A small portion of the lyrics from Fred Eaglesmith's song White Rose. Fred is from Port Dover Ontario. He does a great family picnic.

it was all we knew
it was all we had
it was all we wanted
it was good enough

It has been raining all day. We have an umbrella but the streets are so narrow that any car or truck passing by can soak you to the knees (pants hanging near the register at this time). I have rented a car starting Monday so tht I can compete on a level footing with the other drivers. It reminds me of 'Rainy Night In Georgia - by Brook Benton'.

Have a listen:

Take out tonight: Chicken Korma, Steamed Rice, Potato Samosa, Garlic Naan, Peroni.

NASHVILLE — The first time I heard Mary Gauthier sing, it was 2005 and a song called “Mercy Now” was playing on the car radio. My father had been dead two years by then, but my eyes filled instantly with tears at the first line — “My father could use a little mercy now” — and I had to pull over to the side of the road because I couldn’t see to drive. “I love my father; he could use some mercy now,” sang Mary Gauthier as I sat behind the wheel of my still-running car and wept.

The first time I heard Mary Gauthier talk, it was 2016 and she was asking a question at the Southern Festival of Books. The fiction writer Odie Lindsey was reading from “We Come to Our Senses,” a story collection about American veterans after the first gulf war. When he stopped to take comments from the audience, a woman on the front row asked one of the most insightful questions I’d ever heard at an author event. Later, walking down the wide marble stairs of the Nashville Public Library, I caught up with her and introduced myself.

“I’m Mary Gauthier,” she said, holding out her hand.

“Oh, my God,” I said. “I love you!”

“I love you, too,” she said.

Apparently, when a complete stranger says, “I love you,” to Mary Gauthier, she says “I love you” right back.

This impulse to empathy courses through her new CD, “Rifles & Rosary Beads.” Written with American veterans and military family members, these songs are the result of an innovative nonprofit called SongwritingWith:Soldiers, which pairs master songwriters — people like Beth Nielsen Chapman, Jay Clementi, Marshall Crenshaw and Gary Nicholson — with servicemen and women who have returned from war physically, emotionally or spiritually wounded.

“There’s no diagnoses or assessments,” said Ms. Gauthier, a Louisiana native whose name is pronounced “go-SHAY.” Instead, it’s the opportunity to turn trauma into art. By the end of each weekend-long retreat, each veteran’s experience has been transformed into a song.

In some ways Ms. Gauthier is ideally suited for this work. An alcoholic in recovery for 27 years, she understands confusion and shame, powerlessness and anger. “I’ve always been drawn to the hard story, the trauma, because I think art can turn it around,” she said in an interview. “In a lot of ways, songwriting helped save my life. Recovery stabilized me; songwriting gave me a purpose.”

In other ways, writing with military veterans might not seem like a natural fit for Ms. Gauthier, a lesbian and an outspoken liberal who received death threats because of the antiwar sentiment in “Mercy Now.” When the song was released, Ms. Gauthier had to call the F.B.I. because trolls were sending her pictures of beheadings with captions that read, “Tick-tock, tick-tock.”

When the SongwritingWith:Soldiers founder Darden Smith invited her to be part of a veterans’ retreat, she hesitated. “I had a head full of stereotypes of what I thought a soldier was,” she said.

What she learned is that the military is a microcosm of American culture. “It’s a lot of women, people of color, gay men and lesbians, Hispanic, all faiths,” she said. “It isn’t the straight, white-guy conservative who likes guns.” On songwriting weekends, politics is nowhere to be found.

Each veteran or family member is paired with a songwriter, a process that begins with the participants’ own stories. Some of the veterans take longer than others to arrive at a place of candor, but eventually the songwriter’s basic questions (“When and where did you serve?” “What branch were you in?” “What did you see when you got there?”) give way to harder questions (“Is there something you feel deep inside you need to say?”), and the shape of a song begins to emerge.

Once Ms. Gauthier picks up the guitar and begins fiddling with a melody, that’s when the floodgates open. “Melody’s like tweezers that go into the infection and pull out the wounded part,” she said. “You can almost not stay silent in the face of a melody that matches your emotion. You feel seen. There’s a myth that soldiers don’t talk. Well, this generation will.”

My father-in-law, who served in Korea, often points out that the generation after his was the first not to face the draft, and I wonder if this is the difference Ms. Gauthier means, but she shakes her head. “There’s before Oprah and after Oprah,” she said. The willingness to voice vulnerability is just part of the American psyche now.

The songs in “Rifles & Rosary Beads”— chosen from among the roughly 40 Ms. Gauthier has written with veterans during the last five years — reflect the full gamut of the military experience: fighting, injury, death, camaraderie, sexual assault, fear and moral trauma, which happens when service members can’t reconcile what they’ve done with the people they believe themselves to be. Many of the songs wrestle with the unexpected challenges of homecoming.

