Three Chords And The Truth

Volume One, Chapter Three

It’s a crisp sunny Saturday afternoon in Strathclair, two hundred miles west of Winnipeg, population around one thousand. A gleaming white 1954 Cadillac stretch limousine pulls off the highway and makes its way slowly into town. The car itself gets heads turning, but this one is extra special. Painted on the front-door panels in big bold letters: “CKY CARAVAN.” Strapped to the rooftop, a massive black case for the stand-up bass.

At the wheel of the nine-passenger beast, singer and bandleader Hal Lone Pine. Beside him, his wife, the singer and champion yodeller Betty Cody. Behind them, their 16-year-old son Lenny, known as Lone Pine Junior, and four other musicians, including their newest hire, a 17-year-old singer named Ray St. Germain.

They’ve been on the road since Tuesday – five gigs in five nights, including an extra three-hour dance on top of the regular two-hour show last night and another one coming up tonight. They’ll head home in the morning and they’ll be back to the studio first thing Monday. First up, the live-to-air show, then they’ll record four more, thirty minutes each, to run at seven-thirty every morning for the rest of the week; each one including a plug or two for their upcoming shows.

Hal Lone Pine (real name Harold Breau) and Betty Cody (Rita Breau nee Cote) started working together in 1939. They made quite a name for themselves in country music, touring and recording both on their own (Colonel Tom Parker wanted to sign Betty but she turned him down to stay with Hal) and together, first in Maine and out across New England and eventually into the Canadian maritime provinces. In 1957, with their regional bookings starting to dwindle, they sign on with Winnipeg’s CKY Radio to take over the popular morning show. The station promotes their “RCA recording stars” heavily, always including special mention of young Lenny, “the Guitar Wizard.” Lone Pine’s first CKY show airs on January 6th, 1958. The station’s 50,000-watt signal, one of the most powerful in the country, extends its broadcast range all across Manitoba, into neighbouring eastern and northern Saskatchewan, southeastern Ontario, and down into North Dakota, Minnesota and beyond. That’s a lot of territory, with a smattering of mid-size cities and hundreds of small rural communities: towns, villages, hamlets. That’s a lot of listeners and a lot of country music fans.

The Caddy pulls up in front of the Bend Theatre. As Hal and Betty head inside, the boys start unloading the gear. It’s three hours to showtime, but sure enough a half dozen or so young girls have moseyed on over to greet them. They’re not looking for the aging country stars, or even Lenny, cute as he is. No. They want to meet the Winnipeg Elvis.

Ray St. Germain has a long, proud and storied history. In his autobiography, “I Wanted To Be Elvis, So What Was I Doing in Moose Jaw?,” Ray traces the European side of his ancestry back to the early eighteenth century, long before Canada had a name. Francois Brisard arrived in Quebec with the French army in 1706. Jean Brisard Dit St. Germain appears in Quebec in 1714 (the date either of his birth or his marriage). In 1820, Pierre St. Germain served as a guide and interpreter for a group of explorers, one of whom was Sir John Franklin on one of his early far-north expeditions. Joseph St. Germain, born in 1845, is referenced in letters from Louis Riel to his mother. “Say hello to my good friend,” Riel wrote, “and warn him of ‘unscrupulous land surveyors.’” (As leader of the Red River Resistance and then the territory’s provisional government, Louis Riel is considered the founder of the province of Manitoba. Later exiled and subsequently convicted of treason, he was executed in 1885 by the federal government and ultimately martyred, albeit controversially, for his foundational role in fighting for the rights of Indigenous peoples.)

Like Louis Riel himself, many of Ray St. Germain’s paternal and maternal descendants are Métis, a mix of European (mostly French) and Aboriginal blood. A century after Riel, however, young Ray and his siblings will know little of their heritage. “My mom and dad decided not to tell us,” Ray wrote, “to protect us from the prejudice that existed back then and, in some cases, still exists today. They didn’t want us to have to deal with being called half-breeds…. Actually, most Métis were still hiding their identity because of the horrible discrimination. If you could get away with having light skin you were lucky. If you had brown skin like my dad and his brothers you always had grief, especially in the armed forces or downtown Winnipeg. By the way, I grew up believing they had brown skin because they worked outside all year round and they were well tanned.”

