by VFSS Life Member Rika Ruebsaat
Our family moved to Vancouver in 1960 when I was eleven years old. My father had somehow found out about the Folk Song Circle and was told that it took place at the Alma Y, which was located on Highbury Street, a block west of Alma. My father told me that he looked up and down Alma Street without finding it so it wasn’t until 1961 that I first attended the Circle.
The Folk Song Circle met every first and third Wednesday of the month (and still does) with an “open stage” format. Everyone got up to three songs so each evening featured approximately twelve singers. We performed there as a family and I remember my parents performing together but eventually it was mainly my father and I who went. At that time Jeannie Cox seemed to be the structural organizer of the evening, setting up chairs, signing up singers and acting as MC. The atmosphere was very informal with lots of banter back and forth between singers and audience. As a singer you never knew when you were on until Jeannie tapped you on the shoulder to tell you that you were next.
Most of the songs sung at the Folk Song Circle came out of the American folk revival from such singers as Joan Baez, Peter, Paul and Mary and the Kingston Trio. There were also songs from the American civil rights movement such as “Down by the Riverside” and “We Shall Not be Moved” as well as the occasional Gordon Lightfoot song. Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne” was sung there so often that I began to hate the song. It was at the Folk Song Circle that I first heard songs about the country and province we lived in. Peter Usher, who worked as a geographer up north, sang songs such as “Bessie from Banksland” and “The RCMP” about life in that part of the country. He was also the first person I heard sing Wade Hemsworth’s “The Black Fly Song”. Al Cox sometimes sang songs from Newfoundland such as “Lukey’s Boat” and “Squid Jigging Ground. The most significant contribution, however, came from Phil Thomas who sang songs he had collected in BC. I didn’t fully appreciate the importance of his work at the time but certainly enjoyed hearing songs that came from places I had been to.
There were essentially two generations of singers at the Circle: our parents’ generation who had been born in the 1920s and the post-war baby boomers. Some people in the first group sang songs they had learned when they were young. My father, for instance, sang German songs he learned from his father and as a youth in Germany and Paddy Graber sang songs he said he had learned from his mother. The older generation also sang songs they had learned from recordings of such people as Richard Dyer-Bennett, Burl Ives and Alan Mills, singers who pre-dated the folk boom of the 1960s. Us baby boomers sang songs predominantly from the American revival. The Folk Song Circle was an ideal training ground for budding singers. I remember I used to nab people whose guitar playing I admired and get them to show me what they did. It was also an impetus for learning and trying out new songs: Twice a month you knew you had an interested audience to sing to. And people did really listen at the Circle. I once sang a song in Ruthenian that I had learned from a Theodor Bikel record and was approached by a man during the break who corrected what I had said about the song.