Garnet Rogers

It is never easy getting established as a singer-songwriter, but no one has faced quite the obstacles Garnet Rogers has. Not that his road was necessarily the hardest; he was, after all, already a folk star before he ever sang one of his own songs on a stage. But the battle was very different for him; there were no road maps to chart the path he had to follow.

Now, at 39, he seems at last comfort able with the music he is making, content that his style is firmly established and firmly his own. With the release of his fifth solo recording, "At a High Window" (Snow Goose), he appears serenely sure of his craft; a distinctive and moving artist on the cutting edge of the contemporary songwriter movement, yet firmly planted in tradition. His fans would say he should have felt that way years ago, but Rogers thinks the profession of musician is a privileged one. He takes his audience s attention and loyalty as a real trust, a gift he never takes for granted. More than most, he has had to worry about their judgment and affection, though he has always been a highly respected and popular artist. Garnet first made his mark as accompanist for his brother Stan, a legendary songwriter even during his short lifetime; and more so now.

Stan was a big man, an even bigger songwriter. He burst on the sleepy folk scene of the late 1970s like a bracing prairie wind. Accompanied by Garnet s emotional, cinematic accompaniment of a flute or second guitar, and with his strong, supple harmonies, Stan s big, tradition-rich ballads and riveting baritone did much to re-energize folk music and fuel the current revival. Songs like "Mary Ellen Carter," "Field Behind the Plow," and "45 Years From Now" became instant standards in the folk canon. They were filling concert halls during a time most folk performers could barely fill a coffehouse.

Garnet was perfectly content to be his brother s accompanist and arranger. They had discovered music together, built their careers together.

"We were absolutely obsessed with music as kids," Garnet recalled. "I just assumed everybody in the world was. We were drawn to the lyrical pungency of songwriters like Dylan, but also to traditional folk music. We always listened to Leadbelly and Cisco Houston and Robert Johnson. There was a real sense of being able to get inside something old. Both Stan and I were very interested in history, read a lot of it. And folk music established a real immediacy with the past, we felt we were able to get a tangible handle on some piece of history."

Garnet was always much more than a back-up player for Stan. He and a succession of bass players who traveled with Stan were always paid equally, considered part of an ensemble. Stan, in fact, wanted to give the whole group a name, but Garnet argued against it. "They re your songs, I told him, you re the singer." But it was obvious that theirs was a true partnership.

As he looks back on it now, the songwriter in him was present in the way he backed Stan s music. "All I was interested in was the song, in making it work. It s odd, because I worked for so many years as an instrumentalist with Stan without really having any particular skill as an instrumentalist. I had a few things I could do, but I think I had pretty limited ability on the violin, flute, guitar, whatever. I think what my strength was in terms of playing with Stan was that I was so dedicated to making the song stronger. I was just reverential about it, so dedicated to putting the song in a proper setting. I had no interest in learning fiddle tunes or how to do all the hot picking you hear instrumentalists do. It s the literary part of the music that always grabbed me, what a lyric can do in conjunction with a tune."

On stage, Garnet was always in service of the song, belting out bold harmonies, or underlining tender emotions with sweet, spare fiddling. Stan was a powerful performer himself, but Garnet s arrangements always added greatly. They were celebrated for their big performing style, developed over hard years playing anywhere they could in Canada.

"At first, we were often playing for people who hated us," Garnet said with a chuckle. "We developed this very aggressive performing style, which was a function of sweating it out in these horrible bear pits we ended up getting booked into. We would play some kind of really crappy yo-ho-ho Irish bar for two weeks, seven nights a week, just so we could afford to play one night at a folk club that couldn t really pay us. You d work two weeks for that one night in front of a listening audience. As sort of a self-defense, we developed this completely over-the-top, in-your-face style. It was the only way you could get heard. And we were big guys, we liked to leap around, kick stuff over."

In 1983, Stan was already, by folk standards, a superstar, and his star was still rising. After a triumphant stint at the Kerrville Folk Festival, he was killed in an airline disaster.

Garnet, of course, was devastated. His entire adult life had been given to his brother s music, and he had no thought of continuing his career. Then Widdie Hall, the late owner of a magical little folk mecca in New Hampshire called Folkway, called him. She had a date booked with the Rogers brothers, she dryly explained, and expected him to fill it. "We still want to see you, you know," she said, then called other clubs to book dates for him. He doesn t know how or if he would have pulled out of his depression following Stan s death without her fond persistence.

"I didn t contemplate a solo career, just gave myself a year to see what would happen. If I only went around to say goodbye to all the clubs I d been playing all those years, that would have been fine. I had no idea what I was going to do with the rest of my life."

Somewhere along the way, he doesn t remem ber when, Garnet had begun writing his own songs, mostly just to pass time on the road. He had never played them for anybody, even his brother, and certainly had no intention of singing them on this tour. Instead, he worked up folk songs and favorites from other songwriters.

"Doing my own stuff then would have been inviting too many comparisons I just wasn t ready for. I thought it would put too much pressure on myself and also on the audience. It was going to be hard enough for people looking at that empty space on the stage next to me without my inviting comparisons. A lot of people were very upset about Stan s death, very emotional, very wound up. For me to stand up there and say ok, I want you to listen to my songs now, I thought would just be imposing too much change on them."

