It’s a long, hard road – figuratively and literally – from a teaching job on southern Alberta’s Kainai First Nation to folk-music near-stardom in Edmonton. But John Wort Hannam wouldn’t trade the journey for the world.
“It was great and frustrating all at the same time,” said Hannam of his five years as a language arts teacher on the Kainai, Canada’s largest reserve. “There were great things that happened out there, really fantastic achievements and great students. But at the same time, I knew that teaching wasn’t for me. I liked it but I wasn’t passionate. I woke up most mornings thinking: ‘I do not want to go to work. I can’t do this for 30 years.’ ”
Unfulfilled by teaching, Hannam pondered life as a folk artist, a daunting challenge considering he didn’t know how to play guitar.
“My Dad said to me once: ‘You’re dead a long time so you better get started,’ ” recalled Hannam, downing an early-morning coffee at Edmonton’s Remedy Café. “And that little piece of advice worked for me.”
Hannam picked up a guitar, learned to play, and four years later quit his job. Fellow teachers asked if he had landed another teaching gig.
“I’d say: ‘No, no, I’m going to write songs.’ And they’d say: ‘Are you crazy? How are you going to pay your mortgage? How are you going to go to the dentist?’
“It all just sort of fell into place.”
Hannam is being modest. Since his career’s humble beginnings, he has won several awards for his songwriting, including the Calgary Folk Music Festival Songwriting Competition Grand Prize three times.
“Somebody wrote about me that I make the world personal instead of my personal life the world. And that’s definitely something I try to do,” said Hannam, who’s been compared to Gordon Lightfoot, James Keelaghan and John Prine. “I’m really intrigued by stories of everyday people who have extraordinary stories or have overcome extraordinary things. They don’t have to overcome Hurricane Katrina or something; they can just be very, very small town Canadian kinds of things.”
Hannam’s distinctive style shines through on all four of his full-length albums including the just-released Queen’s Hotel, named for an actual sandstone structure that has stood in Fort MacLeod since 1903. (Hannam splits his time between the historic southern Alberta town, and Edmonton.)
“I always see people taking photographs of it,” Hannam said of the hotel. “For a songwriter, if you walk in, it’s a treasure trove of stories and characters. I mean, the lines just jump out at you. The first song written for this album was written in the Queen’s Hotel and it just made sense to call it that.”
Queen’s Hotel was recorded live off the floor at The Factory in Vancouver in just two and a half days. “We decided to sit in a room, sit in a circle, have the microphones set up around us and just play the songs,” Hannam recalled. “It feels less like we made a recording and more like we made music that happened to be recorded. I’m thrilled with the way it turned out. There’s a rawness to it. It’s not a clean, polished album, that’s for sure.”
Raw, live performances are what Hannam lives for. He spends much of the year driving across North America to perform at clubs, theatres and folk festivals. “You get to connect and you get to see if these songs work,” he said. “You see if they’re smiling or laughing at the right time or hopefully wiping away a tear at the right time, things like that.”
Hannam hopes to make such a connection with the crowd at the Untapped Alberta concert series show in Medicine Hat on September 26th, co-sponsored by ATB Financial and Big Rock Brewery. He said the music series, which will also hit Calgary, Edmonton, Red Deer and Beaverlodge in the fall of 2009, gets his endorsement.
“ATB is my bank, always has been, and Big Rock is my beer so I’m happy to join forces and do something like this,” he said. “I’m glad ATB and Big Rock value the arts, because they don’t have to do this. I think they’re doing this to not only help artists but to create a community where the arts are valued.”