Growing up in St. Vital, adjacent to St. Boniface (home to Louis Riel himself and to Canada’s largest French-speaking community west of Quebec), Ray has nothing but the happiest of childhood memories. From as far back as he remembers, any time there’s a family get-together at the St. Germain home, like there is on most Friday nights, his grandmother is soon up playing her fiddle. One of his uncles will join in on accordion. His grandmother gets up and starts dancing. And everyone else will follow suit. Dancing, singing, having fun. Peeking out long after bedtime from his bedroom doorway, young Ray loves what he hears – all those polkas and waltzes, those country tunes. And he loves what he sees – the dancing, the laughing, “the joy they brought to people.” That’s what I want to do, he tells his parents.

Ray gets his first instrument, a child-size accordion, when he’s ten. At 14, he’s playing and singing in the Rhythm Ranch Boys, performing on weekends at dances in and around the city. The repertoire is strictly country, but that starts changing once Elvis Presley comes along, first by way of radio, then on TV. Soon Ray is mimicking Elvis’s singing style, his look, and those moves. The more Elvis tunes he does, the more the audiences like it. “But people would tell me you look silly singing it with accordion,” he tells me. “Could you ever imagine Elvis playing accordion? And besides, it’s hard to move onstage lugging one of those things around.” When he switches to rhythm guitar, his rock and roll transformation is complete.

Buoyed by the popularity of his new persona, Ray competes on the CJOB Western Hour, a singing contest heard live on Saturday afternoons. Three contestants will be nominated (by mail-in ballots from listeners) to return the following week and go up against the reigning “King (or Queen) of the Saddle.” He’s selected frequently, but even with his best Elvis he never quite makes it to the throne. Did he ever consider returning to his country music, I ask him. “Are you kidding? With all the girls screaming at you? And you’re sixteen years old? No way, man.”

Ray is playing one of his regular shows, a Saturday night dance at the Rainbow Dance Gardens in downtown Winnipeg, when who should walk in but Hal Lone Pine – Betty on one side, Lone Pine Junior on the other. “Somebody came up to me and said Hal Lone Pine was here,” Ray says, “He’s in the audience and they said he wanted to talk to me. ‘Hal Lone Pine wants to see me?’ I almost fainted.”

The musicians all recognize them right away and commence immediately to check their tuning and stand up a little straighter. “We all wished we were playing with somebody better,” Ray wrote. Even to those in the audience who might not recognize Lone Pine and company, it’s obvious that they’re celebrities – especially Lenny. “They’d just come from a gig, and they were dressed like stars,” Ray told Lenny Breau biographer Ron Forbes-Roberts. “I’ll never forget Lenny. He had a white suit on, white shoes, white bucks. He was carrying his guitar, a Gretsch, in a white leather case. He had wavy black hair and was small in stature, a cross between Sal Mineo and Tony Curtis. The girls in the audience gasped.” Ray’s outfit, on the other hand, isn’t so flashy: “a Woolworth’s cowboy shirt, black pants that were shiny from being pressed too much, shoes that were pointed and curled up at the toes.”

But Hal is not here to be impressed or entertained. In an earlier iteration of his band back in Maine, Hal had taken on an Elvis impersonator, which helped bring breathe new life to an act that was beginning to show its age. Asking around in Winnipeg for such a talent, Ray’s name kept coming up. Hal’s sold on Ray before he even hears him; he’s ready to hire him on the spot. “I would be paid fifteen dollars a night,” Ray wrote, “get to sing a song on every radio program, and room with Lenny on the road.”

“Yes, yes!” He tells Hal. “When do I start?”

“Immediately.”

All Ray needs now is his parents’ permission. “When I was offered that job, I had to leave school. My mom didn’t want me to leave school. Neither did my dad, but when I told him how much it was paying, he said ‘Go.’ Mom’s biggest worry was how was I going to have clean laundry when I had to travel so much. I told her not to worry: I would be home every Sunday and bring it with me.”