Songs from the Inland Sea - Now Available

THE STORIES BEHIND THE SONGS

1 - Blurs the Line

My first trip up to the Interlake was in 2018 as part of the first iteration of Chautauqua: The Interlake Trail.  Our first activity was a tour of the Arborg area conducted by the local farmer and historian Jóel Friðfinnsson.  Joel is a wealth of knowledge of Icelandic settlement in the area and even gave us a recitation of Icelandic Sagas in the Icelandic language.  He told us the story of John Ramsey, an Indigenous man who was instrumental to the survival of the early settlers, even after the settlers brought with them a deadly smallpox epidemic that lasted years and cost Ramsey most of his family.  Years later, Joel recounted, Icelandic carpenter Trausti Vigfusson had: 

“an unusually vivid dream in which a tall stranger emerged from the bush and approached him from across the home field. The man shook hands and introduced himself as John Ramsay. (Ramsay had brought [his wife] a marble headstone to a grave site at Sandy Bar. Ramsay was dead by the time of Vigfusson’s dream and was buried beside his wife.) Ramsay knew that Vigfusson was a carpenter and, being saddened by the neglected state of Betsy’s grave, asked Vigfusson to rebuild the picket fence surrounding it. Vigfusson promised he would tend to the matter and later did so.”
Source: Manitoba Historical Society

We visited the home of Trausti at the Arborg Heritage Village and the still tended and kept grave of Betsey Ramsey on that tour.

I was thinking about generations of immigration (including my ancestors), the forced removal of Indigenous people in the Interlake and across Canada, the untold generations who have lived on the land, and the power of dreams when I wrote this song.

Blurs the Line Lyrics

I am a poor man come from a land
Far over the deep swirling brine
Valhalla or hell I’m sure I can tell
But I’ve come for a home to call mine

My daughter and wife we’ve built here a life
a hard one as we’ve come to learn
with winters so cold and horrors untold
We pray that the pox don’t return

As I lay in my bed, there came into my head
a man the likes I’ve never seen
And the question he posed haunts my repose
And my days as though more than a dream

Blurs the line
Between time

I am a poor girl of the new world 
yet the tales of my parents resound so
deep in my soul like whirling hot pools
of the fatherland round and around

So it happened one day I happened to stray
Out in my parent's domain
and through the steam found myself in a scene
On a path that was no earthly plain

Blurs the line
Between time

Now here I stand on that same haunted land
remembering what did befell
though it’s been many years
Am I there or they here?
Sometimes it feels hard to tell

Blurs the line
Between time

2 - The Ballad of Carrie Taylor (The Other Side)

Andy Blicq was an invaluable source for this project.  He has written many books on the history of the Interlake and produced a documentary about John Ramsey (featuring the amazing William Prince). He told me the story of the “Quarantine Wedding” which I of course had to write a song about.  

I took much of the song from Come into Our Heritage, a history of the R.M. of Argyle:

Caroline Taylor was born May 11, 1856, the daughter of William Stuart Taylor and Isabella Slimmons. Her early childhood was spent in Kingston, Ont., later, the family moved to Lansing, Michigan. When Caroline was nine years old, her mother died, leaving five daughters. There followed a sad period when these five little girls in heavy mourning (black dresses trimmed with black crepe) lived with their grief-stricken father. Strangers would stop them on the street and ask them whom they mourned, and the girls would burst into tears. Carrie, in later years, had a strong aversion to mourning, especially for children.

Carrie’s uncle, John Taylor, had become involved with a group of Icelandic settlers, including, Sigurdur Christopherson, who was arranging to settle in Manitoba. Through him, she met Sigurder in Winnipeg and they were married on Jan. 22, 1877. Because the Icelandic settlement was under a smallpox quarantine the happy couple stood on one side of Netley Creek (the quarantine boundary) while the Metis minister stood on the other.

Here’s how the song came out and a video Sol James and I filmed standing on the site of the wedding!

The Ballad of Carrie Taylor (The Other Side) Lyrics

I was born long ago 
To a happy home
5 Sisters in Frontenac 
But when mama took sick
She left us so quick
5 little dresses in black 

So we grew up in mourning
But there were nights in which I’ll confide
In my dreams I would see
Her smiling at me
Waving from the other side

I was no fool
So they sent me to school
the years passed by in a whirl
My hair was taken up 
my skirts lowered down
All at once no longer a girl 

I took a job in the country 
Where one morning out the window I spied
Hair a golden colour
A complexion like no other 
Of another on the other side

She became my friend
And told me she’d been sent
from a faraway colony
And my uncle and my daddy 
Decided wed be happy
On the shores of an inland sea

So we undertook the journey
Thinking of the life that we’d find
If We kept heading west
And our journey was blessed
we’d find it on the other side

When we got to Manitoba
wicked winds blew colder
And The lake froze under the snow
So when a fine-looking man
Asked me for my hand
It set my maiden heart all aglow

