'Too silent to be real': The Railroad as Civilization in Gordon Lightfoot's "Canadian Railroad Trilogy"

Note, this is a sample post. While I have by no means been exhaustive with what I have written, feel free to use it as a guide for your own posts. Especially important is your use of the web-environment (i.e. hyperlinks, imbedded images, ect). This technology is powerful and easy to use: put it to work for your advantage.

Also, the idea behind writing these is to be able to muse aloud and publicly, though relatively informally, about one or two representations you have come across in your group projects and to get comments and suggestions from your classmates, myself, and Professor Muise.

As a result I have tried to tease out some questions about the ultimate narrative being presented, and placed them in the context of the production of the piece [i.e. commissioned by the CPR], its reception [by the CBC and in mass culture], and its possible historiographic significance [through social history and the idea of 'silences'].

A final point: yours doesn't have to be as long as mine, but feel free to take as much time and space as you need!
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Before reading further, have a listen to Gordon Lightfoot's "Canadian Railroad Trilogy."

The CBC webpage linked to above describes Lightfoot's song as "stirring" and able to "tug on our heartstrings with this unmistakeably Canadian narrative." The lyrics celebrate the hard work of the navvies, who "bended [their] backs until the railroad was done" while "living on stew and drinking bad whiskey" for as little as a dollar a day to build the Canadian Pacific Railroad in the late nineteenth century.

This song, with its catchy and uplifting tune, was actually commissioned by the CPR, and their bias is found throughout the song. The forest and mountains, before the railroad, are imagined as being silent, living in a primordial peace. It isn't until people, explicitly "white people," "to this verdant country...came from all around" that any sense of meaningful activity was brought to the landscape being described.

These individuals, in various points gendered as male, "built the mines, the mills, and the factories for the good of us all." [Emphasis mine, more below.] Soon a group, in Central Canada (though this is not made explicit in the song), "grew restless to hear the hammers ring" and from this restlessness eventually came the CPR--though it required bringing in workers who, seemingly, happily laboured on the project for the "railroad men" and thereby participated in bringing productive civilization (the mines, mills, and factories) to "the dark green forest too silent to be real."

This civilizing process is implicitly, in the song--but very explicitly on the CBC page linked to above, represented as one of the, if not the, defining activity that created Canada and one that should be remembered as such.

Indeed, various video tributes [see three examples below--I apologise to music lovers for the last video] have captured this theme in recent years as the internet, and particularly Youtube.com, have provided individuals with increasingly powerful ways to re-represent this song to a mass audience.

Thinking about the song, especially after watching the videos above, I was struck by the line "too silent to be real." As young historians today, we have inhereted a rich and diverse historiographic tradition that not only includes political histories but also social and cultural history. One of the lessons of social history from its establishment as Marxist labour history in the 1970s (and in its subsequent development, that includes by and large an abandonment of that Marxism) has been an effort to recover lost voices, otherwise termed "silences."

Lightfoot sings that the "Long before the white man and long before the wheel, the green dark forests were too silent to be real" questioning the reality of the activity that happened in those "silent" forests, essentializing 'sound' to that of industrial civilization (I am also struck by an absense of farm labour, but that is for another post). He unequivicobly writes off the First Nations, Métis, and, indeed, European settlements (in the form of HBC forts) that existed across the country and, especially in the context of the CPR, the West, before the coming of the railroad.

Also, while he does acknowledge labourers, he represents them without a voice past an expression of satisfaction, for "a dollar a day, a bed for my head, a drink for the living and a toast to the dead" and, after the work is done, for "open[ing] up the soil with our teardrops and our toil." Resistance is precluded in this song. Similarly, the only people explicitly mentioned are European--though one could take "came from all around," to include Chinese workers; however given the feel of the rest of the song this is unlikely.

I am also left wondering what happened to the workers after the railroad was built? [For one take see: The United Steelworkers of Montreal "Goddamn the CPR" Track 8 Kerosene and Coal (2005)--I could only find a small sample online, here are the lyrics.]

I'll end with a series of questions for further reflection and, I hope, discussion: What is the Canada represented in this song? Certainly it is one that can be linked to our modern nation-state. But by making this a 'national' story and excluding so many individuals and groups directly affected by it, by focusing on white male industrialists and, seemingly content, workers who does this song implicitly exclude from being counted among "us all"?

With this in mind, can it truly be said to be an "unmistakeably Canadian narrative" and, if so, what exactly does that mean? What does it say about 'Canadian narratives'?

In many ways on deeper reflection I'm left with the feeling that Gordon Lightfoot's "Canadian Railroad Trilogy" is, itself, "too silent to be real."

Further reading:

David J. Jackson, "Peace, Order, and Good Songs: Popular Music and English-Canadian Culture." In The American Review of Canadian Studies 25.1 (Spring 2005): 25-44.