A Live Listening Party & Conversation with Sylvia Tyson

Hello, and welcome to season two of ReFolkUs, where we talk to artists and music industry professionals about building sustainable careers as creative workers - with a focus on folk. I'm your host, Rosalyn Dennett.

[00:00:20] Rosalyn: Sylvia Tyson, known as Canada's folk country music matriarch, emerged as an internationally respected songwriter during the 1960s Greenwich Village folk scene. Originally from Chatham, Ontario, she moved to Toronto at 18, gaining acclaim for her polished alto voice and forming the influential folk duo Ian and Sylvia with Ian Tyson.

The duo led the singer-songwriter movement from 1961 to 1975, releasing 13 albums and achieving great commercial success. Sylvia's breakthrough songwriting included the hit, ‘You Were On My Mind’, covered by numerous artists. The album ‘Great Speckled Bird’ has long been recognized as pioneering the genre of country rock, and after the duo's era, she embarked on a solo career.

Releasing albums like ‘Woman's World’ and contributing to the group Quartette. Tyson's impact extends to her roles in various organizations, and she's honored in the Canadian Music and Country Music Halls of Fame, the Order of Canada, and the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame. We spoke with Sylvia at a live listening party at the Folk Music Ontario Conference for her new and possibly her final album, ‘At the End of the Day’, released on November 3rd on Stony Plain Records.

Here's our conversation with Sylvia Tyson.

Hello, hello. Welcome. Thi is such an exciting day. I'm so glad that you can join us for this really incredible event. We're so pleased to welcome Sylvia Tyson to Folk Music Ontario.

[00:02:01] Sylvia: Hi everybody!

[00:02:02] Rosalyn: I am sure that you are all here because you are familiar with Sylvia's biography, so I won't read it aloud to you, her reputation precedes her and I'm sure you're all, um, incredibly familiar with her work. But, I will read a couple, uh, little tidbits about, um, one of the big reasons why we're here, on her 83rd birthday, after a decade layoff from recording on her own…..yes, applaud that, please!

[00:02:36] Sylvia: Thank you, thank you.

[00:02:38] Rosalyn: …Sylvia announced the release, coming up on November 3rd of, her most powerful and most incisive recording to date ‘At The End Of The Day’ on Stony Plain Records and shares that this will be her final album. Speedy, that was going to be one of my first questions there is that a decade layoff, you know?

[00:03:04] Sylvia: In terms of performing by myself, yes.

[00:03:06] Rosalyn: Okay, and some of these songs have kind of taken that time to mature. You've written with a whole bunch of people for this album.

[00:03:13] Sylvia: I've written with, I think, five or six, five or six different people.

Yes, I wrote, uh, three songs with Cindy Church, who of course I worked with in Quartette. And then Joan Besen and I wrote two songs that were interesting because it was during the COVID, uh, thing and she broke her ankle and she was housebound and going crazy. So I sent her two sets of lyrics and she came up with the melodies, which I was thrilled with.

[00:03:40] Sylvia: And, um, one of the songs I wrote with Chris Whiteley and one of the songs I wrote was Shirley Eikhard. Yeah, and it was very sad actually because we'd written it ten, twelve years ago. And, I called her to let her know I was going to record it. And she was gone a week later, so I was just devastated.

[00:04:05] Rosalyn: Um, that one's a generous heart, which you can hear on the album. I was wondering if we can, this is a listening party by the way, so we're going to, as you can see, we're clearly partying already, uh, but we're, um, we're going to talk a bit and then also get a chance to just kind of preview and hear, hear some snippets of the song. So you said that, when we were chatting before people came in, the first song that we have queued up is called ‘No Crowd No Show’ and 10 years of not performing on your own.

Some of it probably was, you know, maybe COVID pandemic related as well, um, because nobody else could, could perform either. Is there some of that in, in that?

[00:04:48] Sylvia: Uh, I think ‘No Crowd No Show’ is about as close as I get to a protest song. And it really deals with how much everything has changed, including the music business.

And in fact, the last verse definitely refers to, uh, you know, someone busking on the street and, and being told to move along by the cops.

