SUMMER WAGES WAS IAN TYSON’S ODE TO B.C.
To mark Canada’s 150th birthday, we are counting down to Canada Day with profiles of 150 noteworthy British Columbians.
In the early 1960s, folksinger Ian Tyson was sitting in a bar called the Kettle of Fish in Greenwich Village in New York. A “kind of grubby kid” walked in and announced he had a new song.
“It was Bobby Dylan, and he sang me, Blowin’ in the Wind,” Tyson recalled on the TV show, The Texas Connection. “He just wrote it. I thought, ‘I can do that.’ ”
Tyson went home and wrote his first song, Four Strong Winds. Not bad for a first try — in 2005, it was named the best Canadian song of all time on the CBC Radio show, 50 Tracks. It’s been recorded by all sorts of people, from Neil Young and Johnny Cash to Bob Dylan.
Tyson said he tried to keep up with Dylan, but when Dylan “kicked into overdrive,” Tyson conceded he couldn’t. Still, he didn’t do too badly: Tyson authored several songs now considered classics, including Somebody Soon, Summer Wages and Navajo Rug.
Tyson lives on a ranch in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains near Longview, Alta., and will always be associated with the province. But he’s from B.C.
Ian Dawson Tyson was born in Victoria on Sept. 25, 1933, and grew up on Vancouver Island before leaving to attend art school in Vancouver. Always fond of the cowboy life, he broke his ankle in a rodeo and picked up a guitar in hospital, learning Johnny Cash’s hit, I Walk the Line.
In Vancouver, he played with a rock ’n’ roll band called the Sensational Stripes, but after graduating from the Vancouver School of Art, he moved to Toronto in 1959.
There he met Sylvia Fricker, and the two formed a folk duo, Ian and Sylvia. After releasing their debut album in 1962, they became stars on the folk circuit, mixing originals with covers of songs like Gordon Lightfoot’s, Early Morning Rain.
In the late ’60s they switched to country-rock. One of the songs they recorded in both their folk and country phases was Summer Wages, a workingman’s tale that might be the best song ever written about Vancouver and B.C.
“In all the beer parlours down along Main Street,” sings Tyson, “the dreams of the season are all spilled out on the floor/ The big stands of timber wait there just for falling/ And the hookers waiting watchfully, standing by the door.”
Ian & Sylvia split in 1975 and Tyson moved to Alberta, where he launched a successful career as a country singer. At 83, he still performs, and people are still covering his songs.