Black Grass: The Sound of Oshawa and Mid-Eastern Ontario
By Will McGuirk
Because it comes from the land. The best farmland in the country, said the father of the goose and smudged smack-dab into the middle of it, is the Manchester of the North, the dirty Shwa, Shwarock City, the City of Oshawa, Prepare to be Dazed and Confused.
The Shwater fuels the grass, colours the grass black, oily and grimy and slippery and slimy. Grass dirt gets in your lungs and under your skin. Burns your eyes, tickles your ears, feeds your soul. And what grows from the soil stares out from the ditches and the hedgerows, the clumps of bush and the darkness of the Ganaraska Forest. It lives here. It has lived here always, as each wave washed over the countryside, riding high the high hills, then low, the lowlands, down the valleys towards the lakes; Ontario, Simcoe, Scugog, the thousand lakes of the Kawarthas to the hills of Northumberland. The land between Pickering and Peterborough and Port Hope has and will give rise to the Black Grass.
Black Grass pushes through the sidewalks, through the asphalt of the parking lot and the concrete of the highway. It spreads sideways following the perimeter of the pavement and it pops up wherever the farm pushes up against the factory which is now a lot, which is many in the shadow of the moody Oak Ridge Moraine.
Because what is this place, born as it is of grass and grit, grace and grease?
Neil Young, Ronnie Hawkins, Ian Tyson, their piss is on this soil. Every solitary guitar picking bar boiled singer songwriter filling time between orders at the cracked end of the street; they sprang from this pissed on soil.
From the then and them to the now and where and everyone knows this is nowhere.
You’ve been to Redwood, I’ve been to Hollywood and this, well It Ain’t Hollywood, and the Rebels are Forgotten, but the Star shines in the bookman of the Legendary Horseshoe Tavern and in some ways the story centres around the ‘Shoe and that Handsome Ned and the graft of punk and art and country and junk and the back alley grass clots of Queen Street back lots. Ned leans into Blue Rodeo. Blue Rodeo stands like a denim wearing Colossus over the Canadian Music Scene, one foot west in the Simcoe Sound of The Band and one foot in the cross-shwaters east of Hogtown, seen fleetingly via a train window like a film reel. The curls and curves, one could get lost in there and the gritty grassed co-founder of Blue Rodeo walked up to a For Sale sign, purchased on sight and in there a whole band got Lost Together.
The hills called Greg Keelor. Maybe the Black Grass began with him, he draws inspiration still from the land around him. Or maybe it started with Ian Tyson who bought a farm on the concessions in Bowmanville or with Neil Young who grew up in Pickering listening to the wide lonely whistle of passing trains in the night. “In a lonely shack by a railroad track, He spent his younger days” Or maybe it began with Ronnie Hawkins passing from Simcoe, ( aaaah the smooth mellow whisperings of The Band and Daniel Lanois but this ain’t Hamilton), through Yonge to Peterborough, where Hawk settled in before the Group of Seven painting that is Stoney Lake.
Maybe Ronnie laid down a hipster trail of dark tales and rude awakenings, seeding the seeds of rock 'n roll in the high heads of hawkbillies, seeding the grass which grew inside the pavement cracks, the bruised and burnt, black tar fed grass with the runnellings of tanneries and car factories of this Manchester of North America. The Brit Manchester grew its own in Factory Records and perhaps the Black Grass will give rise to its own factory, the motto over the door, Tool or Die, Toil or Fly.
The blackness, it has sat there, in the darkness a windigo winding its way through the grasses, waiting to feed, sat there ‘til machine vibrations woke it up. Strumming campfire jams calmed a life force winding its neck back unto, onto itself. Strings strummed as a weapon against the long dark unknowable night. Would a melody be heard as a friend? Would a song carried like a flame, the single source of heat and hope, a balm, carried across by the Irish and Scots, footsteps on the east coast, the rocky and rockier work that ground down knuckles and the spray of salt made the wounds sting and singing was the way to move outside of the life, would a song, could a song?
And so the song was carried down the narrowing St. Lawrence by the French, by the Acadians who bridged the cleft into America and further south to the tips where they sat in outcast with the slaves and the sons of slaves and the daughters of slaves, slaves and outcasts and a hundred years later and a hundred years later more the sound found north again driftwood cast out washing up on the shores of the Six Nation, onto the shoulders of Hwy 6, on into The Six.
But the Irish, the Scots and the English folk traditions were caught in the hook of the Great Lakes and they have sat their pushing and pushed back so the Jazz, the Swing, the R&B, the Soul, the Rock 'n Roll, The Scarborough Blues never breeched the Rouge. No one called the Bluffs. The Red line was the frontier. Frenchman's Bay in Pickering was the border. The portage was as far south as the French got and as far north as the Anglos got until it flipped and Canada became Canadian and the Canadiens became Canada. And the melodies of the English got stuck in the rushes, the branches, thickets, the ravines, roots, waters, creeks of the Oak Ridge Moraine, sloped as it is on one side into Lake Ontario and on the other on to the Kawarthas.
And it waited and it sat and the dark oils of industry seeped into the soil and it coloured the music. It came from the black black water. it fed the Black Grass. The fiddle and banjo, the guitar and the mandolin drank from it and waited.
Rickity ticky tack of the train, ta-thump, ta-thump, ta-thump, ta-thump, toiling through the rolling hills, English named, the soft curves of the land, curves a man could get lost in. The names other men now lost left for others, an attempt maybe to tame this land, to make it familiar, subservient, kneel to their wishes, I dub thee Sir Brighton of Hastings, Lady Pickering of Peterborough, Dame Scarborough of Uxbridge, Sir Whitby of Newcastle. One name rang out like a bell, Clarington.
