Stompin' Tom Connors: An Unlikely Canadian Star

By Richard Flohil | The Sound Cafe Journal

There are gigs to play and the Maple Leaf to fly and there’ll be no fallsy-downsies in this man’s band.

When Stompin’ Tom Connors died in 2013, the media reported he had died of natural causes. He was, after all, 77 years old.

What the media did not say was that Tom — and everyone who met him instantly called him by his first name — smoked three and a half packs of cigarettes every day, and drank close to 175 bottles of Moosehead Ale every week.

Despite that, he never appeared to gain weight; one friend said he could have slipped through a drain grating but for his ever-present cowboy hat.

It was, in fact, something of a miracle that he lived as long as he did.

Back in 1970, I interviewed him for a now long-gone magazine, The Canadian Composer. It was the first cover story published on the man, and he talked about his poverty-stricken childhood, when he was shuffled between orphanages, group homes and ill-chosen foster parents.

As we walked around downtown Toronto, he showed me the greasy spoon at Sherbourne and Queen Street where he’d briefly been a short- order cook on the night shift, and he talked about his dislike and distrust of the police.

In his teens and early twenties, he was — to use his own words — a travelling bum. “I’d stick out my thumb for a ride, and if I couldn’t get one, I’d go to the other side of the road, and get something going in the other direction. Didn’t matter; you just kept going, looking for a bed for the night and a beer or two before you turned in.” Tom hitchhiked from one side of Canada to the other and back, and more than once.

Re-reading what I wrote more than 50 years ago, one line stands out: “Connors could, if he had to, catch a rabbit, kill it, skin it, cook it and eat it.” And he was, even in his early days, tough, stubborn, sometimes bitter and often cranky.

A career begins in a northern Ontario bar

By 1970, he was a decade (and an astonishing five albums) into a career that had begun in a bar in Timmins, a northern Ontario mining town.

Hitchhiking through town with his beaten up Martin guitar, he stopped into the Maple Leaf Tavern for a drink. Unfortunately, he was a nickel short of the price of a beer, but the bartender offered him a free drink or two if he played couple of songs. Tom recalled: “The bartender called the boss, and he came in and listened and he asked me if I’d like to sing at the hotel for a week, for money.

“So I started that night. No microphone, no stage; they just cleared away one of the tables in a corner, and they stood me there to sing. They gave me a bed and $35 for the week. And by the time I left 14 months later, they had a stage and a sound system and they were paying me $75 a week. And they was packed every night.

“Early on, they figured I was wrecking the carpet with my foot pounding out the beat, so they gave me a sheet of plywood to stand on. And that’s where my name came from.”

After he left the Maple Leaf Hotel, he began to play in other bars in northern Ontario — Sudbury, Wawa, North Bay, Kapuskasing — and built a following in small towns. Along the way, he wrote dozens of songs; some were stories, and all of them celebrated another Canada that the big city folk in Toronto and Vancouver and Montreal knew little, if anything, about.

Tom’s relationship with his musicians was remarkable. The first thing he asked a potential new player would normally be seen as a trick question: “Do you drink? Do you like beer?”

He explained that he wanted people in the band who drank beer, but that he did not need any “fallsy-downsies” who couldn’t handle their Moosehead.

If they were hired, they agreed in the contract to stay up with Tom after the gig, on a schedule with the other players — and drink warm beer, play chess and discuss subjects as disparate as world politics and numerology.

Some of the best young folk artists in Canada, including J.P. Cormier, Dave Gunning, Mike Plume and Tim Hus, apprenticed with him. They learned his enormous repertoire, learned how to play chess and croquet, and learned how to drink copious amounts of beer without getting drunk.

In the late ’60s and the very early ’70s, Tom and his band played well over 250 shows a year, often in small towns where you needed an ordnance survey map and a magnifying glass to find them. Word of mouth did the trick; an advance man would move ahead by two or three weeks, book a venue, run an ad in the local paper, buy some commercials on the nearest radio station, flyer the town, and promote the gig as a country music event for the whole family.