[00:05:12] Rosalyn: Interesting. Are there some themes in there that you wanna mention? So you said, you know, there's some changes in the music business, certainly, I'm sure you've seen a lot of changes, you know, is there a way that you're approaching it now that's a little bit different with this new album?

[00:05:31] Sylvia: Well, the songs on the album are very diverse, really. Although I think that the ensemble of musicians kind of hold it all together and, and make it sound cohesive.

[00:05:43] Rosalyn: Yeah, it's an incredible ensemble, it's an incredible cast of folks that are performing on it. I'm a fiddle nerd, so Drew Jurecka, who I just love, plays fiddle all over it really gorgeously and it's got some other fantastic musicians. Why don't we, why don't we listen a little bit to ‘No Crowd No Show.’

[song plays]

Beautiful. Just gorgeous.

[00:09:42] Sylvia: Thank you.

[00:09:53] Rosalyn: It's amazing. So we are in London, Ontario. And you are, you grew up nearby in Chatham?

[00:10:01] Sylvia: In Chatham, yes.

[00:10:03] Rosalyn: But you have a few, a few connections to London. Your parents met here, right?

[00:10:08] Sylvia: They did, as a matter of fact. My parents met working for the T. Eaton Company as, um, Piano and sheet music demonstrators.

[00:10:18] Sylvia: A love story.

[00:10:21] Rosalyn: Yeah! So yes, I do have that connection for sure.

[00:10:24] Rosalyn: Growing up in the area, do you feel like there was, there was some influence on, on your sound in terms of, like, what you were listening to or, like, radio stations, what people were playing, maybe what your parents were playing?

[00:10:37] Sylvia: My mother, loved all of the, of the popular songs of the, of the 30s and 40s She also, um, was a Chopin specialist. And, uh, my dad was an ear trained musician who loved the organ. And he used to go around to the little country churches where they needed repairs to their pump organs and repair them. And I used to go with him sometimes and I would, uh, I would just sit quietly in the pews and build houses out of the prayer books.

[00:11:11] Rosalyn: [Laughter] I heard another story, with a little tie in to London, which is that, you know, everyone's familiar with the story of Dylan going, going electric and the hoopla that that caused and, and, you know, Sylvia, I feel like you're, very well recognized for kind of being the pioneer of kind of a country rock, folk rock genre, but, you know, maybe the reception wasn't, you know, immediately, uh…..

[00:11:42] Sylvia: The first time Ian and I appeared in London at Western University, uh, with the larger Great Speckled Bird band, some of the audience, when they came in, they saw a steel on stage, and they walked out.

[00:12:02] Rosalyn: Some of the audiences in London have matured and that we, you know, we've broadened our, broadened our horizons.

[00:12:10] Sylvia: I'm sure some!

[00:12:10] Rosalyn: Hahaha. But it's such an interesting, um, what an interesting time, right? That like, you know, that the audiences were, were kind of stuck in.

[00:12:20] Sylvia: Well, people get used to what you do and they don't want it to change. But if you're a musician, you do change. You hopefully develop and, and become better and, and, and, more interesting. One hopes….

[00:12:32] Rosalyn: Absolutely. And it's incredible that you've continued to expand and, and, and explore genres kind of within the genre, right?

[00:12:43] Sylvia: Yeah, well, one friend of mine calls me the mother of reinvention.

[00:12:48] Rosalyn: Yeah and I love your first album because a lot of traditional music and, kind of before you got into songwriting.

[00:12:58] Sylvia: Yes, my original interest was in traditional music. Um, when I was in high school in Chatham, we had a, um, a poetry book, called Grass of Parnassus that was quite a broad spectrum of poetry. And one of the things, actually two or three things in it were old English ballads. And someone who put the book together had the foresight to print the music, with, with those, and I suddenly realized, hey, these are songs, I could, I could sing these. And I became very interested in traditional music at that point. As a matter of fact, uh, when Ian and I first got together, I had quite a large repertoire, but it was mostly out of books from the library.

[00:13:38] Rosalyn: there's a, probably like the most famous that I can think of, of like songwriting stories that I can think is when you wrote, one of your most famous songs in a bathtub.

