root salad Jenny Whiteley
The award-winning Canadian country/folk singer tells her story to Cara Gibney.
J
uno Award-winning country folk singer Jenny Whiteley dedicated her recent album The Original Jenny Whiteley to her father, the interna- tional blues artist and multi-instrumentalist Chris Whiteley.
Canada born and bred, her brother Dan is a renowned folk musician too, as is her uncle Ken. Indeed her family is steeped in the playing, performing and writing of music. “There are some Whiteleys who had an ‘orchestra’ in northern Ontario. That included my great-uncles,” she told me. And to carry on the tradition, Jenny married musician Joey Wright, with whom she now lives in eastern Ontario with their two daughters.
Hers was a calling pre-written. The 1980s were the glory days of Toronto folk, and Whiteley’s dad Chris and uncle Ken were gigging frequently with their group the Original Sloth Band. The young Jenny and her brother Dan regularly joined them on tour, immersed in the music and the life of a musician. As time progressed, brother and sister joined their dad and uncle in another project, The Junior Jug Band. “My Dad and [uncle] Ken decided to make their own kids’ record” Jenny explained. “It was a serious kids’ music boom in the early ’80s. My brother and I would go to shows, and join in the last two songs playing spoons, jug, washboard etc and singing. We just started being included in more and more of the show, until we were even- tually in the band.”
On looking back, Whiteley’s sense of it all is that “it was quite odd; I’d be spending my weekends touring libraries and school gyms, sometimes performing for kids my own age”. Then as she grew older she start- ed missing sleepovers and camps.
Still, the die was cast. On a Christmas break from university in Montreal her moth- er gave her a classical guitar. “I saw it under the tree and assumed it was for my brother, Daniel, because he was already a great gui- tar player, but it was for me!” She took it back to university and taught herself to play. “The first song I learned was the Roches Married Men. By the end of that year I had started writing my first songs.”
She reckons she was 25 when she start- ed the bluegrass four-piece Heartbreak Hill. They toured all of Canada’s “major (and many minor) folk festivals from coast to coast” and thus honed their skills as musi- cians and touring artists. “This was my for- mative ‘grown up’ music experience” she recalled. “I got way better, and we all got
better as a band. There is nothing to replace the grind of touring and weekly gigs and just being on stage all the time to sharpen your skills as a performer and player.”
In 2000, just before Heartbreak Hill parted ways, Whiteley released her self- titled debut solo album. Ever the family affair, it was Ken Whiteley who started the ball rolling. “My uncle Ken offered some free studio time” she explained. “I self-pro- duced, but only because I really had no idea what else to do. I got a lot of help, and shared the credit, but I knew what I wanted to hear.” The record went on to win that year’s Juno Award for Roots Traditional Album. It’s a strong measure of the talent involved that in 2003 her follow-up album Hopetown went on to win another Juno for that year’s Roots Album.
In 2016 Whiteley released her fifth solo
album, The Original Jenny Whiteley, a nod to the bluegrass, folk, blues, early jazz and jugband she grew up with. “It’s the part of my musical mind and even my overall mind that was forming before I was aware that I had taste, or any talent or an opinion,” she explained of the title. “[It’s] the atmosphere I grew up around, full of bohemian artistry, deep discussion, guitars and singing, hanging out with musicians, being backstage, side stage, on stage. The essence of who I am.”
Things Are Coming My Way, and others are songs that I have always sung at my own concerts, and that fans always ask about, that have never been on any record, because I mostly record my own originals.”
T
Take the traditional In The Pines for example, sung raw and busted, with bass harmonica weightily bouncing down the scales, high whistling drawing things up to the surface again. Or the self-writte Malade, the French language jug song, which is “about being hung over and broke, like any good blues number”. When Whiteley wrote this she took the song West Indies Blues that she knew from The Original Sloth Band, “and used it as a template to build my own song in French.”
Jenny Whiteley has spent a lifetime drawing together the best of the roots music she evolved in. Harvesting from the old crafts, and creating her own. Dedicating The Original Jenny Whiteley to her father is just the most recent of a line that winds beyond his generation, and will undoubted- ly be passed on to the next.
jennywhiteley.com F 19 f
he album is a combination of long- standing classics and Whiteley orig- inals. “Some are songs I have always sung with my family, like
Photo: Ali Eisner
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