The Life and Times of David Francey
by Richard Cuccaro


In a small town in Canada, about two hours west of Ottawa, a man walks out in the cold winter air, 
alone with his thoughts.  Maybe the clear winter skies yield some sunlight, and bluish shadows curl 
around the trunks and branches of naked trees. He takes in the beauty of it and it triggers a feeling. 
The feeling becomes a memory, maybe of something recent, maybe distant. Words start to flow. 
Along with the words, a melody takes shape. He hums the melody to himself, like he always has, 
over and over and commits it to memory. When he gets home, alone in a room, without any instrument, 
he'll sing it into a tape recorder and write it out. David Francey has, once again, taken the raw material 
of observation and feeling and turned it into a poetic jewel. 

Over the course of releasing five albums of original compositions, one live recording, and one covering 
traditional Christmas songs, Francey has been nominated for a Juno award (Canada's Grammy) four times 
and has won twice. He has become one of Canada's most respected artists. 

David Francey writes songs about the working class of this earth because that's where he came from 
and that's what he knows. A Scotsman who was transplanted to Canada, he remains connected to his 
Celtic roots. The subject matter is contemporary, but the tone and melodies draw heavily from a well 
of traditional material. The Scottish burr strides in on a baritone that cuts like a chisel. The songs fit that 
voice like a spandex robe on a stone Buddha.

He brings to the contemporary folk music arena, a treasure trove of stories and ballads. Many obliquely 
echo that old warhorse "Guantanamera," that says "With the poor people of this earth I will cast my fate." 
The combination of voice and style, along with Francey's sense of connectedness to his gut feelings, 
carries a power that is never easy to come by for any folk artist. 

Beginnings
David was born in Ayrshire, Scotland in 1954. David's father had a love of poetry and would read the 
poems of Robert Burns. Their home in Scotland was not far from where Burns had lived. This undoubtedly 
took root in David and influenced his own poetry and songwriting. Additionally, singing was always a 
big part of the family's times together, whether it was just his parents and his sister or all of them together 
with the aunts uncles and cousins. On his recordings, he often provides his own harmony. He learned to 
harmonize early. On any outing, a drive into the countryside, or a family trip to the beach, the harmonies 
filled the bus all the way there and back. 

"Singing in vehicles was a normal thing," he told me. Harmony came naturally to his mother. "She could 
harmonize with a pig." At age 85, she still sings harmony with David. 
Another early development was David's world view. He was aware that The Daily Record, the paper he 
delivered had, as its primary purpose, "to induce panic among the population." He read The Daily Record 
from cover to cover. In his song "Paper Boy," he recounts learning about Rhodesia, Malcolm X and mass 
killer, Richard Speck.

When he was 12 years old, his family relocated to Canada. He had written poetry (often accompanied by his illustrations) 
since he was nine years old and it never stopped. When he reached high school, a gate inside of him sprang open, 
and the words started coming with music attached.  It wasn't until he was around 30 years old, he says, that they 
started to turn into "worthwhile songs."

Working Class Hero
After high school, he tried University but it just didn't feel right. He says, "I was spectacularly ill-suited for it. 
It did nothing [for me]."  He stared down the world and defied conventional wisdom, not trying to live up to 
what others might expect of him. With a typically blunt poetic manner, he says he decided, "achh, I can lift 
heavy objects. I'll just go and do that." Describing his sense of purpose, he continued, "I was always drawn to 
manual laboring. So that's what I did. I never regretted going that route. It gave me a lot of stuff to write about." 
I got a steady job with the railroad right out of high school but it wasn't what I wanted to do. I was working 
in the yards but wanted to work on the trains. So I packed that in and decided to hitchhike up to Alaska."
Just before he left for Alaska, a major influence made its appearance. A friend had just returned from Ireland 
and had brought with him the first album by the Irish folk music band, Planxty.  They listened to it "around the 
clock." On his way to Alaska, it "rattled around" inside his brain the entire trip. Planxty's harmonies, built around 
traditional forms, shook him to his core. He said that it felt like it was something he'd "waited his whole life to hear."
Every melody was stuck in my head like I'd known it all my life" (He also cites people like John Prine, 
Bruce Cockburn and Joni Mitchell as influences).


David likes walking the dogs. This pup, "Badger," was a birthday surprise for him -- 
"A welcome addition to our household." A Border Terrier, he was 6 months old 
in this photo, obviously eager to uncover the secrets hidden in the snow. 
Badger is one of many dogs featured in a gallery of pet photos on David's web site 
sent in by fans and friends. Beth's descriptions add to the charm of perusing the pictures.

