The Whistling Egg Man has arrived Ageless entertainer Al Simmons crafts first album in more than 25 years around longtime favourite tale By: Alan Small Posted: 12:30 PM CST Friday, Jan. 26, 2024

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This article was published 26/01/2024 (600 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Al Simmons is 75 and has a pacemaker, but it was his car battery that needed a jolt to get going this winter, as the children’s entertainer and member of the Order of Manitoba has the same boundless energy as the youngsters that populate his audiences.

“I feel there’s a seven-year-old living within me. I’m loving life, what can I say?” says the grandfather of five granddaughters who calls Anola home.

“I don’t feel that much different. My wife would agree: we raised three boys but she was really looking after four little boys.”

Simmons used that get-up-and-go spirit during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown to record his first new album in more than a quarter-century.

In The Whistling Egg Man and Other Tall Tales, Simmons travels north to Hudson Bay to rap about polar bears and south to the Gulf of Mexico to teach about the oral hygiene of alligators.

The capper is a visit to Dawson City, Yukon, for a yarn inspired by the poems of Robert Service.

“The reason for the title, it goes back to when I wrote a poem called the Whistling Egg Man, and it’s a tall tale about the Yukon Gold Rush, 1897,” Simmons says.

“I had it memorized. I’d just recite the poem at festivals or concerts or whatever, and people would come up to me afterwards, ‘Is that in a book? On a CD? I want that.’ I would always say, ‘It’s in my head right now.’”

So during his downtime he put his memories onto Memorex; the result is an almost eight-minute story, one of 14 songs, raps and “enhanced poems” that entertain the youngster in everyone.

“That was the tune that took the most time to create, so I thought, well, I put all my money into this, I might as well call the album that,” he says with a chuckle.

“It turned out it might have been a mistake, because it’s too long of a handle.”

Simmons has built his legendary status on live performances filled with crazy costumes, handmade gadgets and noisemakers that crank up the kids in the crowd.

Some warned Simmons not to try recording albums, saying his visual performances wouldn’t transfer to vinyl, audio tape or, these days, streaming services.

He recognizes it’s a tall task to tell tall tales with no audience to interact with, but his method earned him a Juno Award in 1996 for the album Celery Stalks.

Thanks to a vaudeville vibe from early New Orleans jazz accompanying him and his stories, Simmons’ secret has worked again in 2023.

“It’s hard in the studio. You’re faced with a microphone and someone behind the glass nodding. I was performing them for seven-year-old me. I know what I enjoyed at a young age — anything that would take me along for the ride,” he says.

“As it turns out, I can create the visuals in the mind of whoever’s listening, so the added bonus to my recordings is you get the visuals, but they’re created by you.”

Simmons’ career as a children’s entertainer began in Churchill, so it’s not surprising his new album contains two songs about polar bears. Back in the early 1970s, Simmons was touring with Fred Penner, a longtime friend who has also built a career yukking it up with youngsters, in a band called Cornstalk.

“We were up there doing shows at the bar, at the Hudson Hotel,” Simmons remembers. “A gal came up and said, ‘Would you come do a show for the kids at the school?’

“I know for me, that was the first time I entertained only kids. And probably for Fred, too. That was an eye-opening experience.

“I don’t know what Fred thought, but for me, I’ve always taken whatever path was in front of me. Take a fork in the road and come back and do the other road, too. I was open to any place where people needed to have a laugh.”

The next stop on Simmons’ journey is the Festival du Voyageur, where he will perform at the Tente des Neiges on Feb. 18 and 19.

He’ll have at his side the usual menagerie of musical doodads that he’s built by hand, including some he repaired after a February 2018 fire that destroyed a storage shed, his musical laboratory. He was able to save only a few of his treasured props.

“I attempted to rebuild some of them, but I built a bunch of new stuff, too. I’m building props that go along with the new tunes now,” Simmons says.

He has become used to audiences of all ages singing along with his performances, especially parents who grew up enjoying songs such as I Collect Rocks or Where Did You Get That Hat? when they were toddlers.

Simmons says peers such as Raffi, Penner and Sharon Hampson, the late Lois Lillienstein and Bram Morrison (of Sharon, Lois and Bram) all noticed an eventual shift in their audiences.

“We’re all commenting on that fact, that sometimes the adults who are coming to see us are more interested in the show than the kids,” he says.

“I think if I can take people away from the daily news and give them a few laughs and take them into my world a bit, then I’ve done my job.”

Alan.Small@winnipegfreepress.com

X: @AlanDSmall