The “Canadian Railroad Trilogy” and the Last Spike
I’m getting ready for the launch of my book “The Boy in the Picture” on Sunday (August 15) at the Railway Days Festival in Revelstoke, B.C.
Book launches are always high on authors’ agendas. I’m indebted to the Revelstoke Railway Museum for working me into their observations of the 125th anniversary of the driving of the Last Spike.
Museum director Jennifer Dunkerson will interview me and I’ll be signing copies of the book.
It’s the story of boyish Edward Mallandaine who set out to “fight the Indians” in the Riel Rebellion, missed the uprising, but had hair-raising adventures in the B.C. mountains during the final days of the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1885.
It’s a Young Adult title
– the best-selling sector in the book business these days — but Margaret Bryant from my publisher Dundurn Press reports that her grandfather enjoyed it!
I’m blown away by the early response. As I write, I’m No. 1 on the children’s non-fiction best seller list on Amazon. Had a great interview with the Revelstoke Times-Review which will run a feature in their anniversary edition coming out on Thursday.
After Revelstoke, I’ll have a book signing at the Creston Museum in Creston, B.C., on Tuesday afternoon, August 17. My Toronto launch is set for Roundhouse Park in Toronto — where a railway museum is being assembled — for Sunday, August 29 at 4 p.m. (Sorry for all these shameless self-promotions.) It’s on Bremner Blvd., opposite the CN Tower.
All this has gotten me to thinking about how celebrated railways are in our history, in songs as well as in books.
Among many great railway songs, there’s Paul Quarrington’s “Gotta Love a Train” which I heard him perform at Hugh’s Room not long before his untimely death.
But nothing, I’m sure Paul would have agreed, matches Gordon’s Lightfoot’s unforgettable “Canadian Railroad Trilogy.”
The CBC web site has an interesting piece on how this matchless classic was commissioned by the CBC and first played on air on January 1, 1967 – the year of Canada’s Centennial.
The article by Jennifer Higgs about “Railroad Trilogy,” Canadian nationalism and 1960s folk music, critiques Lightfoot’s song as an exclusively white, European interpretation of Canadian history.
Well, that’s what Canadian history looked like at that time. She criticizes the absence of aboriginal references in the song. But it was written before “les sauvages” of New France had completed their long migration into the “First Nations” of modern Canada.
The “Canadian Railroad Trilogy” accurately represents attitudes of the era of which it speaks, and the time in which it was written.
Nonetheless, it remains a stirring, epic poem that has rightfully contributed to Lightfoot’s iconic status as Canada’s folk singer laureate.
Listen to it now, and see if you don’t agree. (Note that the visuals include pictures of Chinese railway laborers, to whom I devote a chapter in “The Boy in the Picture.”)
