If you aren’t Canadian, or if you are pretty young, you may not know whoStompin’ Tom Connors is, or was. He was a proud Canadian, a musician, a wanderer, a poet, sometimes known as the Canadian Troubadour. Stompin’ Tom Connors was a Canadian legend.
My Mother and my Grandmother introduced me to the music and the character of Stompin’ Tom. So, thinking of him now I am thinking of so many other things connected to the memories I have of the man, his lyrics, his music, his travels, his love of Canada and his goofiness.
R.I.P. Stompin’ Tom Connors.
Born in Saint John, New Brunswick, Charles Thomas Connors was raised by foster parents in Skinner Pond, Prince Edward Island.
Connors was fiercely proud to be Canadian. In 1979, he protested what he saw as the Americanization of the Canadian music industry by returning six of his Juno awards.
With only 35 cents in his pocket, Tom Connors didn’t have enough money to buy a beer in a hotel barroom in Timmins, Ont. But he had a guitar, so a friendly barkeep offered to buy him a drink if he’d play a few tunes. By 1970, six years later, fans are packing Toronto’s Horseshoe Tavern to hear Connors and the legendary plywood stomping board he uses to keep time. In this CBC-TV interview, Connors describes his life on the road and a near-beating at a gig in Kapuskasing, Ont.
• Born to an unwed teenage mother in New Brunswick in 1936, Stompin’ Tom Connors spent most of his childhood with a foster family in Prince Edward Island. Unwilling to pick potatoes for a living, as he says in this 1970 clip, he left at age 15 to make his own way.
• For 13 years Connors was an itinerant worker, hitching his way across the country with his guitar and writing songs about the people and places he encountered. His nickname, Stompin’ Tom, was bestowed on him by a waiter introducing him onstage in Peterborough, Ont. in 1967.
• Connors and his bride, Lena Welsh, were married in November 1973 in a live broadcast of CBC-TV’s Luncheon Date. After the ceremony, Connors explained that he chose the live setting as a way for the fans who gave him so much to participate in a special moment in his life.
• The song that almost got Connors thrashed in Kapuskasing was The Reesor Crossing Tragedy, his account of a 1963 labour dispute that led to the deaths of three people.
• Connors became an officer of the Order of Canada in 1996 and has received several honorary university degrees. In 2009 he was one of four subjects in a Canada Post stamp series paying tribute to Canadian musicians.
• Stompin’ Tom Connors died on March 6, 2013, at the age of 77.
- Stompin’ Tom Connors Stomps Out | Saskboy’s Abandoned Stuff
- Jian’s tribute to Stompin’ Tom | Q with Jian Ghomeshi | CBC Radio
- CBC Digital Archives – Life on the road with Stompin’ Tom Connors
- Stompin’ Tom Connors’s songs mapped – Canadian Geographic Blog
- The Official Stompin’ Tom Connors Website
- RIP Stompin’ Tom Connors – shawn king’s posterous
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