Roads Most Travelled

Life is a highway for this ‘singing mortician’ and he’s seen many twists and turns along the way.

I was born in 1941 in the small town of Timmins in northeastern Ontario. We were a poor family of 15, including Mom and Dad, and I was the eldest child. My father was a roving “packsack miner” and prospector, hoping to strike it rich. There was a lot of booze around while I was growing up; the kitchen always had a batch of dandelion wine fermenting in a corner with a towel covering it, and there was a moonshine still set up downstairs. Dad was away a lot, working the mines, but hardly ever sent money back to the family.

When Dad was home though, there was always music around the house. My mom sang and my dad had a band called The Porcupine Troubadours, and they’d all practice together at our house when I was very little. I remember hearing my mother’s voice on the radio one time, and Dad showing me my first guitar chord and teaching me about E major. You know, there’s something about music that somehow runs in your soul—it certainly runs through my life and my best memories as a kid are rooted in it.

Growing up in our circumstances was no picnic. At school, I was treated the same as most poor people, which ranged from being ignored to being insulted. Some people started calling us half-breeds, and I didn’t know what it meant at first—I thought it had to do with being hard up for cash all the time. I only found out later that my great-grandmother Marguerite Levert (Raymond) was a Cherokee Indian, apparently from a North Dakota tribe, and that people born with “some Indian in their blood” were called “halfbreeds,” or the more socially acceptable term, I guess, Métis. Seems other people knew more about our family being partly Indian back then than I did.