But as our love was rising
The pox swept through like a tide
And no one was getting married
With so many being buried
Carried over to the other side

The quarantine
Meant we could not leave
And not a minister left in town
So with nothing getting better
We wrote to one a letter
To see if he would come around

We met him at the river
But he would not cross the boundary line
not a word was lost
With us Shouting vows across
With him standing at the other side

Now I’ve more years than my mother
And my eyes are dimming like the night
But I know Ill see
My family
When I cross over to the other side

3 - Three Sisters

During my research, someone tipped me off that Elder, Knowledge-Keeper, and Order of Manitoba Recipient, Ruth Christie, knew the names of the waves on the lake. So obviously I had to speak to her.  She invited me into her lovely little home in Selkirk, fed me, and told me hours’ worth of amazing stories about the lake.  It turns out that for generations fishermen and lake-goers have referred to “The Three Sisters,” phenomena of three rogue waves forming.  They are named Agnus, Mabel, and Becky with Becky, the third wave/sister being the most deadly. 

As the saying attributed to “the Icelanders” goes:

"Oh Agnus, Mabel and Becky.
You got to watch when they come, boy.
Sometimes Becky, she's the last one,
and when she comes, boy, you have to watch out for that one.
Cause them three sisters, boy,
they are the ones you have to watch out for if you're out in a storm."

What I could not find (and no one who I spoke to seemed to know) was WHY they were named this.  So, imagining these dangerous sisters, who I have since encountered sailing out on the lake, I wrote this song as an origin story for Agnus, Mabel, and Becky.

Three Sister Lyrics

You see the wind and the lake they were lovers
Long before time had begun
And they moved together as lovers do
Timeless under the sun

And when the winter grew colder
They were parted by endless glass
Their daughters were born in the springtime
First Agnus, then Mabel, and Becky came last

Agnus was the oldest, and dutiful to a fault
Sparkled in the starlight, a beautiful cobalt
And in her heart, a secret, locked up in a vault 

She’d fallen for a fisherman, from the village on the shore
She’d watch him from the beaches, where she‘d washed up before
And she followed in the water when he was pulling on the oars

Mabel, she was guarded but adored her sister so 
She’d grown up in her shadow and was content to follow
Lovely as the moon, the curve of the crescent hollow

But when she caught her sister, spying as he fished
She felt the stab of envy and the shocking jealous twist
And was shaken and ashamed by the weight of what she wished

Becky was the baby, with a mischievous streak
She talked back to her sisters, and she gave her mother cheek
She secretly saw Agnus and Mabel as timid and weak

She thought they were silly, pining over a boy
And didn’t care about him, or how he brought them joy
She saw his fishing trawler as a little wooden toy

And so they followed it out
Yeah they followed it out
The sisters in a row
And they tossed it about
Yeah they tossed it about
As the storm began to grow

Agnus following her heart
Mabel following her sister
Becky following for fun
And Becky she knew
In the wake of those two
Most of the work would be done

Agnus struck strong
And Mabel struck strong
And left the boat battered and bruised
And Becky came along
With an ominous song
Tore the planking loose 

And now it's drifting away…

And as his body grew colder
And the daylight streamed from his eyes
The Sisters as one saw what they’d done
And the storm began to subside

First Agnus wept for the fisherman
Then Mabel wept for the shame
And Becky came last and to herself laughed
And thought it what a wonderful game

So beware ye sailors and fisherfolk
For the sisters their father’s lead take 
And would bid ye would come, as many have done
To their mother’s house deep in the lake

4 - The Princess

Andy Bliq once again gave me a great song idea when he told me about the wreck of the SS Princess.  Bruce Cheney did a great job writing about the incident and I was able to find some sources and articles published back in 1906.  I was struck but how one “Mrs. Sinclair” really seemed to be the only passenger on board to keep her head and so I tried to include her as the hero in the story.

The Princess Lyrics

She was the princess on the lake
She was the princess down the red
She was the princess in the storm 
Now she's the queen of the dead

It was 1906 in late august
When the princess went down in the waves
Some miles yet from Swampy Island
Taking 6 souls to the grave

The captain had ordered them turn back
Too late in the telling by some
The smokestack cracked and cut through like an axe 
And the princess was done

With seas as high as a mountain
Rain like needle and nails
The valleys they fell to were depthless
The spray cloaked the night like a veil

With the cold swell lashing upon her
Clutching her children so tight
Mrs. Sinclair fought for them there 
While others swept into the night

With the help of the wheelman George Starr
Who awoke to a living nightmare
She freed the yawl from its mooring
And threw her child through the air

As the princess was wrent into pieces
She steadied herself for the next throw
And only then with her children sent
Would she deem it now her time now to go

The Family now reunited
In a vessel so pitifully weak
It was pummeled and pitched to a pinnacle
A last glimpse was caught from its peak

The captain still in the wheelhouse
The stewardess and cook there with he
And over the tempest their song could be heard 
Nearer my God to thee

The lake is a merciless master
And it suffers no royalty
But when the Princess went down, it bestowed a crown
Now She rules for eternity

5 - Girl from the Ocean

I never thought that my future wife would be sailing from New Brunswick into the same Nova Scotia festival I was playing years ago, but boy am I glad she was. She was coming to see Ashley Macisaac play, and we were on stage right before him.  Thank the universe for that life-changing serendipity.

