By Andrew Macdonald
As The Macdonald Notebook reports elsewhere, Carroll Baker — Canada’s First Lady of Country Music — is on her final concert tour, a farewell to her legion of fans, people she calls her friends.
Now 75, she has three performances in Nova Scotia set for` April, as she winds up her singing and songwriting career that spans 56 years. She was born and raised in Port Medway, a tiny community on the province’s South Shore, so she grew up just 12 miles from another country music legend, Hank Snow. Her home now is in Guelph, Ont.
This week, The Notebook had a 30-minute interview with Baker, and during our chat she was visiting the South Shore. The day I chatted with her, she was conducting 11 interviews to promote her upcoming concert tour across Canada.
While she has lived in Ontario since the age of 16, she tries to spend a lot of time in Nova Scotia, and since 2001 has hosted a museum in a former Baptist church in Port Medway, displaying some highlights from her 56-year music career.
“From the time I moved away from home as a young girl with my parents, I have been coming back every year, sometimes two or three times a year, and particularly when my mom was alive. It is just ‘never not home’. It is always home to me no matter where I go. There is something about Nova Scotia, and it does not matter what part you are in, Nova Scotia feels like your home when you are in Nova Scotia.”
For her final tour, while she has sung Nova Scotia songs during her five-decade career including Sail on Nova Scotia in 1984, she does not plan to sing such songs as part of her farewell concert repertoire. “I found that what my fans really want to hear are the hit records I have had over the years.”
She has 20 hit albums, including 12 consecutive hits.
“My fans are the most important thing to me to have a career, it is because of them I have a career. I am going to do the hits so everyone can go back in time, remember what it meant to them at the time, and the songs will probably bring back memories to them,” Baker tells The Macdonald Notebook.
Her tour “will probably be my last time” to sing for an audience, she says. “This is my farewell, this is my last hurrah, whatever you want to call it. I am looking forward to doing this. I can’t do it forever. Some people do it until their life is over. That is not me. I want to be able to spend time with my family, come to Nova Scotia, especially here in Port Medway, so I can be able to greet people, at times at my Carroll Baker Mem’ries Centre and The Friends of Carroll Baker Society, right here in Port Medway.”
The former Baptist church serves as her music museum. “It is an old church that was built before Confederation. We purchased it (in 2001) so it can remain a church. We have only taken out some pews from the left side of the church. That is where I have my memorabilia, things like costumes. There is a lot of that stuff that I could still bring to the place, but I do not want to take away from the originality of that building. It was built as a church, a refuge for people, way before Confederation, so I want to maintain that kind of heritage. It was for me the right thing to do.”
The museum is still a venue for weddings and funerals.
While she grew up 12 miles away from Hank Snow’s nearby community of Brooklyn, she will not perform Snow’s songs during her concert tour. A Hank Snow museum is located in the old railway station in Liverpool.
On YouTube, there is a 1981 interview she conducted with Snow, and that video shows her singing with him. She laughs when I ask if she will sing his song I’ve Been Everywhere, where he rattles off many towns and cities. “I can’t sing it anymore. It is not easy, but when you are younger you can remember easily, you never forget it. But I can’t sing that song anymore. I can’t even talk that fast, my tongue would get all caught up in my mouth,” adds Baker.
“But, I still do one song my fans have always loved. It’s a song called The Auctioneer. I go so fast in that it is a wonder my tongue does not fly out of my mouth. It is just a fun song, the band speeds up and the audience really loves it,” she says.
“There is stuff I want to do in this show during the entire tour that I know my fans want. They want gospel music, they love that side of Carroll Baker who sings gospel music and it is my favourite music in the world. The stuff I did as a teenager, I will do a little rock and roll medley where I dance a little bit. (At 75) I don’t dance as much as I did at my age, but I still get around.”
Obviously, she plans to sing from her first Number 1 record, produced in 1975, called I Have Never Been This Far Before. I love that song, it was my first number 1 record, my first gold, and first platinum.”
That song, as well as the album name, was written by Conway Twitty, and Baker has performed with him at the Grand Ole Opry. “Conway and I became very good friends. He took me on the road with him in Ontario, and we sang the song together on stage every night, because he said, ‘If I sing it, they will be yelling for you to come out’. And he said, ‘If you sing it, they will be yelling for me to come out’.
“So he said, the best way to do it was to sing it together. We used to do that song together every night and we would end the show with a gospel song,” she adds.
“It was just such a joy to work with him, such a wonderful man, such a brilliant musician and singer.”
Baker says her final show is the right way to retire.
“This is the right thing for me. I want to get on stage and do a proper show for my audience and fans who have expectations about my performances. So I do not think I could do what the fans deserve if I were to go on much longer (with her 56-year career). It gets harder every year, it gets harder on the voice and my voice is not as strong as it used to be, so I phrase my songs a little bit differently then I used to so that everything will still be there. I want to give my fans the best possible show from Carroll Baker that I am able to do.”
Growing up in Port Medway, Baker’s first music introduction was to sing rock and roll, not country. Her dad who worked for Irving Oil tried to encourage her to perform country music, but back then she was not interested. It was only after joining a country band at age 19 in Ontario that she came to fall in love with country music.
Her dad died at “a very young age” of 56 and did not live long enough to see his daughter perform at Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry, but her mother did. Her mom died in 2002, living long enough to see her daughter be dubbed Canada’s First Lady of Country Music.
“He never saw me sing. If there is anything in my life that I can say is a dark spot, career-wise, that would be it. That my father, who was a musician himself, he loved country music and he played old-time fiddle. He sang every song that Hank Snow sang, and my older brother Gordon sang Hank Snow songs and my sister Rose sang a lot of Kitty Well songs. My father heard them all but never heard me (sing country). That is a pretty sad part of my life, but my mom heard it all,” Baker tells The Macdonald Notebook.”
Her mother “was a huge part of my career. When I went out on the road, I did not want to leave my daughter with daycare. My mom was alone and we’d bring her up to Ontario from Nova Scotia and she would stay with us. She was my daughter’s second mom, really. You’d never get that from a nanny or daycare. My mother loved her as much as she was her own child. My mother did a wonderful job bringing me up. I could not have asked for anything better.”
Her only child, a daughter, Candice, went to the University of Guelph. is now a teacher. “I wish she could be on the tour with me because she is such a brilliant singer. She makes the hair stand up on your arms when she sings. But, she is a teacher, that is her profession, and she goes with me when she can, on weekends, or in the summer. It is always a treat to have her with me.”
Carroll Baker is conducting a farewell tour. In April 2025, the final tour of her 56-year-long music career will take her to Halifax, Truro, and Sydney.
