This Canadian folk musician has some incredibly sad songs.
- Stan's tragically early death in a 1983 airliner fire adds to the emotional drama of much of his music when listened to now.
- "Northwest Passage:" Not a sad song in and of itself (although sober and reflective), but the tenor harmony voice on chorus could be the last starving cries of a doomed man echoing off an iceberg. The song is a story of a modern man's reflections on and homage to the early northern explorers while traveling west in a car.
- Go listen to "Northwest Passage", then try "Barrett's Privateers"."Goddamn them all, I was told
We'd cruise the seas for American gold
We'd fire no guns, shed no tears
Now I'm a broken man on a Halifax pier
The last of Barrett's Privateers." - "First Christmas". It's the experiences of a young man working the night shift to make ends meet, an abused teenage girl in a homeless shelter, and an old man whose family have put him in a nursing home, each on their first Christmas away from home. The third verse especially can do it.
- There's also "Turnaround," used at the end of the end of the TV movie Terry about Canada's great hero, Terry Fox. Just the chorus "Yours is the open road/The bitter song, the heavy load that I'll never share/Though the offer's still there/Every time you turn around" hits you in the heart with what a man Terry was and what we lost when he died all too soon.
- "Harris and the Mare" is awfully goddamn sad.Now with the wife as cold as clay I carried her away
No hand was raised to help us through the door
And I've brought her half a mile, but I've had to rest a while
And none of them I'll call a friend no more
For when the knife came down, I was helpless on the ground
No neighbour stayed his hand, I was alone
By God, I was a man, but now I cannot stand
Please, Harris, fetch thy mare and take us home. - "The Last Watch" can make anyone who has made their living on a ship for any period of time break down like a child.
- "White Squall," about the sudden storms that blow up on the Great Lakes, and the consequences:And I tell these kids a hundred times, don't take the lakes for granted
They'll blow from calm to a hundred knots so fast they seem enchanted
But tonight some red-eyed Wiarton note girl lies staring at the wall
And her lover's gone into a white squall." - "Make And Break Harbour"note is a ballad of the last of the old-fashioned fishermen on the Atlantic seaboard.It's so hard not to think of before the big war
When the cod went so cheap, but so plenty
Foreign trawlers go by now with long-seeing eyes
Taking all where we seldom take any
And the young folk don't stay with the fisherman's ways
Long ago, they all moved to the city
And the ones left behind, old and tired and blind,
Can't work for "a pound for a penny." - "Flowers of Bermuda," about the Heroic Sacrifice of the Nightingale's captain by going down with the ship after the vessel was holed.He was the captain of the Nightingale
Twenty-one days from Clyde in coal
He could smell the flowers of Bermuda in the gale
When he died on the North Rock Shoal. - Many other Rogers songs fit the bill: "Lock-Keeper", "MacDonnell on the Heights", "Tiny Fish For Japan", "Free In The Harbour"... the list goes on. And on.
