Rogers and Me: The Making of From Fogarty’s Cove

Abstract

I’m not a big fan of musicals. I am, however, a fan of the music of Stan Rogers, the great Canadian folksinger and songwriter who was the driving force behind the Canadian folk music revival in the 1970s and early 1980s. I’m also a member of the Mulgrave Road Co-op Theatre, which is located in the town of Guysborough, in northeastern Nova Scotia, and is dedicated to creating original theatre about the part of the world that Stan Rogers’ family was from, the area that he named “Fogarty’s Cove”. In fact, the connection is closer than that. Like Stan Rogers, and like the Mulgrave Road Co-op, I found my creative inspiration in the landscape, seascape, and people of the Chedabucto shore. Like Stan Rogers, I am from Ontario, but have family connections with that shore – the man who made Rogers his first guitar, his uncle Lee Bushell, happens to be my wife’s uncle, too, by marriage. And like both Stan Rogers and many members of the Co-op, I am concerned about what it means to come from away and make art out of the “raw materials” of a picturesque and culturally rich but economically troubled area at a time when the death of the fishery threatens a whole way of life. I am concerned about the folksinger, playwright, or theatre company as offshore dragger.