The mission: To teach an urban audience why people should care about
Canadian agriculture. Be succinct, realizing many audience members know
nothing about agriculture, have never been on a farm and are there for
music and mingling, not education.
Sound daunting? It was.
The Producer accepted this mission when it was asked to supply
agricultural information for Family Farm Tribute Three, a concert
scheduled Jan. 12 at the Music Hall on Toronto’s Danforth Avenue.
Liberal MP Dennis Mills is the force behind this concert and its two
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predecessors. The Toronto politician has been supporting the cause of
the family farm for some years.
But at this concert, the Producer has a role to play beyond tacit
support for events with potential to benefit the family farm.
We compiled a bushel of agricultural factoids, most of them extracted
from the WP. We married those with hundreds of photographs from our
files, taken by staffers as they travelled Western Canada.
The result is a presentation full of facts and faces that is still a
bare beginning, a mere introduction, to the variety that is agriculture
in this country.
The presentation will be displayed at the concert as visual
accompaniment to the music, and will soon also be found on our website.
About the music: concert performers will include Jim Cuddy, Jason
McCoy, Sarah Slean, Wave, Ray Materick, Murray McLauchlan and others.
So, when McLauchlan sings about “straw hats and old dirty hankies” as
part of the Farmer’s Song, there might well be a photo of same, affixed
to a western Canadian farmer of Western Producer acquaintance. You see
how the project is a good fit?
The past year wasn’t a Season of Plenty (a Materick song) but You Can’t
Win (McCoy) in farming if you can’t Fix Anything (another McCoy tune.)
If the Wind Could Blow My Troubles Away (McLauchlan) on most of the
Prairies, we’d all be standing in Whispering Rain (ditto) or feeling
the Rain Down on Me (Cuddy) and thoroughly enjoying it.
But we can’t water a parched earth with Ten Million Teardrops, (McCoy)
however inclined we might be.
The concert may eventually be televised, so watch for it. As Cuddy
sings, you don’t want to be The Last to Know.
