Canada: the English & the French ...

Damn!

Sneaking in just one last one ... (I promise)

Tried to find a good You Tube version of Neil Young singing this .... but ended up with k.d. lang's version instead. Still, pretty good!

Love this song! Goose bump material.:
There is a town in North Ontario ...

I do think that we here in Germany are divided, culturally and by languages.

First, there's of course the division between 'old' and 'new' states, the most recent division.

Then, the 'traditional' division between the South and North (mainly in the old states). With quite some language 'barriers' as well. (Mainly, however, only in dialect).

But - and that's often not recognised - we have - as official language! - the minority languages Danish, Sorbian, Romany, and Frisian as well ...


And since there have some dozen of independent/sovereign countries in what is now Germany until the early 19th century, and more than two dozens somehow independent until early 20th century ...

The song title, Miss Kitty Kat, is "Helpless."

Probably the greatest group from Canada in the 60s-70s was The Guess Who, which included Burton Cummings and Randy Bachman. (Randy later formed a group with a drummer named Turner, and a couple of his brothers, called Bachman-Turner Overdrive, whose big hit was "Takin' Care of Business.")

The Guess Who were the first Canadian rock band to have a number one hit in the United States, with "American Woman" in 1970.



Here, they do "Runnin' Back to Saskatoon," which is about the prairies, where they came from. I'll post the lyrics, too, because you'll never understand it all.

I been hangin' around gas stations
I been learnin' 'bout tires
I been talkin' to grease monkeys
I been workin' on carBs

Moose Jaw, Broadview, Moosomin too
Runnin' back to Saskatoon
Red Deer, Terrace and a Medicine Hat
Sing another prairie tune
Sing another prairie tune

I been hangin' around libraries
I been learnin' 'bout books
I been talkin' to playwriters
I been workin' on words, phrases

I been hangin' around hospitals
I been learnin' 'bout dyin'
I been talkin' to heart doctors
I been workin' on disease

This spirit is home grown
Don't come from Hong Kong
This spirit is home grown
Don't come from Hong Kong

I been hangin' around grain elevators
I been learnin' 'bout food
I been talkin' to soil farmers
I been workin' on land

I been hangin' around camera stores
I been learnin' 'bout sight
I been talkin' to film makers
I been workin' on eyes

Moose Jaw, Broadview, Moosomin too
Runnin' back to Saskatoon
Red Deer, Terrace and a Medicine Hat
Sing another prairie tune
Sing another prairie tune

This spirit is home grown
Don't come from Hong Kong
This spirit is home grown
Don't come from Hong Kong

Been reading along and actually learning some things that I can use in my travails across Canajia.My best strategy is to make sure from the outset that the Quebekers or the N New Brunswickers know that Im from US and not some local ANglo. Ive never had the local meat pie and I wonder how similar to the Coal region "pasty" they are. Both seem to rely on an internal structure that involves cinnamon in the meats. Sounds great.

Youve got one person here who can resist le Poutine. Im of a school that likes chips or fries with malt vinegar and sea salt and nothing NOTHING else.

I am convinced that Poutine is just for the purpose of taking in huge amounts of grease calories and fats to act as energy storage and quick glucose sources.

How bout the cod head stews of te Maritimes? I love the way they serve that at" le Fine Grob Su Mer" in Chatham NB

Yeah . . . so? Is there something wrong with that? I would pay not to have vinegar on my fries. Sea salt, now, i'd do that in spades.

During the Great Depression, when the Dust Bowl reached the prairie provinces, and there were massive strikes everywhere, the boys in the Maritimes sent salt cod (salted, dried fish) to the poor folk out there. They didn't know what to do with them, how to cook them, or even that they could be cooked, so they used them to patch holes in the roof.

the railroad was a major force in uniting the country, this song has a few problems, it glosses over the darker parts of the railroad construction, but it's definitely one of my fave G. Lightfoot songs



Gordon Lightfoot
"Canadian Railroad Trilogy"
From the Album - The Way I Feel. 1967

There was a time in this fair land when the railroad did not run
When the wild majestic mountains stood alone against the sun
Long before the white man and long before the wheel
When the green dark forest was too silent to be real

But time has no beginnings and the history has no bounds
As to this verdant country they came from all around
They sailed upon her waterways and they walked the forests tall
Built the mines, mills and the factories for the good of us all

And when the young man's fancy was turnin' to the spring
The railroad men grew restless for to hear the hammers ring
Their minds were overflowing with the visions of their day
And many a fortune lost and won and many a debt to pay

For they looked in the future and what did they see
They saw an iron road running from the sea to the sea
Bringing the goods to a young growing land
All up from the seaports and into their hands

Look away said they across this mighty land
From the eastern shore to the western strand

Bring in the workers and bring up the rails
We gotta lay down the tracks and tear up the trails
Open her heart let the life blood flow
Gotta get on our way 'cause we're moving too slow