Take the old old train to old old York, grab a girl and an open-top robin eggshell blue Buick, make ways east to Ganaraska in the bowl of the bell that called, make ways east to work, to lay down tracks in an old old land, where the songs hide in plain sight, like fireflies at dusk or snow falling in a streetlight, on a cold December night by Lake Ontario.
The songs from the land curve into the land, curve themselves to the curves, curve to the contours of the hills, they hide in the folds, between, but when you roll back the blanket of grass they emerge, blinking in the light like fireflies or street lights behind branches in the wind.
A blanket laid down from the Northumberland Hills over the Oak Ridge Moraine to the Kawarthas, bound by a chain of lakes, and tucked in under the Rouge Valley.
And what of the songs that lie there in wait, under the blanket, under the soil, a song in the heart of each one who passed over the land and passed away into the land and a song in the heart as the heart decayed and fell apart, crumpled and crumbled and all that was left was the song of the soul under the soil, the fertile soil of the best farmland in the country, and the land gave birth to the song, from deep within the folds of the curve, the watershed, the streams that runnel down the sides to the wide open lake of Ontario.
And what of the songs in the soul who crossed oceans, seas; the souls of Vikings, Celts, Anglos and Bretons, the Teutons, Gauls, the Scots and Irish, the English and French, long lines launched in a fishing village, on a blighted farm, in the dreams of the schoolhouse or the barracks, by choice or pressgang, by eviction, by dogs, by guns, by lies, by neighbours, family, friends, lines launched with a gesture. A line that ends at the ticket booth and sits hushed into the back of the film. Outside the theatre is a place that remains strange.
But the black and white world of the cowboy, the simplicity of Good vs Evil, is familiar, the binary choice, the us vs them, that they know, that they fled, that they ran from, walked away from, sailed from, flew from, this they know, outside is Canada, inside is America, the rift, they embrace.
The landscape is unfamiliar but the music fills them with home, the glowing amber mesa and saffron butte, the shadows of the canyon, clouds of dust as horses, wildly gallop through, the thunderous upheaval calmed by a guitar, a trumpet, vaguely Latino, vaguely Europeano, with hands like roots clawing back into the soil of another continent but this was also new, a melding. It was time melded with space. The music, lonesome like lost souls burying too many, harvesting too little, and longing too long. It paired well with their own traditions, their own folk, which they played at night around campfires, the eyes of the Windigo on them in the black forest, and the sounds in the theatre married well with their times. It brought space to them. It came from beyond their eye’s horizon, carried in by the wind and the whistle of the passing trains, runnelling down the sides of the Oak Ridge Moraine, from Pickering to Port Hope, and into Peterborough, Omemee, the little towns of North Ontario, Black flies, the little Black flies, always the Black flies, blue blue windows, yellow moon on the rise.
A new sound was being born and it called to the songs in the earth, a sound equal parts time and equal parts space. It was a howl of history and it howled on into the future, from sea to sea to sea, from the pier at Halifax, following the stepping stones, the outcroppings, the rocky shore, it sailed down the great cleft of the St. Lawrence, narrower and narrower, tighter and tighter until the Frenchman stopped at the bay entrance, the beginning of the portage, and said enough south, no further and the Rouge marked the line between the Red and the Blues.
The Blues travelled north to the same point, shaking hands shaken in agreement. Enough north, long time running, from the delta up the mighty Mississippi round the Loop in cart and on foot underground following the waters and onto Hwy 6, the mystical road, as the Hawk flies, and the mesh of streets Yonge and Yorkville, Young and Isabella, oh Isabella, and there on the outskirts the blues sat in with the folk and stayed never straying further, day trips to the Rouge but skirting in a hat of fifty years ago the edges of the Bay.
Folk is skittish. It twitches into the light when it’s right. It is a nervous music, distrustful. It has not the swagger of Blues, the sweat of Soul, the swoon of Jazz. It does not belong here. It is an interloper, and it is shy to prove its worth. It is not the sound of the land but the sound of the people who sought out the land, this stolen land.
The Blues is the sound of a stolen people, Jazz, and Soul the sound of a stolen people in a stolen land. Folk is the sound of time, and the Canadian Sound is the sound of time meeting space, of history meeting geography.
This geography drew Neil Young on its west, Ian Tyson on its east, and Rompin’ Ronnie Hawkins on its north, sowing the seeds of the Black Grass, grew hard, grew, limbs, trunks, branches, the ghosts of songs raised with them, grew with them, snarled in the branches, the ghosts like spiders nests, caught in the claws, but when poked, awoken, touched, the nests crack open and a thousand golden spiders descend like notes.
Black Grass, ribbons, reaching up, highs and bellows of farmlands, ribbons that flutter up and flutter down, canopies of trees or clouds nimble and light, the rain falls in streams, streamers weave in and out of the sound waves, airwaves, like a ghost in machine, Mr Soul in the computer age, trans, transmitting overhead wires, between the plants, the nuclei on the lake, bookends and a heavy glow like clouds of fireflies fly over the waters.
The plants electrified the land, energized the grass, the plants sucked up the heat and burnt black inside out from the hot metals, and in the cracks of hot motels it grew, on and from metals and in and on the drip of diesel from the underside of ill kept chrome machines weeping down from rivers running blindly towards the sound of the sea calling.
Over and out over, in and on and under and up and over the lush dark high hills and lowlands soft in their curves from the dewey caress of the farmer’s hand stroking sensing feeling the heat and growth and opportunities and potentials of the dirt and seed heads rolled between fingers like numbers and dropping like names back to earth.
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