Stompin' Tom Connors:  Oh Canada, Eh?

"In Canada, you get to see them all."

artist:  Stompin' Tom Connors

songwriter:  Stompin' Tom Connors

date released: 1994

Charles Thomas Connors, better known as Stompin' Tom Connors, was born on February 9, 1936, at the General Hospital in Saint John, New Brunswick, to Isabel Connors and Thomas Joseph Sullivan.  Isabel's family were Irish Protestants, and his maternal grandfather, John Connors, was a sea captain from Boston, Massachusetts, who had died before Charles was born. His father was a Catholic of Irish ancestry and "may have been Métis or Micmac.

At 13 Tom ran away from his family to hitchhike across Canada. He got his first guitar at 14, and at 15 he wrote his first song called "Reversing Falls Darling". His hitchhiking journey consumed the next 13 years of his life as he travelled among various part-time jobs while writing songs on his guitar, singing for his supper. He worked in mines and rode in boxcars, and in the coldest part of winter, he welcomed vagrancy arrests for a warm place to sleep. At his last stop in Timmins, Ontario, he found himself a nickel short of a 35-cent beer at the city's Maple Leaf Hotel. Tom told the bartender to put the cap back on the bottle, and he'd head for the Sally Ann, but the bartender, Gaëtan Lepine, accepted the 30 cents and offered him a second beer if he would open his guitar case and play a few songs. These few songs turned into a 14-month run at the hotel, a weekly spot on CKGB in Timmins, eight 45-RPM recordings, and the end of the beginning for Tom Connors.

 Focusing his career exclusively on his native Canada, he is credited with writing more than 300 songs and has released four dozen albums, with total sales of nearly four million copies.

Connors' songs have become part of the Canadian cultural landscape with songs, such as "O Canada, Eh?"   Among his best-known songs are "Sudbury Saturday Night", "Bud the Spud" and "The Hockey Song"; the last is played at various games throughout the National Hockey League, including at every Toronto Maple Leafs home game. In 2018, the song was inducted into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame in a ceremony at a Leafs game.