Bring in the workers and bring up the rails
We're gonna lay down the tracks and tear up the trails
Open her heart let the life blood flow
Gotta get on our way 'cause we're moving too slow
Get on our way 'cause we're moving too slow

Behind the blue Rockies the sun is declining
The stars they come stealing at the close of the day
Across the wide prairie our loved ones lie sleeping
Beyond the dark ocean in a place far away

We are the navvies who work upon the railway
Swinging our hammers in the bright blazing sun
Living on stew and drinking bad whiskey
Bending our backs til the long days are done

We are the navvies who work upon the railway
Swinging our hammers in the bright blazing sun
Laying down track and building the bridges
Bending our old backs til the railroad is done

So over the mountains and over the plains
Into the muskeg and into the rain
Up the St. Lawrence all the way to Gaspe
Swinging our hammers and drawing our pay
Layin' 'em in and tying them down
Away to the bunkhouse and into the town
A dollar a day and a place for my head
A drink to the living, a toast to the dead

Oh the song of the future has been sung
All the battles have been won
On the mountain tops we stand
All the world at our command
We have opened up her soil
With our teardrops and our toil

For there was a time in this fair land when the railroad did not run
When the wild majestic mountains stood alone against the sun
Long before the white man and long before the wheel
When the green dark forest was too silent to be real
When the green dark forest was too silent to be real
And many are the dead men too silent to be real

I went to high school in a boarding school which drew from New England and
eastern Canada. One of the kids was from Sherbrooke, a pale skinny little guy
I called Whitey. He had an an Irish surname, but spoke both English and
French, English being his first language.

Whitey had (and still has) a good singing voice, and in college, he taught
himself guitar on a borrowed instrument and joined a folk-singing group. This
was the sixties. We were all in folk-singing groups.

But he also became more and more fascinated with the Francophone part of
is heritage, the literature, the poetry, the music. He set about making his
living singing and writing songs -- in French. It was lean existence, but he
loved it, and got pretty good at it.

He lives in Montreal these days, east of the Main, as Francophone as it gets.

a really deep rich malt vinegar is what the fry was meant to be slavvered in, not some greasy,yarrowrooted concoction that for the life of me reminds me of SOS sauce.

Well, i always liked SOS, as you call it. My grandmother made it with chipped beef, and it was quite good. I cannot stand the smell of vinegar. I'll leave the house if someone starts cooking something with vinegar in it.

Peasant.

waffle eater

you like scrapple and want to speak disparagingly of poutine? tsk tsk tsk

Love Gordon Lightfoot's Railroad Trilogy. It was on two of the cd's that I had on constant shuffle in the old car's cd player.

Did Whitey get a radio program?

yeah, i've been wondering about that too, thinking of That Black Sheep Inn kind of crowd

wow, just read through the whole thread (well, I skimmed some of the longer posts). Fascinating. I live so close to Canada and have spent almost no time in it. The longest stretch was in Whistler which was Anglophone so far as I could tell. But, it is a resort area for international tourism.

Either that - or a particular Saturday night host ...

My pals in Mr. Something Something played at the Black Sheep Inn - said it was great. I want to go along the next time they play there.

here is HANK SNOW with a tribute to the east-coast fishermen :
" sqid jigging grounds "

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yp3ShbppWsk

( there isn't much fishing left on the east-coast )

To my way of tinkin', if I'm tinkin at all, the real dichotomy in Canada, and in many other parts of the world, is Catholic and Protestant. I say this since only in Ireland is there the honesty, in my opinion, to admit that Protestants and Catholics do not have mutual love for each other. In other places there seems to be, again in my opinion, a desire to blame a "red herring," since no one wants to go back to the feelings that Europe dealt with in earlier centuries.

The rift between Catholic and Protestant is deeper than people might imagine, I believe, since if Protestants did not have strong anti-Catholic feelings collectively, then Protestantism would just rejoin the Catholic Church, since it is the mother church. I also believe the U.S. Red state versus Blue State is really a red herring for the dichotomy of the Protestant South and the Catholic North. Mind you, liberal mainstream Protestantism does seem to align itself politically with the northern Democrat Catholics. However, the bible belt Protestants do, I believe, have a less universal vision of what the U.S. agenda should be.

While it has been pointed out in these posts that there has been vociferous antipathy to Catholic education by English speaking Canada, may I point out that Catholic education got its impetus, as I have heard, from the collective Catholic perception that public schools were designed to bring Catholics into the Protestant fold. So, neither side trusts the other side, it appears to me.

Finally, if English speaking Canada had been consisting mainly of English speaking Catholics, would anyone agree that the historical and current cultural and language rift be much less, or some more harmonius compromise would have been effected?

Perhaps, the focus on language reflects that some might remember the Second Defenstration of Prague ?http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defenestration_of_Prague