Blog: News and Views

Fields, Implements, and choir repertoire

Hi members and friends of Chor Leoni.

Here I am in windy and somewhat wet Outlook SK, my wife's hometown, following CL's 2007 Summer Tour to Quebec and Ontario.

I've been thinking about one of the songs we sang on our tour, "The Field Behind the Plow." It's composed by the late Stan Rogers and arranged by Ron Smail. A brief note at the beginning of the score explains that Rogers was inspired to write the song when he saw a Saskatchewan farmer working his field.

When we first sang this song a few years ago, I immediately protested that Rogers was off the mark with his song. Prairie farmers don't plow the soil. It was precisely the practice of plowing that gave rise to the "dirty" of the "Dirty Thirties." Dry-land farmers disturb the surface of the soil as little as possible, so as to conserve moisture and prevent the topsoil from blowing away. Rogers may have been inspired by his early morning observations of a Saskatchewan farmer at work, but his conceptual grasp of farming was informed, no doubt, by his upbringing in Ontario.

Within the vocabulary of the song, this is confirmed by his use of the word "rod," a measurement of distance which is so miniscule (about 10 metres, I think) that it is meaningless in the Canadian Prairies, but which may well make sense in the richer soil and more favourable climate of southern Ontario. We drove through such farming country in the last days of our tour, in the regions of Kitchener-Waterloo and Stratford. Indeed, the fields are small compared to those in the region around Outlook (where the smallest unit of measurement seems to be a quarter-mile). And, sure enough, one field had recently been plowed!

Even so, I'm glad we have included this song in our repertoire. For even if it conveys the agricultural technology of the wrong place, it nevertheless captures the poignancy of Prairie farming. I know this because I was so informed by a pastoral colleague and friend who is a professor at the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Saskatoon. He has used this song effectively in his ministry with Prairie farmers, some of whom have suffered total loss of livelihood and land in the last few decades.

From the second floor of the Solheim residence in Outook SK, with vistas of the vast Canadian Prairie,
Cliff Reinhardt
Burnaby BC

Posted by Cliff Reinhardt on August 22, 2007 at 8:22 AM
Filed in: Arcana; Tour Diaries | Permanent Link

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