Garnet quickly carved out his own niche as an engaging performer and fine interpreter. His baritone was rich and resonant like his brother s, but with a warmth and personality all his own. He toured a few times with the great Scottish folk singer Archie Fisher, and slowly let his own quirky wit and engaging personality emerge. People were at first surprised, then charmed, by how much more intimate and sell-deprecating Garnet was than his often bombastic brother.

"A lot of my humor and stagecraft was aimed at demystifying myself, trying to make myself accessible to the audience, not setting myself up as some special kind of person. If you set things up in such a simplistic way here s the great folk god, or the great country-western star or the next Kurt Cobain or whatever it gets in the way of the songs. It was definitely on my personal agenda to try to keep that from happening to me the way it did to Stan. I find it very frightening having to deal with that, and it gets in the way of what the songs are trying to do."

It wasn t until 1988, long after he had established himself as a popular folk singer in his own right, that Garnet began slipping his own songs into the mix. Revealingly, he did not identify them as his own, but rather attributed them to some obscure writer. Often he claimed they were poems by Australian poet Henry Lawson he had merely set to music. "I just wanted people to give them a fair shake without worrying about whether I was the writer."

This was more than modesty. As he began working on his own writing, he realized there was no shaking his brother s shadow. They had discovered music together, shared the same influences, the same tastes and passions. "It was a real problem figuring out if I was going to write in the style I m used to dealing with and having people say, oh, you re just trying to write a Stan Rogers song."

It was not in him to phony up his style, which he would have had to do to avoid writing Rogers-esque songs. As he said in a Boston Globe article once, "After all, who has a better right to sound like him than I do."

Like his brother, Garnet has a penchant for big ballads, for telling panoramic, vividly human stories about ordinary people fighting to maintain their simple way of life in the face of careless modem times and brute circumstance. Unlike his brother, however, Garnet often looks for, as he titled one of his albums, Small Victories those little life-affirming moments of grace and redemption that can keep us muddling through. In "A Row of Small Trees," he paints a wrenchingly vivid portrait of an old man who is utterly lost when his wife dies. In the final verse, his friends silently rejoice to see him out in his field, planting a row of small trees; showing he has again connected himself to life.

Garnet s songs are also very much his own in the way they paint pictures and then allow the listener to fill in the meaning. He likes to refer to his style as "musical journalism."

"My songs are just telling stories, trying to illuminate something without being too specific. I get really short-tempered with songs I hear that seem like just off-the-cuff extemporizing, people just writing whatever comes into their head with some sort of specialized system of symbols and metaphors only they understand. Everyone in the room is expected to listen, but the actual singer is the only one getting the full import of the song. I think that s just so bloody self- indulgent. If you like that, fine, but from my point of view maybe because I really enjoy the traditional songs and have had a bit of contact with real traditional singers I need most of the people in the audience to be able to understand what s going on, and then leave enough room in the writing for them to be able to bring their own experience to it. In that sense, maybe I m different from Stan, in that I don t spell everything out, dot the i s and cross all the t s. Stan s writing was very literal; it was beautiful and poetic and wonderfully constructed, but there s only one interpretation of the song. It s kind of his way or the highway."

"People sometimes take exception to the fact that I don t write chorus songs, which is something Stan was famous for. Trying to find a style that s my own, I m not going to try to write a bunch of monster choruses, because comparisons are inevitable. But the other thing that makes me not write chorus songs is that I don t want to slam people over the head with something. I want them to have the option of taking it at face value without having it drilled into their brain. I m sure this is intellectualizing it too much after all it s just a damn song but I am trying to give them the option of getting into the song and taking it as far as they want."

"I think that s what got me into writing in the first place, you kind of enter the songwriter s world through the songs. I can remember when I was 9 years-old, playing "Desolation Row" on my ukulele, feeling like I was this tough little Bob Dylan spitting out those lyrics. I didn t understand what the hell the song was about, of course, but I could kind of cop that attitude, enter that world the songwriter has created for you. To that extent, I m trying to always leave room for the people to enter that world if they want to."

It was that kind of incisive empathy that informed Garnet s playing with Stan, and his ability as an interpreter. It makes his songs remarkably moving, as though he is painting in just enough of the story to draw your attention, then waiting for you to add the finishing touches. In the end, he wants you to belong to the song, to own in it the same way he does. Happily, he is finally contenting himself with what his fans have always known, even when Stan was alive: that Garnet Rogers is very much his own man, his own musician, his own artist. He knows he will never entirely escape Stan s shadow, just as his own unique Rogers style will never stop inviting comparisons. He just doesn t worry about it now.

"I still get it if I go to a city where I haven t been before. Because Stan is far more popular now than he ever was. He s well-known in the states, but he s a complete legend up here in Canada. People who never, ever heard of him until a couple of years ago now have their whole lives revolving around his music. And they re waiting to hear his stuff come out when they come to see me. I have to make it clear to people that I just don t do that. I ve even had members of my own family say, it s so wonderful that you ve carried on Stan s work. Well, I m not; I m carrying on my work."