This is an excerpt from the print edition of Dirty Linen #144 (November/December 2009).
The full article is in the magazine, available on newsstands, by subscription, and at the Dirty Linen webstore.
by Kerry Dexter
| In a book of poetry she studied in high school, Sylvia Fricker came across several poems
that had melody lines printed with them; they were English ballads. "That made the
connection for me," she recalled recently. "It suddenly dawned on me that these poems
were actually songs, and I became very interested in old English ballads, and out of that
grew an interest Appalachian ballads, too." She decided, by the time she finished high
school, that what she wanted to do was be a folksinger. That's a path Sylvia Fricker
Tyson has followed through the height of the folk music revival into the present day, as
half of the legendary duo (with then-husband Ian Tyson) Ian and Sylvia, as a solo act, as a
broadcaster, an author, a member of the group Quartette, and songwriter. Though it has
been more than four decades since that first decision, she continues to make music and
set herself new challenges in her career.
It wasn't a common career decision for a teenager in southwestern Ontario in the 1950s. "There was always music in the house," Tyson said. "Both my parents were musical -- my mum was a classically trained pianist, and my dad played by ear." There was also the radio, with country and, later, folk and world-music programs from the CBC and rhythm and blues and soul from across the border in nearby Detroit, about 60 miles away. "Most of what I heard on the radio was country music, but I'm sure hearing that blues stuff then influenced some of the music I did later," she said. "My parents for Christmas one year bought me a guitar from the Eaton's catalogue; Eaton's was the big department store up here at that point. It had a kind of brown sunburst finish, it had a neck like a two-by-four, strings sitting about half an inch off the frets, and it had a red and white silkscreened picture of a cowboy roping a cow and said 'Stampede!' on it. I wish I still had it!" Tyson said with a chuckle. Despite the two-by-four neck and high action, it proved a good enough tool to allow her to continue her musical explorations. "Really, there was nobody around to teach me. So I taught myself from books, and then later on Ian showed me a few things, and I learned from watching the great players we had working with us, although, since I'm left-handed, it was kind of like watching a mirror image. "There wasn't a lot of folk music around to listen to," Tyson said of her teenage years in Ontario. "Chatham, my home town, was a city of about 30,000, but basically a small town. Oddly enough, it had a rather enlightened public library, and there were several books of folk music there, including, strangely enough, The Little Red Songbook, which disappeared suddenly, that being the 50s! So I started mainly learning my songs from books. I've always been a great reader, so again, it was a connection with books." |
This is an excerpt from the print edition of Dirty Linen #144 (November/December 2009).
The full article is in the magazine, available on newsstands, by subscription, and at the Dirty Linen webstore.
![[cover #144]](/linen/144/cover144t.jpg)
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