[00:13:48] Sylvia: Uh, yes, ‘You Were On My Mind’ that song was written in a bathtub in the Earl Hotel in Greenwich Village in New York. And contrary to any thought she might have in that, I wasn't having a bath. It was a very old, very deep tub, and it was the only place where the cockroaches wouldn't go.

[00:14:14] Rosalyn: So in your, your safety bathtub, um, at that point what was your songwriting process? Was it collaborative? Was there someone in the bathtub? I know, um, there's, we don't have to go there, but is, uh, was it, um, was it like an immediate, you're struck with it, or was it something that you were kind of developing and working on over time?

[00:14:39] Sylvia: Generally, songwriters are first time lucky. They write that song, and they write it sort of word for word, note for note, right away. You keep hoping that will happen to you again.

[00:14:54] Sylvia: And actually the songwriting process becomes harder as you move along in your career because, uh, you become more critical of your own work, of course, so you make it harder on yourself.

[00:15:07] Rosalyn: Yeah, that's very interesting. Why don't, why don't we queue up another, another song?

This one's long, uh, the one that I have, the one that I have queued up is ‘Long Chain Of Love.’

[00:15:18] Sylvia: I wrote with Cindy Church, yes. Cindy and I had a discussion about the fact that families are usually traced through the male line, and we thought it would be interesting to write something where a family was traced through the female line, and that's really what this song is about.

[clapping from the audience]

Thank you

[00:19:41] Rosalyn: And something I didn't know about you until just before we sat down here is that you are also a published author.

[00:19:48] Sylvia: I wrote a novel called Joyner's Dream, which is actually about a fiddle that's passed down through a family through, well, generations from late 1700s through to the present day.

[00:20:03] Sylvia: it actually took me five years to write

[00:20:06] Rosalyn: And it's long!

[00:20:11] Sylvia: Well, it didn't have to be three minutes long!

[00:20:19] Rosalyn: Stretch out a bit.

Yeah. Yeah, it just reminded me because they're both kind of, you know, following people's journeys, right? And life journeys and and is this, you know, was that song, did that kind of come from your head? Did you make up this character or was there some influence from?

[00:20:39] Sylvia: Okay. Um, Huey’s from real life. And he said, I write from real life to the point where it doesn't rhyme and then I make the rest up. Laughter. Excellent.

[00:20:47] Rosalyn: This album is put out on, uh, the wonderful Stony Plain Records. Stony Plain, hooray! There is a story that I heard, about when you, uh, were kind of in, yeah, in New York and I think getting approached, I don't know, I think it's probably maybe your second, second album possibly, and had maybe the opportunity to go with like a more commercial label and you chose instead you wanted to go with a more independent folk label.

Can you talk a little bit about why you'd made that decision?

[00:21:24] Sylvia: Well, um, our manager, Albert Grossman, wanted us to go with a major label. And I did quite understand why he wanted us to do that. But at that point, the real folk label was Vanguard. I mean, Joan Baez's record got everybody's attention. And just about anybody who was anybody in the folk field recorded for Vanguard. So we decided we wanted to do that too. We didn't realize at the time that, uh... Vanguard's idea of a promotion was to put an ad one of the book review places.

[00:21:57] Rosalyn: Okay.

[00:21:58] Sylvia: places.

[00:21:59] Rosalyn: Yeah. I think that's so, uh, I don't wanna say it's so rock and roll. It's so folk and roll. It's like, it's, it's, it's cool. It's, it's a, yeah, it's a, it's a really neat decision to make.

[00:22:11] Sylvia: Well, the other thing, too, was that, uh, Vanguard had mostly recorded music up to that point. So they used a very live approach. And, uh, we recorded in some very strange places. Uh, we recorded in the Brooklyn Masonic Temple. You know, with drapes around us.
the Manhattan Towers Hotel Ballroom, because of the ambient sound, basically - they were great believers in ambient sound.

And I think those old albums hold up pretty well.

[00:22:43] Rosalyn: I think they do. I think they absolutely do. And then this album was recorded in Toronto at Canterbury, right? How was that recording there? Had you done it before?