We met on a dock, stayed in touch, and did the long-distance thing until she moved to the prairies.  During the pandemic, I knew she was missing the ocean and her family so when I proposed to her on Christmas Day, I did so with this song. 

Ashley MacIsaac and some friends were kind enough to play on it and I’m not sure if it was the Cape Breton fiddle or me… but she said yes.   A condition of our living “in a tideless place” was to get our own sailboat, and it’s been a wonderful way to explore beautiful Lake Winnipeg. 

So, for my beautiful wife, the Girl from the Ocean…

Girl from the Ocean Lyrics

Girl from the ocean pining for the sea
Cuz the prairie rolls too slowly
Air drier than the sun-baked fields
But when the gulls cry out t could almost feel

Like Home, Home, oh to be
Home Home on the sea

Girl from the ocean stuck in a tideless place
Dreamin of the salt spray on her sun-kissed face
Traded lighthouses for the elevators
Casting shadows longer and much later than 

Home, Home, oh to be
Home Home on the sea

Its getting tougher being in her garden tending
Dreary days spent dreaming of a winter ending
But with the axis tipping comes the barley bending
And when the wind comes whipping, it makes for prettier pretending

The girl from the ocean is finally free
Steady in the wheel house out on a rolling sea

Where now she is Home Home oh to be
Home, Home, on the sea

Girl from the ocean
Girl on the ocean

6 - Blink of an Eye

Sol James is a long-time friend, collaborator, and fellow Interlaker.  Both she and I have grandfathers (Opa for me, Avi for her) who farmed the Interlake.  It always fascinates me how quickly endless farmland turns into an endless lake.  She came over one day with a song idea about her memories of growing up on an Interlake farm, and we finished it together. 

Blink of an Eye Lyrics

I remember
golden Septembers
lunch in the hayfield 
A horse on the run

Gone before sunrise
Stopping at sunset
No matter how long
There’s work to be done
And he’d say to me

Always remember
Nothings Forever
Though the sun shines,
it wont for all Time
So hold steady the reigns
Grateful for clear skies
Cuz It can start raining
In the blink of an eye

There were bad years
the rain fell like cold tears
The sloughs overflowin’
Like hearts overcome

Life on a thin line
Didn't bother him none
Cuz even in thick mud
There’s work to done

I was too young to see
But he’d say to me 

Always remember
Nothings Forever
Though the rain falls, 
it won't for all Time
So hold steady the reigns
Grateful for grey skies
Cuz It’ll stop raining
In the blink of an eye

Oh how I miss him
Thought I had more time
21 summers
Were just the blink of an eye

Now cows the in the distance
The drone of the bees
The smell of a clean sweat
Or old axle grease 

And I’m back there in Oakview
Just Avi and me
And I’ll pass on his words
His legacy
Now I finally see

Always remember
Nothings Forever
We’re here all together,
But not for all Time
So hold steady the reins
An eye on the sky
Cuz It can start raining
In the blink of an eye

7 - The Narrows

One of the books I read for research was Glen Sigurdsons’s “Vikings on a Prairie Ocean. Glen talks about growing up in a family of generational fisher folks and summers spent up in the north basin and winters out on the frozen lake. His family’s legendary boat was the JR Spear. It would have made the trip up to the north basin through “The Narrows” countless times. When I wrote this song, I called Glen for some advice and feedback and he suggested heading up to Hnausa to get some of his family to sing on the track. Brenda Fulsher was my contact and put together a lovely choir of family and friends who knew the boat and together I think we make a choir worthy of the mighty JR Spear.

The Narrows Lyrics

Were headed for the narrows, narrows,
Headed for the narrows today
Steady as she goes while the north wind blows
Headed for the narrows today

All aboard those coming aboard  
The JR Spear at the Hnausa Pier

Casting off the dock with the freighter full stocked 
In the setting of the sun hear the diesel drum,  

CHORUS

Boy, ya get the feel hauling on the wheel …
Steady on the course with the Fairbank morse…

See Hecla rising on the dim horizon …
See the beacon’s light as we pass ‘er in the night 

CHORUS

Rolling with rollers pulling her over…
yet the night is ours, steering by in the stars when…

The shield stretching east, west limestone reachin’...
Pushing on ahead Through the channel Dogs heads…

CHORUS

With the sunrise facing to the wide north basin…
And at the end of the season, w/ a full hold’s reason…