Songwriter turns podcaster with ‘occasionally true story’

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This article was published 29/03/2022 (1599 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Little Miss Higgins has taken the hobby of investigating her family tree to new heights.

The singer-songwriter from Ste. Anne has created The Fire Waltz, a five-episode podcast about her great-grandmother, Eva Bersay, and her travels from the English Channel island of Jersey to southern Alberta early in the 1900s.

Higgins’ storytelling doesn’t stop there. The music that accompanies the episodes has been turned into a 21-track album that she released on streaming services March 14. Expect a selection of them to turn up when she plays the Times Change(d) High and Lonesome Club on April 15.

”I’ve heard different versions of stories (of Bersay) throughout my life,” Jolene Higgins says of her great-grandmother. “They got more mature as I got older, and I got to hear a bit of the juicier bits, which was always fun.

“I was always intrigued by her character and she just seemed like a very strong woman and funny. So I just starting writing down these stories that I heard, and I started doing research on Jersey island, where she lived.”

The podcast (which can be heard at buzzsprout.com/1936032 or on Apple Podcasts or Google Podcasts) begins with Bersay being a humble daughter of a potato farmer who makes her way across the Atlantic Ocean and across Canada to Whiskey Gap, Alta., which in 2022 is a ghost town near Lethbridge.

“We have postcards, we have a travel journal, we have letters and we have oral history,” Higgins says. “Those are just the framework we used. We filled it in with our own creative notions of what they might be, what these people might have been like, and things that might have happened to them at that time.”

The TV comedy series The Great, about 18th-century Russian empress Catherine the Great, inspired Higgins and her collaborators to add to Bersay’s life story.

“At the beginning (of The Great) I love it because it says, ‘An occasionally true story,’ ” Higgins says of the satirical series starring Elle Fanning. “It’s so great because they can take Catherine’s character and all the people around her — probably some of them are real and some of them are fictionalized — to create this really engaging new innovative way of storytelling through film.”

Joining Higgins on The Fire Waltz are Winnipeg musicians Matt Foster and Gilles Fournier, as well as Calgary musician and poet Kris Demeanor — the city’s first poet laureate — and Eric Rose, the artistic director of Calgary’s Ghost River Theatre.

The result is tunes that are reminiscent of a century ago, akin to post-First World War vaudeville shows and Jazz Age cabarets rather than the bluesy torch tunes that earned Higgins Juno Award nominations in 2008 and 2014.

“I feel it has elements of my past work that have influenced it, but I’m definitely going in different directions with this,” Higgins says.

Higgins, who also has a theatre background, has been at work on The Fire Waltz since 2019, with plans to turn it into a theatrical work, but the pandemic got in the way. She still has dreams of telling her great-grandmother’s tale to a wider audience.

The first five podcast episodes complete Season 1 of The Fire Waltz; Higgins and company are at work on a second batch of episodes and she hopes for even more.

“I feel like there’s opportunity to make it into a theatre piece. Or as I work into Season 2, is there a film possibility?” she says. “I’m absolutely loving writing. During the pandemic, I’ve been writing so much, not just The Fire Waltz. It’s exciting to write in another way and more of a narrative style. I’m hoping to do a lot more of it.”

Alan.Small@winnipegfreepress.com

Twitter: @AlanDSmall