Northwest Passage
Words and melody – Stan Rogers
Orchestration – Roy Kaighin
Recorded Live at the Royal Theatre Victoria BC, on Thursday May 15th, 2008
Conductor – Simon Capet
Tenor – Ken Lavigne

A water route between the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean along the northern coast of Canada. Since the 16th century, Europeans had searched for a short route to the Far East beforeit was successfully traversed by the Norwegian explorer, Roald Amundsen, during 1903 to 1906.

STAN ROGERS

b. 1949, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, d. Thursday, 2 June 1983.

Singer-songwriter Stan Rogers began as a bass player in a rock band before becoming a well-respected artist within the folk arena. In 1969, he turned professional and, the following year,released two singles for RCA Records. There followed a period of playing the coffee house circuit, with Nigel Russell (guitar), until Stan’s brother, Garnet Rogers (violin/flute/vocals/ guitar), joined them. Garnet worked with Stan for nearly 10 years. Stan Rogers’ low-register voice exuded a warm sensitive sound, the perfect complement to his sensitive lyrics. Besides his song of the NORTHWEST PASSAGE, he is remembered for songs such as “The Lock-keeper”, “The Mary Ellen Carter”, and “Barrett’s Privateers”. Writing for films and television, and having toured a number of countries, Stan Rogers was poised for international success but was killed in an airplane fire on Thursday June 2nd 1983.

The following text is by Stan Rogers on a radio broadcast:

For the longest time, our history text books were published in the United States, and in fact for themost part were even written there. The American view of Canadian history, even American scholars’ view, was pretty far removed from the actual truth. Because it was far easier to make a big thing about American heroes, we are exposed to so much American radio and television and stuff. We know far more about western outlaws like Billy the Kid then we do about the MacLean Brothers in BC who were equally as wild and shot up as many people and were as hard to catch and stuff.So most Canadian’s really don’t know much about their own history. They know more about American History, or at least more Canadian history as it relates to the United States then they do about their own local history or the development during the pioneer days. I’ve always made kind of a great deal of what Canadian heroes we had, and there were plenty of them! When I started designing the last album, I knew it was going to be a song primarily about Western and Northern Canada and I conceived NORTHWEST PASSAGE as the title for the album which meant that I would have to write a theme song. I also wanted to do another ‘a cappella’ chorus song. I’d done one on each album to date, pretty well. We went into rehearsal and it still hadn’t been written, and we went into the studio, and it still hadn’t been written.

So on the final day of recording, just before we started mixing, I sat up all the previous night and wrote NORTHWEST PASSAGE. I was helpless with fatigue at that point and I remember at one point I was lying on the floor of the studio looking up. Everyone else had gone to bed and I was completely alone in the place and I was lying there and I could hear the sort of machinery cooling, that had been heated up during the day, some sort of electronics. I could hear the cabinets sort of cooling or clicking or something and just dead silence, and I started thinking about the silence of the north and what John Franklin must have felt on that last fatal voyage of his, where he got so close to breaking into the Beaufort Sea. He had gotten within 40 miles of breaking through and he would have been the first man through the Northwest Passage, but instead he and all of his men and both ships were lost and it was kind of a terrible saga. And I got thinking again about the first people who went across Canada. There was an explorer called Kelso or Kelsey depending upon where you thought he was from who first saw the Canadian prairies and described it as a “sea of flowers” and that always stuck in my head. David Thompson was the first person to accurately survey and map the Canadian Rockies. Alexander Mackenzie was one of the first people to reach the Pacific through the Canadian Rockies. Simon Fraser another, the Fraser river that runs into Vancouver was named after him. All of these great explorers who were equally as intrepid as people like Lewis and Clark or Kit Carson or any of them you know. Canadians don’t know much about these people. I mean we study them in grade 5 or 6 history and that’s the last we hear of them. Canadians don’t know how Canada was developed. I mean they have a smattering of history from the time of Confederation, the founding of our country in 1867. They know who Sir John A. MacDonald was. He was the first Prime Minster in many ways the father of our country. But they don’t know who the other Fathers of Confederation were. I’m descended from one of them so I take an interest in them. 

At any rate through my songs, for the past couple of years, I’ve been trying to satisfy my own lust for dramatizing these things or perhaps injecting them into popular culture, but I’ve also had the motive of trying to make my countrymen a bit more aware of just how fascinating their own history is, and to sort of help them become a bit more small “n” nationalist. I wrote NORTHWEST PASSAGE with all of that in mind lying on my back, on the floor of the studio at 3 in the morning! The next morning the producer got up, and everybody else got up. We had breakfast and then Paul [Mills] said, “Look, ah, have you got that song finished? We gotta record it today or else!” I said, “Yeah, Paul, it’s finished.” He says, “Okay, let’s hear it.” So I sat there at the kitchen table and sang it and when I was finished. I was reading the words off a piece of paper of course. When I finished Paul was crying. You know he said that it was a very “stirring and solid piece.” So then we went upstairs and recorded it. With the technology of ‘over-dubbing’, I sang all the parts’.

Notes from the arranger Roy Kaighin:

This arrangement is made by kind permission of Ariel Rogers, and is the first time this piece has been set with instrumental accompaniment. It starts with high ‘open’ sound depicting the cold, isolated, wide open spaces of the NORTHWEST PASSAGE to be explored. A low, distant rumble is heard, indicating that there may be some unknown danger on their journey. The opening notes of the solo French Horn are the first notes of the Chorus. This is followed by the solo Clarinet who has the last notes of the Chorus. The crescendo over Bars 8 and 9 indicate that the ‘Dream of exploration is becoming a reality’.

As the song progresses, it tells the story of the Pioneers, their accomplishments, their defeats, their sacrifices of home and family. And now, having found a way, and achieved their goal, now what? As the last chord of the final Chorus sounds, it fades. Back into the cold, isolated, open spaces of their dreams of long ago.

Lyrics

Chorus

Ah, for just one time I would take the Northwest Passage

To find the hand of Franklin reaching for the Beaufort Sea;

Tracing one warm line through a land so wild and savage

And make a Northwest Passage to the sea.

Westward from the Davis Strait ’tis there ’twas said to lie

The sea route to the Orient for which so many died;

Seeking gold and glory, leaving weathered, broken bones

And a long-forgotten lonely cairn of stones.

Chorus

Three centuries thereafter, I take passage overland

In the footsteps of brave Kelso, where his “sea of flowers” began

Watching cities rise before me, then behind me sink again

This tardiest explorer, driving hard across the plain.

Chorus

And through the night, behind the wheel, the mileage clicking west

I think upon Mackenzie, David Thompson and the rest

Who cracked the mountain ramparts and did show a path for me

To race the roaring Fraser to the sea.

Chorus

How then am I so different from the first men through this way?

Like them, I left a settled life, I threw it all away.

To seek a Northwest Passage at the call of many men

To find there but the road back home again.