Rise Again!

The voices of some male speakers or singers — often those thought of as “folk singers,” whether they were or not – that sound like they’ve always been there, that they emanate directly from the earth, like the landscape speaking through evolution and history.

Ewan MacColl, the late Scots singer/songwriter – and partner in every way of Peggy Seeger – was a prime example, a voice that arouses and lifts you with a deep, almost palpable sound.

The most mesmerizing non-singer of this type I’ve heard was the South African poet Dennis Brutus. He did a reading and… would I call it a lecture?… at the Annenberg Center in Philly in the ’80s. I was writing a weekly column for the Welcomat weekly at the time, so he was a natural to report.

I took no notes. His words so seared themselves into me that I could quote almost everything he said verbatim the next day. Now I wish I had such notes, because those enrapturing words have seeped away over the decades.

But I’m not working up to a laud of MacColl or Brutus here. This is for Stan Rogers, a Canadian singer/songwriter who died way too early.

I don’t recall who had the grace to point me to Between the Breaks, his third album, first one before a live audience, and still my favorite. He wrote all but three of the songs recorded there, which… again, feel like you could unearth the lyrics by asking any rock along the Canadian coast.

Though Rogers spent most of his adult life in Ontario, his truest love of Canada and its people came, first, from the Maritime seaport provinces of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island, then later, the farmers and laborers of the plains. The best tracks of Between the Breaks are the seafaring tales, including “Barrett's Privateers,” “The Mary Ellen Carter,” and “The Flowers of Bermuda,” plus his rendition of a traditional sea chanty, “Rolling Down to Old Maui.”

Rogers not only takes you on board these sailing ships, but inside the sailors’ lives and their motivations. “The Mary Ellen Carter” is flat-out magnificent, the story of the sinking of a small ship, its abandonment by the owners, and the crew’s determination to resurrect her out of love and the realization that “she’s worth a quarter million floating at the dock.”

It has wonderful turns of phrase, such as when they attach the ropes to raise her:

Put cables to her fore and aft 

And girded her around.

But the pulsing chorus of “Rise again, Rise again” has an almost magical effect (more on that below).

“Barrett's Privateers” recounts how a tumbledown, half-rotten sloop, The Antelope, set out in 1778 under would-be captain Barrett to attack defenseless American cargo ships. Instead, The Antelope is destroyed with horrific loss:

Barrett was smashed like a bowl of eggs

And the main truck carried off both me legs –

a godawful description of maritime carnage.

Among his non-maritime songs, some might find “First Christmas” a little weepy. The full tag line is “first Christmas away from home,” and it mixes a crowd of short tales about the blow to personal history at Christmas when you’re first separated from family festivities. Some stories are hopeful, but most are stapled to loneliness and the heartaches of life. I see it as a sober look at the downside of celebration, once lost. A damned sight more realistic than the damned sappery of “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

I won’t go into whats on the rest of his albums, except to mention “Northwest Passage,” which many Canadians have latched onto as an unofficial anthem. The chorus includes reference to John Franklin’s ill-fated attempt to find a clear sea route through the Arctic. I wonder what Rogers would think about the more recent discovery of Franklin’s lost ships, abandoned in the far north, with nothing, so far, to point to the fate of his crews.

[There’s one other song, “Giant,” that got me thinking about odd overlaps. It unrolls the Irish myth of Fingal, a folk hero of vast size and strength, who is likely the same character as Scottish hero/leader Finn MacCool. Now the Scots singer born James Henry Miller took the stage name Ewan MacColl, mentioned above. I somehow can’t believe he didn’t switch an “o” for an “l” to slip sideway into legendary Scottish history. Either way, he wrote terrific songs for BBC social-history presentations.]

But Rogers missed out on the chance of hearing about Franklin’s re-discovery. On June 2, 1983, at age 33, Rogers died in an almost absurd plane accident. A smoldering fire broke out on a commercial flight, and the plane diverted to land at the Greater Cincinnati Airport in Kentucky, where an otherwise-successful attempt to release some of the passengers let in enough exterior oxygen to cause a flash fire that killed those still aboard, including Rogers. We can only hope he died of smoke inhalation.

[And what was the plane thinking? Was it taking revenge for abuse it endured while still a Piper Cub?]

His death led to a couple strange legends, one disproved, the less likely one bolstered by first-person corroboration.

Soon after he died, there were reports that a) he had escaped the plane, then fatally returned to help others escape, or b) that he stayed on board to help others at his own risk. There’s no evidence to support any of that, and medical evidence to refute it. He simply died in a miserable situation.

A later story sounds manufactured, except…

On February 13, 1983, the cargo ship Marine Electric capsized in a violent storm off the coast of Virginia. Chief mate Robert Cusick was initially trapped in the deckhouse as the vessel sank, managed to swim clear, reached a swamped lifeboat, and pulled himself aboard. He then kept from drowning as waves roared over him by continually singing “The Mary Ellen Carter” rise again refrain.

Can this be so? Cusick himself recounts the story on a documentary film.

Stan Rogers is 40+ years gone. His work has an almost mystical following in parts of Canada, and his younger brother Garnet tours with his band (alas, singing in an undistinguished voice that can’t do the songs justice).

Listening to Rogers the other day and recalling his early death put something into perspective for me: No, you can’t return to the past or resurrect it, but maybe you can internally buy back some of the important parts. He was telling me I must go ahead with my writing, in all its forms – fiction, personal, whatever else – that have been slipping aside as I wallow adrift in old farthood. 

I mean, we’ve only got one life, and all that – sounds as sappy as Jimmy Stewart, who always gives me hives, but the porridge of existence has an infinite range of flavors.