Stan Rogers
Album: The Collection
Label: Borealis
Tracks: 7 Discs
Website: http://www.stanrogers.net

Stan Rogers was unquestionably one of the finest folk-oriented songwriters to have come out of Canada. Indeed, of he it was said: "If a country could be sung into existence, he'd have done it" (Rick Salutin) and "Stan Rogers was to Canada what Woody Guthrie was to the United States" (Tom Paxton). Stan's death in 1983 (at just 33) in a fire aboard an airplane was one of the great tragedies of music history. His original songs can be described as nothing less than masterly, and they display considerable, and profound, insights into the lives of those he wrote about (whether fictional or not, Stan's research was always impeccable and the resultant songs never less than totally authentic in conveying the relevant experiences). Stan was nothing less than a songwriting genius, with a true gift for melody that set the seal on the simple intensity and boundless humanity of his lyrics. In the opinions of many, no other songwriter has more truthfully captured the essence of life in the situations and places he describes in his songs, with so intense an externalised passion.

So many songs from Stan's impressive canon have achieved wide currency on the folk scene (and there's a good half-a-dozen of them in my own repertoire!), and yet his small handful of albums on the Fogarty's Cove label have been only intermittently and/or unreliably available in the UK over the years. Happily, this situation changed from the spring of 2011, when Canada's Borealis label brought out a fabulous and exceedingly well-packaged single-disc compilation The Very Best Of Stan Rogers, which fully and precisely measured up to that claim; that release was swiftly followed by splendidly remastered reissues of all of Stan's five original albums - Fogarty's Cove, Turnaround, Between The Breaks… Live!, Northwest Passage and From Fresh Water - as recorded variously between 1976 and 1982.

The Collection is a landmark special-edition set housed within a cardboard box; it presents fully-remastered editions of Stan's five original albums (these have already appeared singly over the course of the past couple of years) plus two separate discs which are unique to this package. First there's a DVD, One Warm Line: this gives us the original honest and affectionate 1989 film by Alan Collins and Robert Lang, subtitled The Legacy Of Stan Rogers, which is now supplemented with extra features by way of four exclusive interviews and a pair of riveting live performances (The Witch Of The Westmorland and White Collar Holler) on which Stan's backed by Garnet Rogers and Jim Morison. Then there's a five-song CD-EP Discoveries, containing rare, recently found live recordings of Stan performing songs written by his contemporaries. These span the years between 1977 and 1979, and were made at a variety of venues; even not taking into consideration their original source as soundboard-cassettes, they sound remarkably good, and the vibrancy and 200% commitment of Stan's performances fairly leaps out at us, as does the gutsy fiddle playing of brother Garnet (on three of the EP's five cuts). Stan would regularly perform songs by his songwriter friends during his sets, and was a great champion of songwriters who wrote well-crafted songs; the five examples unearthed for this EP are prime cuts, sure, and apparently just the tip of the iceberg that was set into motion by the mid-'90s release of the From Coffee House To Concert Hall CD which presented several previously unreleased recordings. The roll-call of songwriters represented here comprises David Essig, Doug McArthur, Mark Rust, Bob Franke and Ian Robb, with the latter's a cappella lament for The Old Rose & Crown providing a suitably lusty and humour-filled (and yet somewhat wistful) finale to proceedings here.

Me, I'm never satisfied tho'! - I now want to see Borealis uncovering more of that iceberg, as well as reissuing those earlier posthumously-released collections Home In Halifax and the aforementioned From Coffee House To Concert Hall (and hey, why not also For The Family and Poetic Justice for completion's sake?). But let's be immensely grateful to Borealis for The Collection, which richly deserves, nay unquestionably demands, a place on the shelves of any serious enthusiast for (or student of) contemporary folk songwriting and genuinely passionate folk singing; it really is that essential.

David Kidman