The Bush and Beyond
He got a job doing exploration in the Yukon Bush for a mining company. Hiking for 12 hours a day, seven days 
a week with a large pack on his back, carrying wire and other required tools gave him time to "sort things out" 
for himself, -- a great thing to do "at that age." "You spent your day humping through through the bush along 
'cut lines,' in the middle of nowhere.  It gave you tons of time for reflection and tons of time to kind of sort yourself out. 
That Planxty album was rattling through my head at that time. I started writing songs quite a bit up there. 
I had a little book. I kept some of them. Most of them didn't really pan out to anything but it was a great place to start."
Some time later, back in Toronto, he worked in the construction trade. He tells a story that describes the coexistence 
with work and with his songwriting craft: "I was working on a job site, high-rise construction. I'm basically running 
around with wheelbarrows of cement at a grueling pace. I was happy as a clam that day, thinking that was exactly 
what I was meant to do. I wrote 'Working Poor' two days later."

A Marriage of the Arts
A year later, Francey changed jobs and got married  to artist Beth Girdler, a woman who would change his life. 
David and Beth had met during David's brief stint at university. Later, both had unsuccessful first marriages, then 
got together again when they were in their early 30s.
Beth had carved out a career in art as a successful watercolorist. For David, along with the intense attraction to a 
vivacious artistic personality, the blossoming of love came with the responsibility of an instant family. Beth's two daughters 
from her first marriage, Julia and Amy, were four and eight years old respectively. Despite some apprehension, 
David took readily to fatherhood. He wrote the tender song of unrequited yearning from Skating Rink, "Broken Glass," 
for Amy when she was in her early teen years.

He was working as a carpenter with his best friend in Quebec and started writing songs at a faster clip, a great 
many of them about the working life he'd experienced. He'd get in the truck in the morning to go to the job and 
be working on a song in his head. On the job, he'd continue while working on a roof, singing the song to himself, 
sometimes out loud. "It was basically just bull-work," he recalls.  His co-workers would ask him, "What's that you're
singing?" He'd say it was something he'd written. Then he'd go home and work on it some more. The amazing part 
about all of this is that he wouldn't sing it into a recorder until it had reached a point where it was close to fully formed. 
Melodies have always stayed intact in his mind until the songs are practically finished. 
"I had a really tall pile of songs, a great raft of songs at that point. A lot of them to do with the working life -- 
and love and the usual things that people write about." 


A watercolor by Beth entitled "Sydney." There are many more samples
to look at on David's web site as well as photos by both Beth and David
Ther are samples of David's art work also.

At his point, his wife Beth took particular notice of his songs. She'd say "Oh, that's beautiful" in response to a 
growing number of the songs he was singing around the house. "You ought to do something with them -- 
you need to get them out there." 

Career Liftoff
David was content to just write them down and tape record them, but at Beth's urging, he met with a band she 
knew about, Blue Moon. David went to a rehearsal where his songs were met with great enthusiasm from the band.  
They asked him to perform three of the songs at one of their shows. He agreed, and the seed was planted. From there, 
he met Dave Clarke, an outstanding Montreal guitarist. They "hit it off really well," and David loved Clarke's band, 
Steel Rail. Later, Francey played at Townshipper's Day, an English cultural festival in Quebec. They were heard by 
the CBC and were asked if they'd like to go on radio, live across the provinces. "Sure!" They did, and the CBC rep 
was so impressed that he asked if David had an album. When David said "No," an offer to make a demo was presented. 
The rep had a studio in Quebec City waiting to be used and would rent it cheap. Over the next two years, they made 
a full album, David's debut Torn Screen Door.

It's fun to contemplate what people's reaction must've been to this exquisite piece of work upon first listen. Here was 
this newcomer, a fully-formed monster talent. Dave Clark's solid fingerstyle guitar joined David along with some fine 
fiddle and mandolin and some sweet harmonies. The riches of this first album are too numerous to count, but a few 
standout examples would include the following:

The first track, "Borderline," which evokes the early-morning loneliness of a trucker. David's steely burr paints a 
horizon-wide landscape and then fills it: 

Four in the morning, twenty below, 
with the sun coming up over Buffalo
I'll be turning for home with a load to go, 
comin' back from the borderline

The driver hopes his love is still waiting:

The highway slithers like a golden snake 
between the darkened sky and the frozen lake
My heart's still hoping that you might wait
coming back from the borderline

You know that he's been there.
"Sorrows of the Sailor," a 39-second a capella track in which David overdubs his own harmony vocal, 
leads into "Blue Water." Together they form a riveting one-two punch of traditional chantey styling. 
"Sumach Street" is a slow-paced, more contemporary-sounding regretful look backward at a relationship that haunts 
its narrator, who can't let it go. 

It's you and me and a lot of things
that never quite got said
It's you and me and a lot of things
that rattle around in my head
Ah, never mind, baby, let's go downtown again

"Red-Winged Blackbird," was the first of my favorites. A luscious vocal harmony on the chorus, 
Thought I heard a red-winged blackbird, red-winged blackbird down my road
rides the waves of a rolling fingerstyle guitar backup. It's a harbinger of a long-awaited spring, 
one where the namesake will be

there beside the river when winter finally breaks its bones
he'll be king among the rushes, he'll be master of his home

"Working Poor" draws upon David's hard-won experience in the realm of sinew and backbone. 

I push a shovel on a building site 
and I'm already working when it breaks daylight
If I don't keep moving man, I'll freeze for sure
I'm just a common example of the working poor.