[00:22:54] Sylvia: Well I had recorded with Quartette in the old Canterbury Studio but the new one is very snazzy. A very nice room and the people are great too.

[00:23:03] Rosalyn: Oh, wonderful. Great people to work with, too. Excellent. Now, that's neat. Beautiful people, gorgeous, gorgeous place, and, and just nice to get back into, get back into studios, you know?

[00:23:17] Sylvia: It had been a long time since I'd recorded on my own in studio, but, you know, I, I was, actually, Quartette, we were together for 26 years, which is some kind of record for groups in the industry.

[00:23:37] Rosalyn: You know, these kinds of decisions and stuff, it's, um, yeah, I wanted to maybe hear a little bit about your kind of your perspective, as a woman in the music industry, you know, coming through vastly different times, you know? How has that sat with you?

[00:23:52] Sylvia: Well, when I worked with Ian it was not, not a problem, uh, being, uh, uh, you know, having, having problems because he was a big guy.

[00:24:01] Rosalyn: Yeah, yeah.

[00:24:02] Sylvia: But, uh, I have to say I've, I've had very good luck.

I've been, I've, I've had, I've worked with great people. No regrets. Very few instances where I felt that, that somebody was, uh, being less than respectful.

[00:24:17] Rosalyn: Oh good, yeah.

[00:24:19] Sylvia: All the musicians I've worked with, I've worked with for a very long time. And, uh, Danny Greenspoon, who produced the album, was in my band, which was my version of The Great Speckled Bird for about five or six years.

[00:24:39] Rosalyn: like, you know, being able to make like bold choices like that, you know, and, and both musically and, you know, career wise, I guess I've gotten to be a bit of a bratt I don't think really had anybody but to do. Yeah. You know, and, and I know that that is unusual.

[00:25:04] Sylvia: Um, and you know, career wise. Maybe that's a good segway to the next.

[00:25:13] Rosalyn: Beautiful. Uh, well, maybe, maybe this is a good segway into the next song that we wanted to play because it's kind of, kind of maybe a bratty song a little bit. It's called ‘Cynical Little Love Song’. Would you like to introduce the song? Is there something you want to say about it?

[00:25:30] Sylvia: Actually, the title kind of says it all.

[00:25:35] Rosalyn: All right. Let's, let's roll it.

[music plays]

[00:27:01] Sylvia: Thank you. I'm not really that cynical.

[00:28:45] Rosalyn: Fantastic. I was wondering if it would be okay to let folks ask some questions.

[00:29:04] Audience Question: I’m just so curious as to what motivated the creation of that song and if there's a little bit of humour in there as well?

[00:29:27] Sylvia: ... I hope so. Yeah, it's just, you know, sometimes you hear something in that line about, um, the one who cares least is the one who makes all the rules. That really caught my attention. I think it kind of grew from there.

[00:29:35] Audience Member: I’m wondering if you could talk about how the music industry has changed. As one of the forerunners of the folk revival, you're kind of in a unique position to speak to it from the beginning of the folk music industry.

[00:29:56] Sylvia: I don't think I'd like to be starting out now. I think it's much harder. You have to be so computer savvy now. And the way that you get your material out and get heard is to work your butt off online, getting people to hear what you do. And, uh, uh, that's something I certainly am not up to at this point. And the thing is that there is, especially once COVID came through, there are fewer and fewer places to learn how to do what you're doing, you know, to basically build your chops and, uh, garage bands are all very well, but the way you learn is you get up on stage and you learn how people respond to what you do and you build on that, and, uh, I, I don't know, it's, I think it's just very hard right

[00:30:59] Audience Member: I was struck by your song about that matter, the, uh, climate emergency. How can we be in this business and in this community and go forward in more sustainable good ways. And I'm struck, I was struck in that room at the lack of eldership in the space. And I, I want to play off the last question, which was you've seen a lot of change at the start of the folk revival until now. And so I'm thinking about, you know, the core of what this folk music thing is. I know that's a big question. But I'm curious to hear from you, somebody that I consider one of the elders of our community, in the best way of that word. Um, with lots of respect, I would love to hear just any thought you might have about How this community, not just industry, but community and industry, um, can learn from the core of what folk is all about, to go forward in good, sustainable ways.