Stomping along on a sheet of plywood, he played in pubs and clubs, school auditoriums, small-town taverns, and occasional concerts in more formal venues. Canada was about to fall in love with the man.

Seen, sometimes patronizingly, as some sort of musical primitive who told Canadian stories in simple language, he earned his fame — and he stuck to his stubborn belief that being “Canadian” was special, and that Canadian artists should get a fair shot on radio, television and the media. He was, at the time, ahead of the pack.

The Pride of Ontario's Northland Earns a National Audience

Parked outside the Horseshoe Tavern on Toronto’s once-trendy Queen Street West was Stompin’ Tom Connors’ huge boat of a second-hand car, with a bright red trailer hitched to the back. The trailer, emblazoned with musical notes, bore the legend: “Stompin’ Tom Connors, Pride of Ontario’s Northland.”

It’s 1968 and Tom’s career was about to take off in a way that surprised the entire Canadian music industry — and, indeed, the man himself.

In a few years, with the help of a short, puffy Ukrainian called Jury Krytiuk and an experienced music publisher, Mark Altman, he formed his own record company, Boot Records. Certainly none of the major labels at the time were even slightly interested in signing him. (Boot later released dozens of albums by other artists, including the debut recording of Rita MacNeil, singing a collection of a cappella feminist anthems. The label also introduced classical guitarist Liona Boyd to a national audience.)

At the time — and, in fact, throughout his career — Tom’s music was completely out of touch with what was being played on radio. Old-school country music, especially in major cities, had long been out of favour, and commercial radio was certainly not inclined to play songs about towns in northern Ontario (“Sudbury Saturday Night”) or truck drivers “tearin’ the tar off the 401” as they delivered Prince Edward Island potatoes to Toronto.

His records were cheaply produced — cutting half a dozen songs in a single recording session was not out of the question for him — and he once recorded a four-volume boxed set of cover tunes, 40 songs in all, in three days.

Given the lack of production values, Tom’s songs stuck out like a chainsaw on the manicured lawn that was commercial radio at the time, and country stations saw him as a hayseed novelty act. It didn’t help that Tom was a keen proponent of the 1971 legislation that compelled radio stations to play a specific amount of music by Canadian artists, something the broadcast industry strenuously opposed.

However, even without radio play, word was getting out. As the country went through another period of optimistic nationalism, his homespun populist songs found a foothold. He won Juno Awards, national press coverage, and even academic pieces in literary magazines. There are probably a couple of dozen PhD theses written about his songs.

Tom’s live show, by the time I presented him at Massey Hall in February 1972, was straight-up. He sang all his “hits,” pounded his plywood stompin’ board with his left foot, and played songs that resonated with everyone in the sold-out house.

“TTC Skedaddler,” “Sudbury Saturday Night,” “Bud the Spud,” “Big Joe Mufferaw” all tumbled out, with light-hearted introductions and a perfectly ordinary three-piece band, which he called, at the time, The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.

Afterwards, he sat on the edge of the stage and signed autographs until the last fan had left; it took almost as long as the show itself.

Facts and logic rarely changed Tom’s opinions

Toward the end of his life, he toured far less frequently. His shows were perfunctory — with his band testing his audiences’ patience by playing Stompin’ Tom songs for almost 30 minutes before the star came onstage.

He would then sing eight or nine songs before declaring intermission, and after the break, his band came back, once again playing more of the headliner’s songs. Tom would finally return to close the show.

No autographs; he and the band left quickly and headed back to their lodgings, usually a motel on the outskirts of town, and preferably one with a croquet set on the front lawn.

And then, with whoever’s turn it was, he’d head back to his room, and snap the cap off yet another Moosehead.

Tom Connors was, truth be told, a cantankerous, cranky man who, his mind made up, could never be convinced to the contrary by logic or facts.

