Stan Rogers

Legendary Canadian folk singer, songwriter and guitarist Stan Rogers began his professional career in 1969 and quickly became a fixture on the Canadian folk club and festival circuit. In the 1970s, he performed frequently on CBC Radio and appeared on the Canadian television variety series "John Allan Cameron". His first album, Fogarty's Cove, was recorded in 1976. He later went on to establish with his brother, musician Garnet Rogers, Fogarty's Cove Music label. Rogers' songs spoke for the ordinary lives that reflect the diversity of the Canadian experience. He gave voice to those who work closest to the land and the sea as well as to the dispossessed and the disaffected. The universal themes of his songs were honor, loyalty and hope. His terms of reference and his images were evocatively specific and his sense of Canadian history equally poetic and heroic. Of Rogers' titles, nearly 100 in total, the best-known are 'Barrett's Privateers,' 'Make and Break Harbour,' 'The Mary Ellen Carter,' 'Northwest Passage' and the love song 'Forty-Five Years'. His songs have been recorded by more than 25 other artists and groups including Peter Paul and Mary, Raffi, Eric Bogle, the Battlefield Band, John Allan Cameron, Margaret Christl, Mary O'Hara and the Tannahill Weavers. Rogers began attract international attention and made his US debut in 1978 and subsequently appeared widely there in folk clubs and at festivals. Tragically, he was killed in 1983 in a fire aboard an Air Canada DC-9 at the Greater Cincinnati Airport. At the time, he was en route home from an appearance at the Kerrville Folk Festival in Texas. The Stan Rogers Folk Festival was founded in 1997 and named in his honor. It is held annually in Canso, Nova Scotia and has featured such acts as Bruce Cockburn, Ron Sexsmith, Jimmy Rankin, The Barra McNeils, The Irish Descendants and Eric Bogle. Rogers is widely considered to be the greatest Canadian folk singer of all time.