Well, I'd like to acknowledge Paul Mills sitting in the front row here because, because of course we worked on the radio show Touch the Earth for what, five, six years. And, That, that was a growing thing, you know, we started out really with very traditionally and gradually developed into a real, um, outlet for singer songwriters, which of course, this is my, uh, my love as well.

it's, it's funny, you know, When, when you're really young, you, you have, you have an audience, and, and people are interested in what you're doing, and you're the newest thing, and all that. And then you get into middle age, and suddenly it's like you cease to exist, But I did, I have found, that once you get up into your 70s and 80s, they think you know something. So I'm kind of enjoying this period.

[00:33:12] Rosalyn: And it's interesting because it is really a whole different industry, right.

[00:33:18] Sylvia: It's very different

[00:33:20] Rosalyn: There's a lot of youth programs and a lot of developing programs but there are elders in our community and people that are, that are in that time of their life that are, that are starting making music and that are releasing their albums now and so, I wonder if you have any words of encouragement for them?

[00:33:44] Sylvia: When I first started listening to recorded music in Chatham, I didn't have a lot to listen to, but as I got out into the community and, and started hearing a lot of recordings, um, the Alan Lomax recordings of traditional artists, you know, and listening to old ladies with no teeth sing these amazing songs. There definitely was a feeling that you, you learned from those people who went before you and, and brilliant players, people who had encyclopedic memories of songs that go back to England, you know. Yeah.I don't know where, uh, the young artists draw their ideas from these days. I have a niece who's a singer and songwriter and, I like some of her songs, but some of them are just too much inside her own head rather than communicating to an audience. I really feel that the whole point of being a singer and a songwriter, of course, is to communicate. And for people to, uh, come up to you afterwards and say, “Oh, I, I've been there, I know that person, I feel like that.” And I think that's a very important part of being a performer.

[00:35:12] Rosalyn: Yeah, and it gets to that core of, kind of what, what Rachel was talking about like that, that core of, when we're talking about folk music and, you know, it's, it's storytelling, right?

[00:35:25] Sylvia: Absolutely. And It's, an acting job. You know, because you are not the person whose voice is in that song. So you really have to photograph who that person is.

[00:35:38] Rosalyn: Yeah, I mean, and, you know, we're talking about having that encyclopedic memory. It's not like, you know, folks were Googling lyrics or anything.

[00:35:48] Sylvia: Hardly. Although it's very handy sometimes.

[00:35:51] Rosalyn: It certainly is a different time to be releasing music.

[00:36:19] Sylvia: I have to say at this point that when Ian and I started out, uh, if you went with a record label, they basically gave you three albums to get established. And there was certainly that period of time where if your first album didn't make it, they didn't want to hear from you again. And I feel very fortunate to be on Stony Plain. Because they really seem to be in that tradition of developing artists, and I'm very happy about that.

[00:36:47] Rosalyn: I'm very happy about that.

[00:36:56] Audience Member: Was something else being written down the hall at the same time?

Uh, Ian wrote Four Strong Winds first. And the really interesting thing is that was his first song and ‘You Were on My Mind’ was my first song.

[00:37:39] Sylvia: Actually One of the reasons why Ian and I stopped performing together was that our musical tastes had diverged quite considerably and he was really getting into the cowboy thing, which I... respectfully was not. So when we first got together, I had this repertoire of traditional songs. He was more into Big Bill Broonzy at that point. And so it really took some adjustment on both sides to, uh, pull together what we did. And I think it, it helped us both in terms of, of developing our musical tastes, but we did diverge and, and I've I've always really been into lyrics, and I felt there were a lot of things that I, I had to say that were not coming out in the Ian and Sylvia material. As good as I feel that material is, and that it holds up for me even now, but, you know, you, you do develop as an artist, and you do, spread out in different directions, so that's really my story.

