Apparent Dip Music Club #4 – Stompin’ Tom Connors

Today’s music club offering might be new to those of you from south of the border. I first came across Stompin’ Tom Connors, and this song, while I was in the field checking out what I thought would be my thesis field area (project never worked out, but that story is for another post; its a good one, I almost killed us). My office mate (we will call her Dr. Swartpuntia) and I had spent a great week and a half in southern British Columbia, near the beautiful town of Revelstoke, and were on our way back south listening to the CBC. They were announcing the results of this contest, where they had asked the listeners to call in with “the best trucking song ever written”. Dr. Swartpuntia and I threw out our guesses, mainly “Truckin'” and a few others she knew of. The DJ came on and said, “while we received many good candidates, far and away the winner is Bud the Spud, by Stompin Tom Connors.” What?!? This blew us away; as music snobs we both thought we would have at least heard of the song, if not already spent hours discussing the true meaning of the lyrics (hello “Tangled up in Blue” and “Last Trip to Tulsa“). Anyways, when we got back to school I was able to collect some Stompin’ Tom, and now love a lot of his songs. This is perhaps his most famous, but please check out the rest of his catalog. Incidentally, I was also given a great gift related to this song, something that has a place of pride on my bookshelf. Youtube has some fantastic Stompin’ Tom videos, mostly concert film, but one excellent video for Margo’s Cargo that almost made me understand what the song was about (a cow-dung clock?).