ROY FORBES

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Some Tunes For That Mother of Mine

Roy Forbes has a new album, a wonderfully austere collection of 11 covers and one jaw dropping new original that pays tribute to the songs he grew up hearing in his snowy Dawson Creek hometown in northern British Columbia. It's called Some Tunes For That Mother Of Mine and in a very real way, in some subterranean place in his musical heart, he's been putting this thing together since his mom turned the family radio on one winter's day in 1956 and they were playing Marty Robbins' "Singin' The Blues".

Pushing the Alaska Highway through was big news for the north in the early 40s but come the 1950s Dawson Creek remained pretty much the same little town it had always been. A few more cars in the streets, yes, but those streets were still lined with wooden sidewalks and the local Co-Op was still the big store in town. Nobody had TV yet, just radio. And fast food? That was when mom skipped the jam on your peanut butter sandwich.

But it was a good life, isolated and not especially prosperous, but everybody was in the same boat, mostly, so nobody noticed. You could buy records at the Dawson Music Shop where they stocked racks of the thick, fragile 78s with Glen Miller on the cover, the newer 33 rpm LPs and the very new, little 45s. Those were for the kids and their rock & roll.

Roy Forbes would have been too young to be buying his own records just then but he was lucky, he had a passel of older sisters who brought home all the rockin' platters. The baby of the family, they called him Bim.

Buddy Holly, Gene Vincent and, of course, Elvis - little Bim absorbed them all like a sponge. Later it would be the Beatles, the Stones, the enigmatic Bob Dylan, Neil Young. There was a black plastic Motorola combination record player/radio in the front room that became the centre of his universe.

When he wasn't spinning records and memorizing the very look of the labels - Columbia, RCA Victor - his mother had the radio on CJDC Radio 1350 and the Western Hour. The singers - Hank Williams, Hank Snow, Jim Reeves, Patsy Cline - and songs - "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry", "Tangled Mind", "He'll Have To Go", "Crazy" - would hold him in thrall for a lifetime.

Fast forward a decade or two and Bim has become Forbes' professional name, he's moved down to the big city and turned his hand to making his own songs and records. He left Dawson Creek days after high school grad and years of practicing guitar, playing in bands, writing songs; years of prepping for the inevitable trip down the Hart Highway to Vancouver.

Over the next three decades he would forge a significant Canadian music career. Usually filed under folk and/or singer/songwriter, Bim - he later reverted to Roy Forbes - nevertheless played his acoustic Gurian with the grit and aggro of a rock & roller and was preternaturally blessed with a unique voice, part Hank, part Billie Holiday, part Robert Plant and startlingly soulful.

From the early Kid Full Of Dreams and Raincheck On Misery through The Human Kind and the career spanning compilation Almost Overnight, there would be eight solo albums plus two collaboration CDs with Bill Henderson and Shari Ulrich as UHF. Punctuating innumerable concert tours and festival performances were a couple of Juno nominations and a nice handful of West Coast Music awards as Forbes branched out into producing for other artists like Connie Kaldor and Susan Crowe. But home is always home and now, 35 years on, Roy Forbes is heading back north - at least on CD - to revisit his musical heritage.

One sunny day last June he decided to make a musical present for his mother and went into a studio with Vancouver guitar ace Robbie Steininger, laying down 14 tracks between 10 in the morning and 3 in the afternoon. Of those he kept 12 and had enough time at the end of the session to lay a blush of harmony on Hank Snow's classic "Bluebird Island".

Other than that, what you hear is what Forbes played, live, stripped and raw, accentuated and underscored by Steininger's tasty licks. There's Johnny Cash's sweet old "I Still Miss Someone", Elvis' "When My Blue Moon Turns To Gold Again", a bluesy, slowed down take on Johnny Mercer's timeless "I Remember You" plus a fine "Waiting For A Train" from the granddaddy of them all, Jimmie Rodgers.

And yes, "Singin' The Blues" is here too.