“Soldiering On,” written with a Marine veteran named Jennifer Marino, points out how the attitude that can save your life in wartime (“Suck it up, shut it down / It don’t matter how you feel”) is the same attitude that will eat you alive when the war is over: “But what saves you in the battle / Can kill you at home / A soldier, soldiering on.”

A song written with Beth Nielsen Chapman and the wives of six service members, “The War After the War,” acknowledges the sacrifice of military spouses. “Who’s gonna care for the ones who care for the ones who went to war?” the song asks in its very first line.

In a documentary directed by Joshua Britt and Neilson Hubbard about the making of “Rifles & Rosary Beads,” an Army veteran, Josh Geartz, says he was suicidal after he returned from Iraq with serious wounds from a bomb blast, but that his experience with Ms. Gauthier gave him hope. “The session that I had, where I was able to tell Mary, who I wrote with, things that no one on this planet knows — that’s kind of where that flicker of hope started,” he said. “Right there, that moment.”

Ms. Gauthier does not use the term “healing” in connection with these retreats. “Heal is so woo-woo,” she said, and probably unrealistic in the context of war. Songs, even powerful songs written with veterans, will not eliminate the tragedy of veteran suicide, and Ms. Gauthier knows that. “The hope is that this is a rung” on the ladder out of a dark hole, she said. Just the first rung. “But a rung is a big damn deal if you haven’t been able to find one.”

Most of the service members who co-wrote the songs on “Rifles & Rosary Beads” are not musicians, but Mr. Geartz, who co-wrote “Still on the Ride,” is a skilled harmonica player. At a CD-release performance at the Franklin Theater on Feb. 23, Mr. Geartz rolled onto the stage in his wheelchair and performed with Ms. Gauthier on his own song, as well as on Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land,” the final song of the set.

When I left the theater that night, several dozen people were already lined up at the autograph table. I had a feeling a lot of them were just waiting to tell Mary Gauthier they love her.

I have watched this video a couple of times lately (and lots of other videos from Maggie) and enjoyed it both times. She is very talented. This is the moment when she meets a famous music producer, Pharrell Williams, in a university class and plays a song that she had written 8 days earlier. You are able to watch him discover her talent and her reaction when she thinks that he is telling her that it is not very good.

Another interesting video is Maggie on the Tom Power radio show (CBC mornings - the best interviewer ever):

My new favourite band. How can you not like them - his crusty voice, she plays banjo, clarinet, and ukulele. The lead guitar plays a a Gretsch 59 Falcon, my favourite guitar sound (same as Luke Doucet). They are a husband and wife team. Allison Russell is from Montreal and still performs in Po'Girl.

We wanted to skip dinner tonight but then we remembered that our waiters were in possession of a partially consumed bottle of wine of ours. The all-consuming question “Could we go for the appetizer and then sneak off with our bottle?” We gave it a fair bit of consideration and decided that we would continue with skipping dinner. We have just returned from the buffet. Apparently “skipping” has a lot in common with “later”. Just listening to Aimee Mann’s latest album “Mental Illness”. Aimee won the Grammy for Best Folk Album back in January for this album. I bought it right after the Grammy's but had not really had a chance to plug it into a good pair of speakers until tonight. What a lovely album. She has been around for 25 years and I had purchased her music in the past, but this is her best work.

We are in St Jacob's tonight. Picked appliances today in Kitchener. Then on to Waterloo to pick two fireplaces. Carol was disappointed with the selection. We think that we have the fireboxes picked, but the surrounds did not appeal. Tomorrow we meet Melissa the "upgrade" lady. My fear is that she will be a highway robber - crap is included in the purchase price but the good things cost real money. I keep telling myself that we will be OK. We can handle her. She is just the "Upgarde" lady. Then I remember that this is her game, and that we are the yokels and my heart goes cold.

I am listening to a bunch of Ron Hynes tunes tonight. Started with "From Dublin with Love" then on to "Dark River" and "Brown Eyes", finishing with favourites "The Ghost of Dana Bradley" and "Cape Spear". We saw Ron perform live twice. Once as part of a program about mental health and addiction. Katie went with me. He sat on stage with one of his doctors to talk about his addictions. Then he performed. I have never seen a performer give more of himself. The evening was capped with a showing of The Man of a Thousand Songs - his auto-documentary.

Years ago, I listened to Shelagh Rogers do an on-air telephone interview with Ron from the hall telephone at Bellwood Addiction Centre in Toronto. He seemed so sane, yet there he was in addiction rehab. He told how in a long-previous phone call to his mother he got the core of one of his great songs - "The Mother Who Bore You In Pain". It was a phrase she used as she expressed her anguish about his addictions. It was a song that Carol could barely listen to. He could not fix the problem but he could acknowledge his failures through the song. It was a brilliant interview. I have contacted Shelagh to find a copy of the interview. (Shelagh got back to me , she did not do the interview)

"Cape Spear" is such a friendly song with a good melody, some tricks in the lyrics, and wonderful images. When we were in Newfoundland in 2012 we went to the south shore and Cape Spear just because of this song.

"The Ghost of Dana Bradley" breaks my heart. After writing the song he visited her parents to get their permission to perform the song.

