Fred Penner reflects on his 40-year career
Fred Penner’s career was launched by an obstinate cat more than 40 years ago
It may sound overly simplistic to suggest Fred Penner has a song about a stubborn cat to thank for his four-decade career as a children’s entertainer.
But the Winnipeg-born singer and guitarist admits he had no intention of ever recording an album, much less spending the next 40-plus years recording albums in this distinct genre, prior to receiving a surprise offer from a benefactor and his family that would eventually lead to his 1979 classic debut, The Cat Came Back.
In the 1970s, Penner had a background in theatre but also in entertaining young people, often using music as therapy while working with children with mental and physical challenges. By 1977, he had met his now ex-wife and the two produced a stage production aimed at kids. One day, a couple approached Penner after watching the play and asked if he had ever considered recording a children’s record.
He hadn’t.
“It came completely out of the blue,” says Penner, 73. “At that point, I had no intention of doing any recording. I didn’t know what it would involve. But they really liked my voice so they said ‘Why don’t you do an album and we’ll pay for it.’ So I called in friends who knew the business a bit more and then I started collecting material I wanted to put on it. I had a number of original tunes and before you knew it, The Cat Came Back had hit the market.”
While the title track is arguably the veteran entertainer’s most beloved song, it was not among the originals Penner penned for his debut record in 1979. The comical tale about a super-resilient feline actually dates back to 1893 and is credited to playwright and Tin Pan Alley composer Harry S. Miller. Penner thought it contained some universal themes that would resonate with children. He certainly made it his own more than 40 years ago and has been making it his own in virtually every concert he has performed ever since. He is currently on a cross-canada tour to celebrate the 40th anniversary of his debut album.
“For me, I loved the animation of the story,” Penner says. “It’s not just a verse and a chorus, it has some real theatrical depth when you are telling the verse, when you are expressing all the devastating things that happen to this cat that somehow makes it through. It could be a bit of a metaphor about how insane our lives are. That we are all going through these devastating things constantly and somehow we do manage to survive; we make it through. That may be digging a little deeper. But, for me, it’s always fun to perform because I can make it as animated and theatrical as I like and I always leave that nice space at the end of the verse. What’s going to happen? Yes, the cat came back again and again and again.”
This is not to say that Penner expected the song, and others from his 1979 debut, to remain a centre piece of his live shows for the next four decades. But the Fred Heads, as they have become known, have proven to be nothing if not loyal. There is apparently a certain power to songs that enter a child’s psyche in those prime formative years, Penner says.
“I, in a joking way, infected their DNA as they listened to my music and took it inside of them,” he says.
“Now they are grown and having their own children. It has turned into this multi-generational thing that initially I had no idea would go that far.”
Penner admits his emergence as a children’s entertainer was at least partially due to being at the right place at the right time.
“The market was very, very ripe for myself and Raffi and Sharon, Lois & Bram,” he says. “We were all essentially playing to same postwar generation, the boomer generation, who were having kids and really wanted quality entertainment for their children. They drove us for many years. We were doing every major venue in Canada and selling out two, three, four shows to 2,000 people a show. It has now clearly established a strong foundation where that generation is now almost moving into grandparenthood.”
Still, it wasn’t all a fluke of demographics. Penner was also savvy about his career. In the mid-1980s, he parlayed his success as a touring act into a children’s program that aired on the CBC in Canada and Nickelodeon in the U.S. When that show ended in the late 1990s, Penner “floundered for awhile” before inspiration struck once more.
“The idea came to try the universities, because that’s where many of my early fans were now going,” he says. “So I was going to them instead of them coming to me. These shows essentially had the same material that I would do at any family concert. But I would supplement it with tunes from the ’60s, some Gordon Lightfoot or Joni Mitchell or Cat Stevens’s stuff. Songs that have stood the test of time but that were a little more contemporary in a way.”
If any more proof were needed of Penner’s enduring cachet, it would come in 2015 when he hosted the ceremonies for the ultrahip Polaris Music Prize in Toronto. A few years later, he enlisted a number of modern musicians — including Basia Bulat, Alex Cuba, The Good Lovelies, Bahamas, Ron Sexsmith and Terra Lightfoot — to contribute to his 13th album, Hear the Music.
Penner says he hopes to record a followup.
“When we started looking for entertainers who had grown up with me and who were interested and participating, from Good Lovelies to Ron Sexsmith to Alex Cuba, there were just a fabulous assortment of great players,” Penner says. “That became the shortlist. But on our longlist, we had dozens more who all wished they could have participated. So I’d love to offer an opportunity for them to come into it. I’m working on material, always, and we’ll see in the next couple of years if we’ll get something else going. Why not? What have I got to lose?”
I, in a joking way, infected their DNA as they listened to my music ...