The title track, "Torn Screen Door" sung a cappella as a duet with Evey Miller describes an abandoned farmhouse and its dispossessed owners. 

Through the crack in the windowpane
I hear the sound of the falling rain
Another farm being left run down
another family moved into town
They worked their fingers to the bone
nothing left to call their own.
Packed it in under leaden skies
with just the wheat waving them goodbye
Had a life that they tried to save
but the banks took it all away
Hung a sign on a torn screen door,
'nobody lives here no more.'

This album will give chills to the first-time listener and if you can imagine hearing it when it made its first appearance, 
the shivers are deliciously intense. As David recounts, the album worked its way across Canada, on its own with no 
marketing or promotion plan. It deserved the Juno award.

 
On his tour of the States, David will be appearing with guitarist Craig Werth.

Since he had four more albums worth of songs written, he went back into the studio. His next album, The Far End of Summer 
won the 2001 Juno Award. He was still working in construction full-time! He collected the award in April of 2002. 
On his way back from Newfoundland that April, he turned to Beth and said, "Hey, do you think we could try this music thing full time?" 
"We could try it. It couldn't be any worse!" came the reply. 
With the exception of the last two months of 2002, he worked construction no more.

David followed up his 2001 Juno win with a repeat win in 2002 for his third album, Skating Rink. His fourth album, Waking Hour 
received a Juno nomination. In 2006 he released two albums, The First Set - Live From Folk Alley and  Carols for a Christmas Eve. 
This year's offering, Right of Passage, has already received a Juno nomination. Right of Passage contains the "Ballad of Bowser MacRae," 
which won the USA Songwriting Competition for Best Folk Song. 
Additionally, David was also voted one of Boston radio station WUMB's top 100 Artists of the past 25 years. 
Other honors, too numerous to mention here, are listed on his web site.

David's sense of the human condition is sharp and his expression of it is articulate. One of my favorite examples of this 
is a song he wrote about the execution of the "Oklahoma Bomber." I am familiar with Steve Earle's passionate anti-death 
penalty stance and his songs relating to this subject. None of them however, gets my attention like David's "Wishing Well" 
from Waking Hour. It is a stately funeral march. One might imagine the sound of a mournful bagpipe and a somber 
drumbeat in place of the guitar's steady strum. For some, every execution is a scraping away of all of our souls. 
Francey provokes that thought in the first verse: 

In the morning news that brought me 'round 
They put the Oklahoma Bomber down 
He might serve in heaven, might burn in hell
But he's no more wishes at the wishing well
I should feel compassion I know I should 
I don't know if his dying does any good
But he was good as gone when the building fell
Ah, when they ran out of wishes at the wishing well

Then, in the chorus, he illustrates the stark horror surrounding the act of state-sanctioned killing; the ones that do it for us and 
the witnesses that deliver our vengeance to us: 

Ah, lying on his back, eyes open wide
And the prick of the needle and the silent slide
And the press lined up with their stories to tell
How there's no more wishes at the wishing well

Later in the song, "And the thunderheads tower over the town," he sings, "I'll be warm and dry when the sky falls down." 
The heaviness in his heart is palpable as he ends with "And we might get lucky but you never can tell, it was dry as a bone at the wishing well."

His awareness of the sorry state of current political affairs glows hotly in "The Fourth of July" from the same CD: 

I returned to the States one year after 
the towers returned to the earth
And the sabres were drawn from their scabbards. 
They were rattling for all they were worth
And I understand how that can happen
I don't need to ask anyone why
It's September and I can't help but think 
that it looks like the Fourth of July

Many of us watch helplessly as we get our collective emotional chains yanked by our aristocratic overlords. Francey sees both sides;

It's the powers that be pay the piper
It's the powers that be call the tune.
They want all of us up for the dancing 
All howling away at the moon
But my ear's to the ground and I'm listening 
I keep watch with a weather eye
It's September and I can't help but think that
it looks like the Fourth of July.

Keeping Up With the Franceys
These days, life is full for the Francey family. Beth devotes most of her time to David's career, painting when she can fit it in.
The girls, Julia and Amy are in their twenties. Julia has a wonderful voice and sings on "Conversation" and "Under the Portland Weather" 
on Right of Passage. Amy is a talented graphic artist and handled all the design work on Right of Passage.
Together, Beth and David had a son, Colin, who is now fourteen and is writing songs, studying bass guitar and forming a band.


Julia and David at home going over "Under the Portland Weather"

As March winds blow out winter's dying gasps, there will be mornings when David steps out of his front door into weak sunlight. 
His steps will glide past faint shadows of branches, and the memories will push their way upward. Words will form around a melody. 
He'll be just a few verses away from bringing us a ballad we can carry for a lifetime.

Web site: 
www.davidfrancey.com

David will be appearing at the Hastings-on-Hudson Library, 7 Maple Avenue Hastings-on-Hudson, NY, 
www.hastingslibrary.org on Friday, May 16th. 
Admission is free, but reservations must be made at (914) 478-3307 or (914) 478-4813.