Stompin' Tom at 90
'A land without song cannot stand very long'
Stompin’ Tom Connors would have turned 90 on Monday, February 9, 2026. There’s a celebration that day with his former backing band, Whiskeyjack, at the Horseshoe Tavern, the venue where he filmed his 1973 concert film, Across this Land:
(This week’s live music listings are here.)
I’ve been thinking about Stompin’ Tom in this “elbows up” moment in Canadian history. Mostly I’ve been thinking about what I think is his greatest song, one I first heard used somewhat ironically in the movie Roadkill, one that I think should be the one Stompin’ Tom song every Canadian knows, instead of, or in addition to, the novelty classics “Bud the Spud” or “Sudbury Saturday Night.”
It’s a song about cultural erasure, about art as resistance, about “how a land without song cannot stand very long.” It’s deadly serious. And true:
When the Canadian icon died in 2013, I wrote this piece for Maclean’s.
Professionally speaking, part of me is thrilled that I got to write Stompin’ Tom’s obit in a national Canadian magazine with more than a century’s history.
But the other part of that story is that I, the copy editor, was probably the only person in the office remotely interested in writing it. That speaks volumes. [Update: my former colleague John Geddes protests my assessment!]
As much as Stompin’ Tom was a household name in his prime, he was as much counterculture as he was mainstream. He didn’t get radio play. He was treated as a hick joke by Laurentian elites. He hated the music industry and they hated him. He ran an independent label that put out records by folk singers, calypso bands, and Indigenous artists.
Part of the reason he was treated as a joke was because he sang songs about Canada, both goofy and earnest. His songbook is almost exclusively about Canada. He thought this country had a cultural deficit and he was determined to fill it. He wanted to celebrate its stories and the small towns where they’re set.
Unfortunately, today he’s mostly remembered for writing a silly song about hockey, which NHL teams have kept alive. Here he is in 1999 playing it at the last game held in Toronto’s Maple Leaf Gardens:
My first book, Have Not Been the Same, co-authored with Jason Schneider and Ian A.D. Jack, came out in 2001, and was about the Canadian music of our youth, 1985-95. We not only loved the music, but felt that it marked a time when English-Canadian rock music became more identifiably Canadian. That was true lyrically, notably in the work of people like the Tragically Hip, Blue Rodeo, the Rheostatics, and Spirit of the West, among others. It was also true in imagery, like the It Came From Canada compilations, or the artwork of Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet.
Being Canadian was no longer considered as hokey as, say, Stompin’ Tom. But you know what? Being unabashedly hokey can also be a lot of fun. Just ask k.d. lang:
Stompin’ Tom was not of our generation, but that of our parents. Yet in the late ’80s, Stompin’ Tom was lured out of retirement—by Dave Bidini of the Rheostatics and Deane Cameron at EMI—and staged a successful comeback that included platinum records and a bestselling two-volume memoir. To me, that was part of the cultural shift we were writing about, as much as a spiritual parent as the then-still-very-relevant Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Leonard Cohen, or Bruce Cockburn.
Please enjoy the most wonderfully weird Stompin’ Tom cover you’ll ever hear, by Don’t Talk Dance in 1993: Gordie Johnson of Big Sugar, Tyler Stewart of Barenaked Ladies, and Chris Brown and Kate Fenner:
My friend Richard Flohil remembers Tom candidly and honestly here and here. There’s also this anecdote that a certain generation of Canadian musician has heard more than a few times:
Tom’s relationship with his musicians was remarkable. The first thing he asked a potential new player would normally be seen as a trick question: “Do you drink? Do you like beer?”
He explained that he wanted people in the band who drank beer, but that he did not need any “fallsy-downsies” who couldn’t handle their Moosehead.
If they were hired, they agreed in the contract to stay up with Tom after the gig, on a schedule with the other players — and drink warm beer, play chess and discuss subjects as disparate as world politics and numerology.
These past 12 months have been a pivotal time in Canadian history, in ways I haven’t felt since the early ’90s, and the threats are now exponentially larger. Behind all the easy signalling, I do wonder if all this flag-waving results in a real attachment to Canadian culture, in all its forms and its storied history. I do see the spirit of Stompin’ Tom in people like Charlie Angus, the former politician (and once-again active musician), who would readily cop to the influence.
Stompin’ Tom’s musical and lyrical legacy is less obvious to me: other than Corb Lund, I don’t hear a lot of character-driven storytelling in music in general—Stompin’ Tom rarely wrote in first person, unlike 99% of lyricists now. Thankfully our biggest international pop exports now have no problem being explicitly Canadian in their lyrics and imagery, so that’s something.
Witness a modern master at work:
For paid subscribers, here’s an excerpt from Have Not Been the Same about Stompin’ Tom’s “far too Canadian” role in what we called the CanRock Renaissance, with quotes from my interviews with Bidini, Gord Downie, John K. Samson, Joel Plaskett, and Richard Flohil.
In retrospect, in this excerpt—and of course throughout the book—there’s a lot of arrogance of youth (I was 29) and cherry-picking history as a way to firmly assert a thesis, so take this for what it is. I’m still proud of it.
