Folk music veteran Connie Kaldor keeps it in the family

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This article was published 09/11/2023 (1066 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It’s taken Connie Kaldor almost her entire life to come up with the cross-Canada tour that stops Sunday at the West End Cultural Centre.

The 70-year-old folk singer will play favourites from her career, but it’s her band, which includes her two grown-up children, Aleksi and Gabriel Campagne, as well as her husband, Paul Campagne, that will make these shows so special.

“Sheri Ulrich and I, I think we’re the only two people in the Canadian music scene that actually gave birth to their backup bands,” Kaldor says with a laugh during a telephone interview from Duncan, B.C. “The long game, nine months, 18 years before you really get them going.

“I realize that this is a rare thing, to play with my sons and sing in family harmonies.”

Aleksi will open Sunday’s show and has his own record, For the Giving, a bilingual collection of songs that mark his heritage: Kaldor performs in English while Paul Campagne is a longtime member of Hart Rouge, the francophone family band from Saskatchewan.

“We both released an album in the same year, my 18th, his first,” Kaldor says.

Kaldor’s new record, Keep Going, follows the mindset she has of her career, which began in 1979 when she was touring with the likes of Valdy, Stan Rogers and other Canadian folk-music giants.

She finds it remarkable to come across lifelong fans of her music at her shows across the country.

“I’m fortunate enough, after this many years, that I have people who’ve followed me. There’s a woman that came up, ‘I’ve been your fan for 43 years.’ It’s just wonderful,” she says.

“Now their kids are coming, and saying, ‘My mom used to play (a song) and we would dance in the kitchen and when you sang that song I remembered her.’ It’s a pot of gold at the end of that long rainbow of many miles.”

While many aspects of touring haven’t changed in five decades of performances — “People still show up and clap, that’s the good thing,” she says — some less-than-desirable characteristics of Canadian society have remained the same, too.

She explores one of those in the bluesy track Woman Who Pays, a song about domestic violence inspired by a rash of murders of women in Montreal.

“Same old story again and again / It’s the woman who pays / A woman a week dead in Montreal / It’s the woman who pays,” Kaldor sings.

“This came out of an incident, my daughter-in-law’s friend, was one of the eight women killed in eight weeks in early 2021,” she recalls. “All this stuff, why it’s happening, the pandemic, but always, it’s the woman who pays. The woman who showed up at my mom’s kitchen because she had to run. Now here’s my young daughter-in-law and her friends are dealing with that.”

Kaldor is known for writing songs about the bigger picture, such as 2019’s Missing and Gone, which addresses the issue of murdered and missing Indigenous women and children.

It’s an issue that resonates in Winnipeg, where Kaldor called home for a time in the 1980s.

A debate about whether to search a landfill that may contain the remains of slain Indigenous women became a key aspect of the provincial election in October.

“If I have a job, it’s to bring these things out. As a songwriter, that’s what you’re supposed to do,” Kaldor says. “Nobody wants to talk about the hard things, but the hard things are a part of our lives.

“It is shocking, and it should be shocking on some level, and maybe it’ll make people think about it, maybe make people think twice about putting money into programs or women’s shelters.

“Sometimes the hard songs have to be sung.”

Alan.Small@winnipegfreepress.com

X: @AlanDSmall