Valhalla Campfire Songbook

Canadiana — songs of the bush, the rails, the rivers

This is the bridge between the kid-friendly trail folk and the serious shanty repertoire. Canadian folk has a particular character: it's wide, lonely, rooted in work and weather, and it sings about places by name. Athabasca, Beaufort, Cabot Strait, Tantramar. Geography is half the lyrics.

The artists you need to know:

Stan Rogers (1949–1983)

The patron saint of Canadian folk. Massive baritone, rolling guitar, songs that feel two hundred years old even when he wrote them last week. Died in a plane fire on Air Canada flight 797 at age 33, with most of the songs we now consider essential already on tape. There is no shanty band in Canada that doesn't open or close with at least one Stan Rogers tune.

Essential songs (all in this app):

  • Northwest Passage — the unofficial second national anthem. Chorus a cappella the first time, then full band.
  • Barrett's Privateers — a fake sea shanty Rogers wrote in 1976 that immediately became indistinguishable from a real one. Capstan tempo, rousing chorus.
  • The Mary Ellen Carter — anthem of stubbornness and resurrection. There are people who credit this song with keeping them alive (literally — Robert Cusick, a sailor whose ship sank in 1983, sang it for hours in the water before being rescued; Rogers was alive to hear about it).

Wade Hemsworth (1916–2002)

The CN Rail surveyor who wrote folk songs about being a CN Rail surveyor. Two of his are now part of the Canadian DNA. He's the original "I just write what happened" songwriter and his style has aged beautifully.

  • The Black Fly Song — written about surveying in northern Ontario in the 1940s. Two chords. Your kid will sing along by the second chorus. The animated NFB short of this song is essential viewing — find it on the National Film Board's website.
  • The Log Driver's Waltz — 3/4 time, lilting, made famous by the NFB animated short with Kate & Anna McGarrigle singing. Perfect first waltz.

Ian Tyson (1933–2022)

Half of Ian & Sylvia, then a solo cowboy-singer-songwriter for fifty years. Wrote Four Strong Winds, which Neil Young called the song that meant more to him than any other.

  • Four Strong Winds — the Canadian This Land Is Your Land. Three chords, perfect for teaching the boom-chuck.
  • Someday Soon — Sylvia Tyson sang the famous version. Works as a duet.

Gordon Lightfoot (1938–2023)

You don't need much introduction. Canadian Tin Pan Alley songwriter, a hundred classics, of which two belong in any Canadiana songbook:

  • Canadian Railroad Trilogy — six minutes long, three movements, tells the story of the building of the CPR. The song to play when you want to feel like a country.
  • The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald — the Lake Superior shipwreck ballad. Technically Great Lakes rather than ocean, but absolutely belongs in the same emotional territory as the maritime stuff.

Great Big Sea (and the Newfoundland tradition)

GBS is the band that took Newfoundland trad and made it a stadium act in the '90s and '00s. They're not in this app directly (most of their best work is either traditional or copyrighted Sean McCann / Alan Doyle originals), but the vocabulary you'll learn from playing the traditional songs they covered will get you 80% of the way to a passable GBS-flavoured set.

The songs they covered that are in this book:

  • Old Black Rum — actually a Sean McCann original, but in the trad style. Skipped here for copyright; learn it from their record.
  • Donkey Riding — traditional, in this book.
  • General Taylor — traditional, in this book.
  • Fortune — traditional Newfoundland sealing song, in this book.

If you want the GBS originals, buy their records. They are still touring as Alan Doyle solo and as the Once Upon a Stage reunion shows.

How these songs are chord-wise

Canadiana sits very comfortably in D, G, and A major for the most part. There's a tendency toward minor-tinged passages (the vi chord working hard) that gives them their wistful character. If you've gotten through the Okee Dokee tier you have everything you need to play this whole section.

The right-hand pattern most of these want is the boom-chuck from Chapter 1, sometimes shifted into 3/4 (one boom, two chucks per bar) for the waltzes.

Why this section matters

The campfire culture you've fallen into — indie folk, bluegrass parents, kids — overlaps almost completely with the Canadiana world. Four Strong Winds and The Black Fly Song will get the same warm response from a Vermont indie-folk crowd as they will from an old union local in Sudbury. They're songs that travel.

For the modern-indie-folk side of that same crowd's listening — Lumineers, Of Monsters and Men, Hansard/Irglova, First Aid Kit — see the Hearthside chapter. It's the post-2007 cousin to this one; the two chapters together cover almost every song that gets played at a 2010s-and-after Canadian or American campfire of any kind.

They also are the bridge to the shanty band. Northwest Passage, Barrett's Privateers, and Mary Ellen Carter are sea songs in everything but their literal lineage. Get fluent in those three and you're 30% of the way back into the Stan Rogers / Great Big Sea wheelhouse the band wants from you.