I think it really does. Um, you know, on PBS, late at night, on Friday nights, there's a venue in, where is it, down, is it North Carolina or something? Um, anyway, a place called The Cabin, and I'm constantly pleased to see that there's traditional musicians that are a big part of that who perform live to an enormous audience, enthusiastic audience, and I think that their pockets exist everywhere where you can still do that.

I don't know that you can do it in big city nightclubs or anything like that, but, but those venues do exist, and they're very supportive.

[00:40:05] Sylvia: Catherine O'Hara called me when they were doing that, because she was playing the autoharp on, and she said “Can you tell me what it was like being in a, in a duo, you know, that kind of, and being buried in that kind of relationship?” And I said, “Well, all I can tell you is that, uh, when we had a new band member, Um, I would sort of take them aside and say, you know, if Ian and I get into an argument about an arrangement, don't get involved, it's not about music.”

[00:40:33] Rosalyn: Public arrangement. That's great.

[00:40:39] Sylvia: I enjoyed it, I enjoyed it. But the problem I had with it was that it leaned much more towards the West Coast slick. Folk music rather than the traditional side of it, but, but fine. It was a great movie.

[00:41:01] Sylvia: When Yorkville was in its heyday, Ian and I were touring full time in the States. We were very seldom in Toronto.

[00:41:09] Rosalyn: Mm.

[00:41:10] Sylvia: The problem with performing in Canada at that point is that there were maybe 8 or 10 universities you could play and if you played them, you couldn't play them again for another 3, 4 years because they've already had you there.

So there wasn't a lot of work to, you know, thick on the ground at that point. And, um, we, we were with an agency called GTA and, um, they managed the Kingston Trio. And...

They had a map in their foyer with a red pin for every college and university in the United States and it was a mass of red pins.

And we played most of

[00:41:48] Rosalyn: them.

Oh my gosh. Yeah. Huh. That's incredible. I think we probably have time for one more question. I saw Cheryl. Yeah, Cheryl.

[00:41:56] Sylvia: I'm in discussion with Bob Misson who booked Quartette early on and, and I'm very fond of Bob. And he's checking to see if there's any interest in my playing some of the festivals this summer. So, fingers crossed, we'll see.

[00:42:18] Rosalyn: So take note, festival buyers in the crowd. I see you. I see you. Yeah. Um, so I'd like to, uh, I'd like to talk quickly about, um, ‘At The End Of The Day’, which is the title of the album, but it's also, uh, the song on the album. And I'm wondering if you can, um, just tell us a little bit about, about the kind of inspiration or maybe about the process of writing the song.

[00:42:42] Sylvia: Well, as I, as I mentioned before, I, I wrote that with, Joan Besen. And, it's, it's a very retrospective song and, and the fact that when you've had a long life, you, you, uh,
you look at everything that's happened to you and I, I basically am pretty positive. You know, I'm, uh, I'm not nostalgic. Um, I think the past is a great place to visit, but I don't want to live there.

[00:43:12] Rosalyn: Yeah!

[00:43:13] Sylvia: Um, but that's basically what the song is. It's, it's looking back, reflecting back on a, on a life and basically taking the good stuff

[00:43:22] Rosalyn: Let's have a listen.

[Music plays]

[00:46:54] Rosalyn: Wow. So beautiful.

[00:47:06] Rosalyn: I was saying I got verklempt during that, uh, during that song. It's so gorgeous. Um, as a final thought, maybe you could share with us one of those good times, a fond memory, one of those good times, from this beautiful career.?

[00:47:22] Sylvia: Oh gosh, well certainly playing Carnegie Hall and Town Hall in New York of course. And I have to say that perhaps a kind of collective experience, uh, with Ian and I with Quartette and on my own. I love playing the small towns because the audiences aren't segregated by age. I think in Toronto, it tends to be a certain age group that goes to a certain place. Whereas in these small towns, you get little kids in the front row and you get grandparents sitting further back so the sound is too loud.

But it's the cross section. I love singing to people.

[00:48:08] Rosalyn: That's gorgeous. Well, this has just been so lovely. Truly honored that, that you've come here, um, to share your music with us and, and your stories. It's been so wonderful having you here. Thank you, Sylvia.

[00:48:24] Sylvia: Thank you. Thank you.