Aengus Finnan

All the songs are arranged by Aengus, Paul and Trevor Mills, and David Rogers. The a cappella choral delivery on “Swing Boys Swing” and the soft-shoe flavor in “Apple Blossom Tyme” prove variety, but what Finnan does best is connect emotionally with the downtrodden, and create whole stories of hardship in fragments of phrasing. North Wind continues to impress in further listens. He hasn’t been at this long enough to be this good.

North Wind, the latest release from Aengus Finnan, features his award winning O’Shaughnessy’s Lament. Set among Cobalt, Ontario’s, silver mines, Gordon Morash considers it the quintessen-tial Canadian song and story.

Back in October, in the midst of her cross-Canada jaunt, the Queen spent an evening at Roy Thomson Hall in Toronto being entertained by some of the cultural best this country had to offer. Oscar Peterson was there, as well as a contortionist from Cirque du Soleil, the Tragically Hip and chanteuse quebecoise Ginette Reno.

Reno’s cri de coeur was a sumptuous little ditty that had been a Top 10 hit in 1969 for the late actor Richard Harris. On that October night, MacArthur Park by American song-writer Jimmy Webb – with full orchestral accompaniment, and its enigmatic refrain, “Someone left the cake out in the rain” – was what passed for Canadian to Her Majesty.

So, whom else would you have called? Well, Gordon Lightfoot was missing in action due to recovery from abdominal surgery, but where were the likes of James Keelaghan, Tamarack, Garnet Rogers, Bruce Cockburn,, Ian Tyson, all of whom have been known to pen songs of Canada and its people. And where, for that matter, was Aengus Finnan, who suffers from the age old Canadian complaint of being better recognized in the United States than in the Dominion.

Ironically, in October, Finnan, too, would feel the touch of royalty, when he received the Golden Jubilee Commemorative Medal for his work, not as a perpetually on tour singer-songwriter, but in the area of humanitarian works. The Irish born former schoolteacher from the Ontario towns of Shelter Valley and Moosonee has appeared lately at such tony venues as the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. He’s been honoured for his business acumen (in Canada, he is his own booking agent, promoter, publicist, manager and grant writer), as well as his writing. At the 2002 Kerrville Folk Festival in Texas, his yeoman work on the a cappella O’Shaughnessy’s Lament was hon-oured with the New Folk Songwriting Award.

And naturally, despite the ducat from the Queen, you might expect him to have an opinion on the royal gala’s lineup – and not just because he wasn’t there onstage. “it’s a shame that so often popular voices get heard and promoted while the voices that truly reflect this country, the land, and her people are left on the street corners hoping to pay off their business loans so they can write more songs that matter.”

Songs that matter. 0′Shaughnessy’s Lament, from Finnan’s just released second album, North Wind, is indeed one of those. The story of a Cobalt, Ont. silver miner’s loss of his wife in labour, as well as the twins she was carrying, has the ring of a modern day classic. In part, this is because of Finnan’s aching performance, but the song carries the weathered feel of an old story, oft told, oft considered.

If there is a commonality to Finnan’s most heart-felt work, it is in his archaic writing voice, a trait shared by the very best fiction practitioners currently working in the historic genre, writers like Wayne Johnston and Guy Vanderhaeghe. You’ll hear it on the railroad work song, Swing Boys Swing from the new album, but also on Finnan’s 1999 debut, Fool’s Gold, in songs such as The Ballad of Marguerite de la Roche and The War Bride’s Waltz. He is accustomed to hearing people comment on how he writes far older than his 30 years, a skill that can be difficult for a writer to grasp and make believable.

“It surprises me how often the ‘age’ of my songs is commented on,” he says, “but personally there is no greater honour than to have an original composition mistaken for traditional. Most of my songs are indeed set in or drawn from the past, but I have a grave concern for authenticity. I try to cast myself into roles, gather research materials, and use ‘method acting’ techniques to locate inspiration by immersing myself in a particular building, area, or moment in order to feel valid in writing.”

And sometimes serendipity steps in, as it did for 0′Shaughnessy ‘s Lament, written after a visit to Cobalt, Ont., Canada’s former silver mining capital. He describes the song as a gift that he was not expecting to receive on the day he visited the miners’ graveyard. When he reached the grave of Martin O’Shaughnessy, whose wife and twins had died at childbirth 40 years before he himself was buried, Finnan was overwhelmed by what had been … and what, to a writer, could be.

“Standing before the grave looking out over what is left of Cobalt, the ruins of a mine at the base of the hill, the sun setting back slowly into the scraggy bush, I thought on what it must have felt like to be this man, a miner, coming time and time again to visit the grave of his family,” he explains of this bolt from the blue.

“The story was no doubt lived a hundred times over in communities across the land, but in that moment, swimming with images from the day and imagining the long cold walk and many silent prayers said and whiskey curses slung up to God, I let myself sing a solitary line that he might have sung: ‘Oh my sweet Rosella May, I miss you dearly.’”

A windblown soundscape is the only accompaniment to Finnan’s baritone, and there is the occasional catch in the singer’s throat on the recording that tells you this was and is no easy song to perform. Though he was able to compose much of the lament as he drove – “I sand it again and again until at my hotel and able to write it down, referring to scrawled notes on a page set on the dashboard,” he remembers certain lines and elements, including the softening of a death image of the miner’s wife, remained unfinished for over a year.

“A pitman’s fear, a hard rock man vowing no strike of silver could ever replace his love, and imagining that he might dig through to her grave,” he says, explaining his writing process. “These images prompted me to sing that he would throw all the silver away ‘if I could dig you up and hold you one more day.’ In my mind, his love is such that he imagines she would be exactly as he remembers her. I used that line for a year until it was commented on several times as being a particularly gruesome image.”

Eventually, he would change the line to, “If I could have you near and hold you one more day,” to conform to an audience’s more natural visual expectation of “a corpse in his arms by the lantern light.” Just to cement the importance of O’Shaughnessy’s Lament, there is a photo on the back of the CD package of Finnan on the day, he says, he “stopped at the grave to deliver the song to its rightful owner.”

While this might be considered the quintes-sential Canadian song and story, there is nevertheless an identification for any listener with a loss that continues for 40 years. That Finnan succeeds so well in conveying his miner’s pain and loneliness makes not only for a chapter of people’s history, but art of the highest order. And trust the Americans to recognize it, while Finnan struggles to have his albums stocked in this country’s record shops.

“My work is intriguing for American audiences, and perhaps because they haven’t been watching me climb a ladder from busker to main stage performer, they take me in as a professional international performer right away. In Canada, there is a hesitance to embrace and help build one of our own. It is the age old story of waiting until we are valued elsewhere or receive a Juno to warrant our work.