Delivering the dream
Festival achieves what Stan and Garnet wanted for Canso
CANSO - Stan Rogers and his brother Garnet had hoped their success in music would one day allow them to give something back to their second home, Canso. It was here where the brothers from Hamilton spent their childhood summers with their grandparents and extended family, building driftwood fires on the beach and dreaming the days away.
Later, as performers, they saw their beloved seaside town slip into hard times with the downturn in the fishery. They wrote and sang about it. They wanted to do more.
"We had this dream that we wanted to make a difference for this community," Garnet said following his performance at a workshop Saturday at the folk music festival named for his late brother. "We wanted to bring something back to this part of the world."
But tragedy interfered with those plans. "We never got to do it." Stan died on an Air Canada airplane on June 2, 1983, as he was headed home from the Kerrville Folk Festival in Texas. After a fire started in the restroom on flight 797, the plane was forced to land at Cincinnatti, where Rogers was found to be one of 23 people who died of smoke inhalation. He was 33.
In the years following Stan's death, it was natural for Garnet to assume the dream had died along with Stan. He and his parents had no ownership of Stan's music and Garnet was starting from square one with a solo career, which wasn't easy. While Stan's music enjoyed unprecedented popularity following his death, Garnet was greeted with resentment in the Maritimes as he set out on his own.
"I made an effort to tour down here in the years after Stan died," he said, explaining that what greeted him wasn't just indifference, but "open hostility."
While the celebration of Stan and his music helped his family during their grieving process, in the Maritimes there was a backlash against his brother and best friend, the artist who wrote, sang and toured with him for 10 years. Some people wanted to fight Garnet when he came to town, his car was vandalized, graffiti was painted on his hotel door.
"I thought, 'I can't fight this'," he recalled. "So I stayed away for a long while."
During those years, Garnet saw other artists trying to advance their careers by exaggerating their connections to Stan. But usually they were very minor figures on the periphery of Stan's career, he said.
"I wasn't about to get into that, so I played other parts of the country and the U.S."
Thankfully, that's all changed.
"I came down last week and did five shows in four days in Nova Scotia," he said with pride. "All sold out."
"It's been a long haul."
Garnet is now one of the biggest draws at the Stan Rogers Folk Festival. He is recognized as an extremely talented songwriter, singer and multi-instrumentalist. He has his own style and his own audience.
Last year at Stanfest, Garnet's thoughts turned back to that dream for Canso he had shared with his brother.
"When I came to the festival last time, I saw people lined up waiting to get into the store and the streets were full of people…One night I looked up the hill and saw all the festival lights and said to myself, "Holy shit, our dream has come true! They made our dream come true!'"
From Stan's legacy the founders and organizers of the Stan Rogers Folk Festival have given something meaningful to the people of Canso. For this one weekend each year, Canso is a boom town.
