jack this, and Mike, Marc and Jack that, my mother keeping up her friendship with The Pals throughout the entirety of my young life. My mother loved to sing, sang all the time around our home and in the car, loved music of every description — when she was home there was always music in the house, Patti Page and Teresa Brewer her two favourite 1950s singers, later turning to Patsy Cline, all of whose music invested almost my every waking moment for years.
Looking back on it, I suppose my love for female vocalists originated with my own mother’s, if not exactly angelic but still melodic voice, her entire demeanour the very definition of joy when she sang. Driving around with my parents in the family car, the radio was turned up loud, my mother singing along with all of the artists of the day, save Nat King Cole, who she worshipped, and would not as his daughter did years later, ‘duet’ with him.
Above all else, though, my mother loved country and western music, a mix of Americana, folk and roots music that spoke of struggle and love lost, of tragedy and wont and lives not fully realized, the heartfelt music I grew up on and which, later in life, would emerge as my favourite musical genre, coming around to appreciate country music, after having as a teenager and for many years after rejecting the music my mother loved, finally coming around in my early 40s — I’ve loved Iris DeMent, Alison Moorer, Shelby Lynne, Kasey Chambers, Lucinda Williams, Lori McKenna, Miranda Lambert and Kacey Musgraves ever since. whose music has become the melancholy and thoughtful soundtrack that has informed my life this past 30 years.
In the late summer of 1958, my parents moved the family to Edmonton, to be closer to family and to be closer to the soundtrack of my mother’s life, roots and classic country music being far more popular on the Prairies than would ever be the case in the Lotusland Vancouver has always aspired to.
12221 81st Street, in northwest Edmonton, my family home from late 1959 through 1961
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.
“Howdy, my name is Burl Ives, and this here to my left is Wilf Carter and standin’ next to him, the singing ranger himself, Hank Snow.”
And with that introduction, the small but fervently enthusiastic crowd came alive, as we were treated to a concert, and musicianship the likes of which I would not hear again till 1998, at a Lucinda Williams concert at The Vogue.
For the first and only time in my life, I saw my mother happy, in her element, dancing off to the side, a look of bliss on her face, her tired and aching bones revitalized with a renewed energy and strength, two and a half hours in my mother’s life that neither she nor I would ever forget, one of the best nights of my life, when I felt safe and loved amidst the music that had long been the soundtrack of my life, as it still remains to this day.
