From Timmins, Ontario · Born in Saint John, New Brunswick · Sang about everywhere in between
Stompin’ Tom Connors made small-town Canada audible to itself.
Before he started writing songs, a Canadian in Cape Breton had no way to recognize a Canadian in Tillsonburg. After him, they did — through the songs.
This is how it worked.
Born one place, raised in another, made in a third
Charles Thomas Connors was born in Saint John, New Brunswick, in 1936. His childhood was as hard as one could have — poverty, homelessness, child welfare. He wrote his first song at age 11, naming it after the Reversing Falls at the edge of his hometown.
At 15, he picked up a guitar. The same year, he left his adopted home and hitchhiked across Canada — a journey he never really stopped.
He played his first paid gig in 1964 at the Maple Leaf Hotel in Timmins, Ontario, where the manager gave him drinks for songs. Timmins became his musical hometown — the place he came from as a working singer, even though he was not born there. Three small Canadian places made him: one gave him his birth, one gave him his start, and one would give him his name.
How the nickname was born
On July 1, 1967 — Canada’s one hundredth birthday — Connors played the King George Tavern in Peterborough, Ontario. He had taken to stomping the heel of his boot on the stage in time with his songs. He was damaging the wood. So he began bringing a sheet of plywood with him to stomp on instead.
The MC at the King George that night introduced him as “Stompin’ Tom.” The name stuck. The board became as much a part of him as the black Stetson.
It was the most Canadian thing imaginable: a singer who travelled with the floor he stood on, because he knew the small-town stages he sang from would never hold him otherwise.
The geography of his songs
Stompin’ Tom Connors – Tillsonburg
Connors wrote over 500 songs in his career. He recorded four dozen albums. Almost every song he wrote was about a real place.
- Bud the Spud — a song about a Prince Edward Island potato trucker
- Sudbury Saturday Night — a song about a Friday night in Sudbury
- Tillsonburg — a song about working a tobacco field in a small Ontario town most Canadians had never heard of
- Big Joe Mufferaw — a song about a Quebec/Ontario lumberjack legend
- Reesor Crossing Tragedy — a song about a 1963 Northern Ontario incident at a rail siding most people couldn’t find on a map
- The Ketchup Song — a song about Heinz tomato pickers in Leamington
- The Snowmobile Song — a song about a Skidoo
- The Hockey Song — about every arena in the country
From 1969 to the early 1980s, Connors toured almost without stopping. From 1974 to 1975, he had his own CBC television program, Stompin’ Tom’s Canada — twenty-six episodes, each filmed in a different place. From the rocky coastline of Newfoundland to the Yukon, and a hundred thousand points in between.
The mechanism was always the same: he wrote a song about one small Canadian town, and then sang it in another. A Cape Breton fishing village heard a song about a Sudbury miner. A Saskatchewan farmer heard a song about a PEI spud trucker. A hockey town in BC heard The Hockey Song and recognized itself.
His songs are still played today in towns he never visited. The Hockey Song runs at every Toronto Maple Leafs home game. Bud the Spud is sung by every PEI school kid before they know what tariffs are. Sudbury Saturday Night is karaoke in places nobody from Sudbury has ever been to.
That is how thousands of small Canadian places stayed in touch with each other through the second half of the twentieth century. They didn’t read about each other. They heard about each other through Stompin’ Tom.
His Canada
In 1978, Connors returned six Juno Awards he had previously won, in protest against the Americanization of the Canadian music industry. He stopped performing in the United States entirely.
He died at his farm in Ballinafad, near Erin, Ontario, in March 2013.
He is buried where he asked to be: among the small Canadian places he sang about for a living.
Why he matters here
1000towns of Canada exists for one reason: to map the thousand small places that, together, make up the country.
Stompin’ Tom got there before us.
Every song he wrote was a kind of letter from one small town to another. He was Canada’s first small-town columnist — fifty years before any of us thought of it.
After him, no Canadian small town was unsung.
After us, none will go unmapped.
Timmins is a city in northeastern Ontario on the Mattagami River. The economy is based on natural resource extraction and is supported by industries related to lumbering and to the mining of gold, zinc, copper, nickel, and silver.
The city has a large Francophone community, with more than 50 percent bilingual in French.
Read and watch more about Timmis, Ontario
Erin is a town in Wellington County, 80 kilometres northwest of Toronto. Erin is an amalgamated town, composed of the former Villages of Erin and Hillsburgh, and the hamlets of Ballinafad, Brisbane, Cedar Valley, Crewson’s Corners, Ospringe, and Orton.
Erin is home to many notable residents, including the late musician Stompin’ Tom Connors.
