Sylvia Tyson

SYLVIA TYSON ENTERTAINS WITH CONVERSATION AND SONG AT IMPERIAL

‘It seems like only yesterday’ is such an over used phase.

Yet it was 1961 that I bought the first self-titled Ian & Sylvia Tyson long play recording which featured a rare Irish song Pride of Petrovar. That was 50 years ago. But it seems like just a decade at most. It was on the prestigious Vanguard label, Recordings for the Connoisseur.

It amazed me since it was a leading folk label, New York based, that had under contract artists such as Joan Baez, the Weavers, Ewan MacColl and Paul Robinson and they were a Canadian duo relatively unknown then.

Sylvia Tyson is appearing at Saint John’s Imperial Theatre next Thursday, Nov. 3, at 7:30 p.m. and I talked with her last week by phone.

“Those were heady days,” she said. “We hadn’t been together even a year, just performing around Toronto, when we got booked for gigs in the States: the Second Fret in Philadelphia, Padded Cell in Minneapolis. Then we played the Bitter End in New York and were offered a chance to record for Vanguard, the label of so many legendary music acts” .

That contract gave them world distribution right from the word ‘go’ and placed their names high among new interpreters of folk songs globally. That and the phenomenal success of Ian’s Four Strong Winds and Sylvia’s hauntingly beautiful You Were On My Mind along with other hits they wrote.

At the time of their first recording, Sylvia was 21 and still Sylvia Flicker. She married Ian in 1964, the year they recorded her You Were On My Mind which became a hit for them and a massive world hit for We Five, a San Francisco folk rock band. Ian and Sylvia divorced in 1975 and she went on to an even more successful career as a CBC show host and solo recording artist, releasing her first album Woman’s World that same year on Capitol (EMI) Records.

Early in their relationship Ian wrote of Sylvia: ‘She comes from Chatham, a small Ontario town near the American border. Except for rudimentary piano lessons from her mother, Sylvia is entirely self-taught. She learned her first folk tunes mostly from books and had hardly a chance to hear recordings of folk singers, let alone live appearances. Accordingly she had a very strange beautiful style all her own when she moved to Toronto.’

They had been together less than a year when they made that first recording. Early on Sylvia played autoharp self taught, then taught herself guitar. I said that Wilf Carter had also played autoharp at Alberta prairie dances and on radio early in his career. That he’d thought it would be easier to learn than guitar.

“Well, easy to say,” she laughed, “but not if you want to play like Maybelle Carter. Wilf had a big influence on Ian though.”

“Talking about instruments,” she said, “ I’ll have a little surprise for fans in Saint John. I’ll be playing button accordion on some numbers. Nothing fancy though, just basic.”

Having followed her recording career since her first album with Ian I know that to add accordion to her live performances she would have to be a lot better than basic. And she did play one on a Quartette album in 1995.

After parting with Ian, apart from finding new fame as host of the award winning CBC radio’s Touch The Earth and a TV series Country In My Soul, Sylvia wrote and produced radio specials and has released nine solo albums to date, another seven as part of Canada’s premier all-female touring act, Quartette, and a CBC Touch The Earth disc.

One of today’s most powerful song writing and recording artists Tom Russell, became associated with Ian & Sylvia during their Great Speckled Bird band years. He co-wrote some of Ian’s most beautiful Cowography series songs Navajo Rug, Claude Dallas and Gallo de Cielo and for Sylvia, Street Of The Mariachi for Quartette’s Work Of The Heart CD and co-produced her Stoney Plain album You Were On My Mind. He, also, co-wrote Thrown To The Wolves with her and Walking On The Moon with Katy Moffatt for that album.

I asked if they still kept in touch. “Oh, yes”, she said, “But I don’t see him as much since he married a few years ago and lives in Switzerland now.”

Sylvia has contributed to the Canadian music scene off-stage as a board member of both FACTOR and the Juno Awards. She was an editor with Tom Russell of the 1995 anthology And Then I Wrote: The Songwriter Speaks. She was made a member of the Order of Canada in 1994. The Canadian Music Hall of Fame inducted Ian & Sylvia as a duo in 1992. Sylvia herself was elected into the Canadian Country Music Hall of Fame in 2003 .

Don’t miss this rare opportunity to see one of the world’s most beloved singer songwriters on Nov. 3, 7:30 p.m., in the Imperial’s Irving Oil Auditorium. Ticket’s are $35 (or $30 for Red Carpet Insiders) by visiting the Imperial box office, phoning 674-4100 or 1-800-323-7469, or online www.imperialtheatre.nb.ca

Sylvia Tyson is also hosting a workshop at the Imperial before her concert on changing opportunities for women performers, balancing career and family and her own life in the arts. It’s free but space is limited and you must register by phoning 674-4111.