You almost certainly know about the five main pillars that support this book: Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, The Band and – if you’ve been paying attention – Hank Snow.
Dig further into memory and you may come up with some of the others: Ian and Sylvia (Four Strong Winds), Gordon Lightfoot (Early Morning Rain), Anne Murray (Snowbird) and probably the McGarrigle sisters, Kate and Anna, if only for their famous offspring and connections. There are others too, about whom many readers will think “Oh yeah…”.
Schneider’s great skill is to thread these names together, not into a list, as above, but into a fluent and compelling narrative that succeeds in putting the work into a Canadian context, even though most major successes came below the 42nd parallel north.
His story starts with Screamin’ Ronnie Hawkins and ends with The Band (formerly, of course, The Hawks) giving the book a pleasingly circular structure. In between, he sketches the connections that link and the schisms that divide. There’s not too much about the big names and not too little about the lesser lights.
The book’s subtitle, The Northern Roots Of American Music, makes a larger claim than Schneider’s thesis warrants, but that’s about the only nit to be picked here.
