James Gordon

Interviewed By: Erin Oldynski

Date: 2007-04-05

James Gordon is a musician, songwriter and director/producer of many musicals, more recent being Hardscrabble Road, which debuted in 2003. Founder of Canadian folk group Tamarack, with whom he has toured extensively with and recorded fourteen albums, James has also contributed to the CBC radio programs "Basic Black" and "Ontario Morning", the latter being his "Hometown Tunes" feature in which he wrote songs from stories that listeners had written about their hometowns and sent in.

Last month, foundinthemargins met up with James in his hometown of Guelph, Ontario to talk with him about some of the books that he has been reading recently which have had an influence on his work as a songwriter and performer and to what ends he has used his passion for folk music to deliver messages about relevant social issues along the way.

Hesitant to label his work as a musician as "activist", James explained that, "When I started playing music professionally, I'd chosen a style of music that reflected my interest in Canadian heritage and culture. I noticed that there weren't many people out there doing that and that I was actually singing songs that were two hundred years old, songs about early settlers and miners. Really, I was just providing a voice to old dead people. That sort of started me on the path of being a storyteller -- I became a storyteller myself by writing my own songs. It was a natural leap that I would be drawn to aspects of social justice and political awareness because I started from human stories.

“I can't tell you when I started to write songs that were about activist issues because that just comes from observing. I like to make sure that my songs aren't necessarily about me but are sort of reflecting what I'm observing and what's around me, and I found that people were anxious to use me, so to speak, as a voice. I can't think of an issue that I thought, ‘I'm pissed off about this, I better get to work on it.’ It came more from other people being pissed off about things -- and maybe I'm the kind of guy that can let people know about it. As soon as I took on that role, I would start to do it myself, saying, ‘Well, here's something that people need to know about and maybe I can make a difference.’

“As a writer, I’ve always got something fermenting -- something that I’d like to someday write about -- so I tend to always gravitate toward books that will inform me a little bit about the things that I’m going to be writing about or dealing with. Sometimes, during the summer, I’ll just go for some kind of trashy novel but by and large I tend to pick a book based on if I think that there will be something for me in it later on.”

The Upside of Down - Thomas Homer-Dickson
“I’m reading a book by Thomas Homer-Dickson called The Upside of Down -- he lives locally, up in Fergus, Ontario -- and one of his theses in this book is that we’re going to have to learn soon that accumulating stuff doesn’t equal happiness at all; that in fact it leads to more stuff and more isolation. We have to turn it around so that we recognize that the mark of success, or, a person’s greatest achievement in life, isn’t how much money you have, how many possessions you have, or what rank you have in society, but that it’s how you’ve found a place with a nurturing family -- whether that’s in your immediate family or if you have to create a family -- and that there’s no greater reward than that. But it’s going to take a lot of education for people not to think that you’re some sort of flake if you suggest that.

“In the book, Dickson compares the civilization that we are in now to the fall of Rome. He takes a historical perspective about crises like climate change, the end of the oil era, and the growing disparity between the wealthy and the poor. His theory about “the upside of down” is that all of these things are coming to a big fall, but that maybe that’s not a bad thing. A perfect example of this is how all of a sudden the environment is number one on everyone’s list of concerns, but only because people can actually see evidence in their own backyards about global warming. But very few people cared about it until they could actually see it happening. Dickson argues that actually seeing this happen will force our hands to re-invent ourselves. It’s a fascinating book.”

Water for Elephants – Sara Gruen
“I love fiction. One fiction work that I’ve read recently is Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen, a western Canadian writer. It’s set in a circus in the 1930s, during the Depression era. I’ve always had this fascination with circus -- just because of the freaks, the sub culture of it and the carnies -- I’m drawn to characters like that. I’ve also got the germ of a musical, to write about Jumbo the Elephant -- the star of the Barnum Circus in the 1880s. He was the world’s largest elephant -- a big tourist attraction -- and was killed in St. Thomas, Ontario in a train accident. In this story, there’s a rumour that the elephant committed suicide because it was sick of being on the road. There is also a conspiracy that the elephant was being too costly by the promoter of P.T. Barnum so they decided that they would do away with him, but still make it a dramatic story and get a lot of press out of it. They actually stuffed the elephant and toured with the bones for another twenty years. It was just as big a tourist attraction after it died.”

The Final Confession of Mabel Stark – Robert Hough
“Another circus book I’ve read recently is The Final Confession of Mabel Stark by Canadian writer Robert Hough -- and again, I’m drawn to this book because it’s the type of thing that I would write about. Mabel Stark was a real person, and he fictionalized a story based around her life. Hough writes about the circus life but also the trials of being a woman in a man’s profession. There are a lot of other pressing social issues that way.”

Shakespeare
“I don’t think people normally just gravitate toward reading Shakespeare plays -- but they’re good! I’ve recently written an adaptation of a play for the Shakespearian Festival in April. I just went through and read a lot of Shakespeare plays and learned a lot. My goal was to pick one that I really cared a lot about -- one that I could write a whole musical about, based on the story.

“I saw that once I picked my play, I was able to do more research to bring out the issues that I thought were hinted upon in the play. As you’ve seen in Hardscrabble Road, I’m interested in playing up the disparity between the rich and the poor. I’ve noticed that in Shakespeare’s plays, he tends to make the poor people the comic characters that don’t get to have relationships -- there’s no love affairs with the poor -- and he calls them the “rude mechanicals” or the “homespuns.” They’re very one dimensional. What I noticed through reading his plays is that he was very much a snob! So I discovered that there was another story within the play. That was a fun reading exercise.”

Barrow’s Boys – Fergus Fleming
“As a student of History, I have a bazaar obsession with all things related to the Arctic -- like exploration, for instance -- and I think this relates to my interest in human stories. These insane British explorers, for instance, who were obsessed with “exploring” -- and no one knows why because there wasn’t really anything to find -- but there’s this whole quest involved and that fascinates me.

“I’ve also done quite a bit of performing up in the Arctic and I’m fascinated by the spirit of the people there. There’s just these six months of total darkness -- it’s really inhospitable -- the climate and the architecture is nonexistent and there’s very few things that you and I would think as what makes up a community. So they have to find these strong personal ties, and rely on each other, which gives them these really strong, independent spirits. I find fascinating just to read the stories of the people -- one is Barrow’s Boys by Fergus Fleming. Barrow was the president of the Royal Geographic Society in 19th century England and it was his organization that would mount these bazaar explorations -- send these men out into the wild blue yonder -- mostly just for the glory of it, I think. But there’s something that compelled them to do it. For fifty years, Barrow was at the helm of this organization -- it was incredible. The book picks different explorations -- though they’re not all Arctic, it follows explorations into Africa too.”

Guelph Speaks: Restorying the City
“This is an anthology of stories. Someone was given a grant to just go around the city and collect stories -- and I have to confess that I got the book because one of my stories is in it. But they’ve done exactly what I’ve been trying to do for years -- and that is to just tell a story of a community or a place by focusing on individuals and their different perspectives. One story is about a woman who was an Italian immigrant and lived down in the ward, and she talked about what it was like for her in the thirties. You get to know a community by hearing stories and there are theories that what lasts in a community are the stories. Stories will last longer than the architecture and the people -- and actually, what we are collectively, are stories. That’s why I’m so drawn to them.”

Purchase Books
You can purchase the books recommended by James Gordon here.

Links:
http://jamesgordon.ca/