Gordon Lightfoot Forums - Travellers member passes away

http://www.thestar.com/article/176697
Joe Hampson, 78: Sang with The Travellers

Feb 01, 2007 04:30 AM
Catherine Dunphy
Obituary Writer

"This land is your land, this land is my land ..."

If you know what comes next – "From Bonavista, to Vancouver Island" – and if, like tens of thousands of Canadians, you can go on to sing the rest of the verse –"from the Arctic Circle to the Great Lake waters/ This land was made for you and me" – then you know the words to Canada's unofficial anthem.

And you owe it all to The Travellers.

The group came out of singalongs at Camp Naivelt (New World), a vacation community north of Brampton for Jewish Socialist families owned by the United Jewish People's Order (formerly the Labour League). Encouraged by troubadour Pete Seeger, a regular visitor there, The Travellers – in a patriotic miscue, they actually once considered calling themselves The Beavers – started singing to buck up the spirits of striking workers, and became the country's international cultural ambassadors.

They sang songs of protest, folk songs, children's songs, international songs – but always half the program was Canadian songs, including their Canadian adaptation of Woody Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land."

They were all over Canadian television – they made the finals of CBC's Pick the Stars (the Canadian Idol of the day); they played for the Queen; they played 28 shows in 28 days in 28 communities in the Northwest Territories. They toured Russia, the first post-Cold War cultural exchange between Canada and the Soviet Union, and they played at the first Mariposa Folk Festival in 1961. In 1967, Canada's Centennial and the year of Montreal's Expo, they were everywhere; they were in Osaka for Expo '70, where they played for the emperor. A year or two later, they travelled in Cyprus and Germany, singing for our peacekeepers.

They made 16 albums and had five television specials. And, since the spring of 1965, there had been a slim man with an open, friendly face leaning into the stand-up bass. Joe Hampson was a gentile who ordered his corned beef on white with mayo on the side and who never understood why he couldn't get a glass of milk at a Jewish deli. He was also an American.

"He brought spontaneity to the group," Jerry Gray of The Travellers said at a memorial service held after Hampson died Nov. 30 at age 78.

He was the musician who had the silly asides and who could lead any audience into enthusiastic participation. One Canada Day celebration in Ottawa, he divided the crowd of 50,000 into three parts, each taking its turn to stand, sing and wave.

"He had a little boy quality on stage even though in later years he had this great white beard," Gray said in an interview later. "You wanted to come up and pinch his cheeks."

"He had music in his bones," said his wife, Sharon Hampson of Sharon, Lois and Bram fame. "He knew every song; he was an encyclopedia of show tunes, standards, pop, folk, everything."

He grew up in a musical home: His mother played piano in the silent movie theatres in Indianapolis and his aunt was a voice coach. Hampson considered becoming an Episcopalian priest in university, but instead became a ballroom dancing instructor for Arthur Murray studios, even partnering Arthur's wife, Kathryn.

He was a folkie known as Joe Lawrence singing with a group called The Wayfarers in a Denver coffee house when he spotted singer Sharon Trostin by the doorway bopping to their music. The next day he told her he was going to marry her. She was Canadian, 18, Jewish; he was 15 years older, the twice-divorced father of a son . They married in Oklahoma and were living in Los Angeles when Randi, the first of their two children, was born. (Randi Hampson is now a lawyer; her brother, Geoff, is a professional bridge player.)

They moved back to Toronto and Hampson was performing with a folk trio called The Chanteclers in a Niagara Falls motel when Gray heard him play. "Joe wasn't with The Travellers in the beginning but he was with us in our glory years," Gray said.

He also became a Canadian citizen.

After Sharon, Lois and Bram formed their acclaimed children's singing group, he often toured with them as their bass player. He arranged some of their music and wrote their song "We Have a Band."

"There was a big learning curve that Lois and I had to embark on and Joe was extremely helpful with that," said Bram Morrison. "One thing he taught me is to think of harmony as its own melody, that way it has a life of its own."

By the '80s, The Travellers' gigs had begun to taper off. Hampson took up renovating and home repair work. He was good at it – what he didn't know, such as welding, he learned. Later he built props for movie and commercial sets, and recently he had started doing equipment demonstrations for staff at a large hardware chain.

He was still making music, though. Every Christmas, he and Sharon hosted a huge musical party. People cheered after he sang a raunchy blues number in 2005. He was the timpanist with the North York Concert Orchestra until last year. And until just a few years ago, he led an informal choir that met in his home, made up of secular Jewish people who had begun meeting Sunday mornings in 1972 while their children learned Jewish culture and traditions.

The Travellers' last performance was at the Canadian Auto Workers' convention last August in Vancouver. Hampson had been diagnosed with a tumour but went anyway, telling his doctor that nothing interferes with a musical gig. After he came home, he learned he had terminal lung cancer. He spent his last few months in bed at home, receiving visitors.

Every evening, Sharon sang to him – "Good night sweetheart/ well, it's time to go" and "I hate to leave you but I really must say good night, sweetheart." And every night, until just before the end, her husband would fill in the bass line.

more:
http://jam.canoe.ca/Music/Pop_Encycl...ravellers.html

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cdunphy@thestar.ca