Jimmy Rankin shifts gears this week from his cross-Canada tour into his East Coast Home for the Holidays shows.
The Songs From Route 19 tour was named after Cape Breton’s west coast highway, also known as Celidih Trail. It's the musical spine of the island, running through Celtic music hotbeds like Troy, Creignish, Judique and the singer’s own home town of Mabou.
It’s the same highway Rankin looked down as a kid, eventually taking it to the Canso Causeway, to head to Halifax to study at NSCAD in the mid-1980s.
“When I was a kid, our entertainment was sitting outside the post office watching the RVs go by, heading to the Cabot Trail or someplace else,” says Rankin, who performs on Thursday at the Hall in Parrsboro at 8 p.m., and heads to the Annapolis Valley for an Evergreen Theatre show in Margaretsville on Friday at 8 p.m.
“Now people have discovered (Mabou) and they’re veering off the beaten track. They’re going to the West Mabou dances, enjoying the culture, and now with the golf courses and all that people are coming in droves, which is good for the area. You go to places like Mexico and Hawaii, and the tourists seem really jaded about it all; I hope that doesn’t happen at home, because the people are still really genuine.”
After playing from Charlottetown to Nanaimo, and dozens of places in-between, Rankin says he’s happy to be able to inject some Christmas spirit into the shows, now that we’re well into December. It’s a chance to dig some traditional favourites out of his musical attic and play his original tunes from his 2012 holiday album Tinsel Town, like the title track and Don’t Wanna Say Goodbye to Christmas.
“When you do a full-blown tour, it’s kind of weird playing Christmas songs in early or mid-November. When December hits, people are fully in the Christmas spirit, but in November you kind of have to convince them,” he says with a chuckle.
The year-ending shows will be an opportunity to share stories of Christmas past, growing up in Cape Breton with 11 brothers and sisters, and some of those songs that were born out of memories created along Route 19, like the Rankin Family favourite Mull River Shuffle about the community’s epic parties and dances, and his solo song Tripper, about a mischievous local character known to the whole town.
“It’s a real songwriter’s show, full of songs that were inspired by that part of the world and I tell stories about those songs I’ve written over the years,” he says.
“It was really easy to put that show together, all those songs have real history and good stories behind them, I didn’t have to make things up out of the blue. The tour turned into something really nice as I was talking to the audience about the songs, and doing requests for songs like Feel the Same Way Too and Movin’ On.”
There will also be songs from Rankin’s latest record Moving East, the first he’s made since moving back to Nova Scotia after several years in Nashville, where he enjoyed the musical atmosphere but “felt landlocked” and missed being near the ocean.
Described by the songwriter as “East Coast folk rock,” Moving East was recorded with Joel Plaskett at his New Scotland Yard studio in downtown Dartmouth, and has a lively, down-to-earth feel that harks back to the records the musician made with his siblings in the Rankin Family, but with fresh touches that mark it as distinctly his own.
Guests included Cape Breton Celtic pros like JP Cormier, Ashley MacIsaac and Hilda Chiasson, jazz/blues pianist Bill Stevenson and the band Villages, and the record sports cover photographs by Rankin’s good friend, the late Swiss photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank.
Famous for his 1950s photo essay The Americans, his cinematic collaboration with Jack Kerouac, Pull My Daisy, and his 1987 Cape Breton-shot feature film Candy Mountain, the New York City-based artist also spent much of his time at his home in Mabou Coal Mines and passed away on Sept. 9 in Inverness.
Rankin has several happy memories of Frank, including running into him years ago in the Mabou Credit Union and deciding to accompany the photographer on a spur-of-the-moment drive to New York. He also recalls that Frank included Rankin’s grandmother in a scene in Candy Mountain, which featured many well-loved locals who have since passed on.
“My grandmother plays a woman who’s sick in bed, apparently dying, Stanley MacNeil is the bus driver, Allan Gillis is in there, all these old-timers like John Archie who ran the Esso. Robert was very sympathetic to that whole older generation,” says Rankin, who visited Frank and his wife June Leaf this past summer, bringing them hand-picked chanterelle mushrooms and sharing stories on the front steps.
“I saw him in the hospital about a week before he passed away, I actually heard the ambulance that took him in after he had his heart attack, but he rallied and I figured he was going to come back,” Rankin recalls. “But I came back to Halifax, and one morning checked my phone and saw the news that he was gone.
“Growing up in Mabou, there was no art or music scene happening, but you’d go to Robert’s place and there’d be some amazing artist or some filmmaker from Germany who’s visiting from some other part of the world.
“It was almost like a window to the rest of the world, when they’d talk about New York and invite you to come visit them on Bleeker Street. Their door was always open in the Coal Mines.”
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