Songwriter turns podcaster with ‘occasionally true story’
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Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 29/03/2022 (1655 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
Alan Small
Reporter
Alan Small was a journalist at the Free Press for more than 22 years in a variety of roles, the last being a reporter in the Arts and Life section.
Our newsroom depends on a growing audience of readers to power our journalism. If you are not a paid reader, please consider becoming a subscriber.
Our newsroom depends on its audience of readers to power our journalism. Thank you for your support.
New releases
• The musical partnership of William Prince and Serena Ryder has proven to be more than a one-time thing.
The Juno Award winners paired up to perform Prince’s song The Spark at the 2021 Junos, and have followed that up with the duet Sing Me a Song, which came out earlier in March.
The two also share the bill for a Friday concert at Toronto’s newly refurbished Massey Hall.
• The Manitoba collaborations don’t end with the Peguis First Nation crooner. Winnipeg’s Don Amero has teamed up with British Columbia country singer Raquel Cole for his latest single, Let You, which came out March 25.
• Winnipeg jazz guitarist Jocelyn Gould has a new single, Serendipity, coming out Friday and on her social media she said it’s the first taste of a new album that scheduled to come out in June.
• More signs of music’s rebound are the number of shows booked at the city’s bigger venues, especially from longtime favourites.
Tuesday morning brought word that Steve Earle and the Dukes returning to the Burton Cummings Theatre Aug. 9, and on Nov. 22, the Sheepdogs will rock out at the same venue.
On Monday, arena-rock veterans Styx announced they will play the Canada Life Centre Oct. 18. Joining the group will be Nancy’s Wilson’s Heart, with Wilson, the guitar wizard on the group’s hits such as Barracuda and These Dreams, taking over vocal duties from her sister Ann.
Alan Small
Reporter
Alan Small was a journalist at the Free Press for more than 22 years in a variety of roles, the last being a reporter in the Arts and Life section.
Our newsroom depends on a growing audience of readers to power our journalism. If you are not a paid reader, please consider becoming a subscriber.
Our newsroom depends on its audience of readers to power our journalism. Thank you for your support.
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