I do love sad songs. I have a big Ron Hynes collection. "Dry" . . "My Name is Nobody" . . "Carry this Cross" . . "Judgement"

Got tickets to see Catherine MacLellan - Nov 8, 2017. For those of you who do not recognize the name, her father was Gene MacLellan the singer-songwriter from Prince Edward Island who wrote Snowbird, arguably the song that launched Anne Murray's international career. Read on - the next post is about Catherine too.

I had the most wonderful time at the Lunenburg Folk Harbour Festival in Nova Scotia. I was there with the Eastern Belles and I was struck again by how truly this is a folk festival. The audience loves old folk songs, loves to engage and sing along and also is genuinely interested in each act for who they are and their original music. It feels, maybe, like stepping back into the 1960’s when folk music and pop music were one and the same.

So thank you, Lunenburg, for that.

During the weekend there was a 2 hour Ron Hynes tribute that I was a part of alongside Dave Gunning, the Fortunate Ones and the Ennis Sisters. It was a beautiful experience sharing the songs of Ron but also so many stories.

There were about 200 people crowded into the Lunenburg Schoolhouse and it was so intimate. We all laughed and cried together.

I had decided to play 1962, which is my favourite of his songs, but I needed one more and so I chose to play Godspeed. Now, Godspeed is a song that Ron Hynes wrote right after my dad died and it’s a farewell to a man who took his life and it questions why but in kindness and compassion.

Ron always told me how he had been meaning to get together with Gene (my dad) to co-write a song. He had finally worked up the courage to call him when he heard the news that my dad had died. Ron was devastated. He told me how just days afterward Godspeed came to him like a gift from Gene, like they finally got their co-write. As I got older and started my own career in music, I was fortunate enough to be able to tour with Ron and see him play many times. Every night, Ron would play Godspeed and I would always cry my eyes out.

From the Gene MacLellan Tribute, Ron Hynes & Catherine MacLellan:

It never occurred to me, after Ron died, until this weekend in Lunenburg, that I would never hear him sing that song again, that yet another connection to my father was lost. I thought how there is no one left to sing this song that will mean anything to me, that could be authentic and genuine for my experience. Another thread had broken. And, God, how I miss Ron. I’ve been doing so much healing over the past few years over the loss of my father, and losing Ron was huge. A friend, a mentor, a hero, a connection to my past. I always felt Ron could just stand on stage and say nothing, and we, the audience, would sit in awe, his stage presence was so powerful.

I remember just after Ron passed, his nephew Joel wrote a piece about how - yes – Ron was a legend and amazing, but he was also a man afflicted and consumed by his addictions. And that although Ron had had cancer, what really killed him was his demons. So when I learned Godspeed, I was singing it not only to honour Ron Hynes and my father, but to flip that song around because now it also speaks to me of Ron’s passing. A tortured soul who never got control of his addictions and in the end they took him away from us. He didn’t take his life like my father, but in some ways he did.

So at the tribute this weekend, we sat and talked and sang and shared and laughed and cried. As the circle of sharing came back to me, after an emotional roller coaster ride, I picked up my guitar and started to play the song. My fingers were trembling and the next thing I knew I was weeping In front of the crowd. I tried to start the song and just couldn’t. I got up and walked out.

I went to the bathroom and wept like I hadn’t in a long time. These guttural sounds were coming out of my throat and I felt full on wailing grief. The show continued on without me and Andrew, from the Fortunate Ones gave me a glass of water and a big hug, thank god – I really needed it.

I felt so embarrassed, usually I can keep it together on stage, and I was thinking “who am I to feel this much grief over Ron.” But I somehow managed to pull myself together, walked back on stage, listened to more stories from everyone and then, without saying a word or explaining why I wanted to play the song or why I was such a mess, I launched into Godspeed. Dave Gunning sat beside me and helped me through it. I was shaky but I felt supported by everyone around me and I got through it somehow. When I ended the song I put down my guitar and looked up as the entire room stood up in applause.

They got it. Without me explaining, they understood. Now, as I sit here and write this, I am still crying. Crying in grief but also gratitude, so thankful to be able to share something like that, no matter how hard it was.

From that point on in the weekend, people kept coming up to me and hugging me, like I was their child, like they understood.

What other festival would this happen at? So – thank you Lunenburg. Thank you for your beauty, for your enthusiasm for songs, for your deep love of songwriters and for being real people who see us crazy musicians as real people too.

“God only knows
What takes a petal from a rose
What makes the dark rivers overflow
What makes a lifetime come and go…
Godspeed, Godspeed…”

All my love,
Catherine

Went to see Devon Cuddy last night at the Collingwood Amphitheatre. Very nice show. When Cuddy and the band got out of their van a cloud of dense smoke almost obscured them. Hmmm. Only later did I realize that there was a food wagon preparing wood-fired pizza that was sending up the occasional cloud. Cuddy and his band were troopers - playing in the rain and taking a break when the real rain came, but coming back to finish their show. Good music too.