But his stubbornness was, in its way, his hallmark. When he felt Juno Awards were being given to artists who had left Canada — Joni Mitchell and Neil Young included — he called them “border jumpers” and sent his own Juno Awards back.

When he was asked to meet the Queen at Rideau Hall in Ottawa, he agreed, but not if he would have to take off his black cowboy hat. Buckingham Palace conceded on the grounds that his hat could be considered a religious headdress.

For the most part, he was a lazy songwriter; his songs came to him both frequently and fast, and he rarely rewrote or laboured over a lyric. His rhymes were often bordering on doggerel — both simple and corny, his songs told their tales effectively enough. And his audience understood them and loved them without reservation.

His very career seemed, in some way, tied to the geography of a different Canada — one with miles between grain elevators, green foothills with mountains in the distance, small towns nestled by lakes, the red dust of Prince Edward Island, the gritty villages of rural Quebec and the deprived, desperate communities of the far north.

And it’s an odd footnote that the only other countries that have produced populist balladeers like Tom Connors are equally large, and contain huge heartlands. Australia had Slim Dusty, who made a hundred albums and will always be remembered for the song “A Pub With No Beer.”

And our neighbours in the United States gave us Leadbelly, the released convict who wrote “Goodnight Irene,” and Woody Guthrie, who was no star in his day but who wrote “This Land Is Your Land” and hundreds of other songs.

Stompin’ Tom is in good company, wherever he is. Which one of his peers is drinking beer with him late into the night is unknown.

STOMPIN’ TOM: YOU HAD TO BE THERE — STORY #1

SOCAN gave a special award to Tom at an upscale event in the Sheraton Centre in 1989. Sitting at an adjacent table, I introduced him to my then-assistant, Brenda Biseau. “So, where are you from?” he asked her.

“My family’s from Miscou Island,” she said, naming a tiny community in New Brunswick. “I’ve been there,” he said. “Who’d you know there?” She named an uncle. “Ah, Gary,” Tom responded. “I knew him. He taught me my first three chords on the guitar.

“Two of ’em were wrong!”

Later, on to his sixth bottle of beer, and between frequent trips out of the room for a smoke, he accepted his award, presented by Gordon Lightfoot. He spoke about singing songs for men and women in small communities, ordinary working folk, and “bums on the street like I used to be.”

“Pretty good,” I muttered to Brenda. “Especially since his asking price for a show these days is $40,000.”

STOMPIN’ TOM: YOU HAD TO BE THERE — STORY #2

Thirty-five years after his first appearance at the Horseshoe, Tom was invited back to the club. Jim Cuddy and Greg Keelor, the frontmen of Blue Rodeo, one of the most successful Canadian roots/rock bands, used to organize an annual event at the club, with the “free list” suspended and every penny taken at the door donated to charity.

It would be nice, they reasoned, to ask Tom to be their special guest. After some diligent work to discover his whereabouts (Tom was notoriously reclusive in his later years), they reached Tom Connors Jr., who agreed to take the proposal to his father.

After a day or two he got back — his dad would be there, but he would need to be able to smoke.

A quick query to the Horseshoe’s owners got a qualified OK. Smoking in licensed premises was against the law, and the club could be fined. But the risk of being discovered was minimal; there had been no previous charges, and the fine was only $300. “To heck with it,” they said, “it'll be worth it; who cares?”

Tom’s son was told it would be fine if his dad wanted to smoke onstage.

“No, you don’t understand,” was the response. “Tom wants everyone to be able to smoke, just like the good old days. And he’d like a proclamation from the Mayor to give everyone in the club permission to smoke if they want to.

“Oh, and the Blue Rodeo boys need to learn 40 Stompin’ Tom songs, so’s my dad can choose three or four to play on the night.”

Needless to say, Tom’s return to the Horseshoe didn’t happen.

Richard Flohil is a Canadian music promoter, publicist, former artistic director and journalist based in Toronto.

In 2024, he officially retired from his public relations company, Richard Flohil and Associates.

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