I woke up this morning to the sad news that Penny
Lang passed away peacefully yesterday at her home on the Sunshine Coast of
BC (where she moved some years ago with Nancy Howell, her partner these past 29
years). She had celebrated her 74th birthday on July 15 during a visit with her
son, Jason Lang.
Penny was the first of Montreal’s folk artists
that I met soon after moving there in 1968 when I was 14 and she and her
band played at Sir Winston Churchill High School. I would
go on to know her well, seeing her at Montreal folk clubs like the Back Door,
the Yellow Door and the Montreal Folk Workshop – and producing concerts with
her at Dawson College and the Golem, the Montreal folk club I took over in
1974. In the 1990s and 2000s, Penny was my frequent guest on the Folk Roots/Folk
Branches radio program and I wrote about her for the Montreal Gazette and Sing
Out! magazine. In 2004, I did an oral history session with Penny for a Folquébec
event in Montreal and in 2009 I hosted a “Montreal Folk Reunion” at the Apple
Hollow Folk Festival with Penny, Willie Dunn, Ron Bankley, Bruce
Murdoch and Marc Nerenberg.
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| Montreal Folk Reunion, Apple Hollow Folk Festival (2009) |
As a performer, Penny was spontaneous, often improvising
lyrics on stage that equaled the originals, open and friendly. Nothing was ever
held back and her stage was almost always like a kitchen table or back porch
session.
Condolences to Nancy, Jason, her brother Pat Lang, and all who
loved her.
 |
| Mike Regenstreif & Penny Lang (2005) |
Penny
Lang
By
Mike Regenstreif
Penny
Lang, the much-beloved doyenne of the Montreal folk
music scene, was in St. John’s, Newfoundland and about to start a concert tour
when she suffered a stroke on April 17, 2000. “It was a strange feeling,” she
recalled in a conversation last November, “it was like I no longer had any
control.”
The concert tour was cancelled and Penny
spent a week in hospital in Newfoundland before returning to recover at home in
Montreal. It would be more than a year before she performed again. Talking with
Penny, there’s no obvious sign that she’s been through a stroke and the
subsequent speech and physiotherapy.
And in November 2001, Penny began
relaunching a career put on hold by the stroke. Gather Honey, a new CD
of previously unreleased recordings made between 1963 and 1978, has been issued
and she’s begun performing concerts again, often on split bills with
multi-instrumentalist Michael Jerome
Browne who backs her after performing his own set.
Penny, who is now 59 and a grandmother
herself, comes from a line of music makers. “Both of my grandmothers sang and I
was very influenced by them,” she said. “One sang hymns and the other, who came
from Scotland, was a drinking and smoking woman. She had a good time singing
funny, goofy songs.” At home, both of her parents played guitar and sang
old-time country music, Carter Family
songs and the like, around the kitchen table. By the age of 10, young Penny was
playing guitar and would soon be accompanying her dad when he sang at local
Legion halls.
In her late-teens, working as a secretary
at the Montreal’s YMCA, Penny discovered the folk music revival that was
breaking out all over North America. At the Y, Penny met a woman named Maureen McBride, who proved very
influential in the development of Penny’s performing style. McBride sang
traditional folk songs, especially sing along songs, and used them to teach
music at a summer camp for inner city kids. Penny worked with McBride at the
camp, picking up songs and learning how to involve people in music.
A couple of years later, Penny happened
onto a performance by the Mountain City
Four, a now-legendary Montreal folk group that included Jack Nissenson, Peter Weldon and the teenaged McGarrigle
sisters, Kate and Anna. “They were playing in a little coffeehouse called
the Seven Steps and they just knocked me out,” Penny recalled. Penny became
friendly with the group, and through them she was introduced the music of Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, Odetta and
many of the other popular folk artists.
Inspired by the folk music scene, Penny
decided to take her shot at performing for a living. She’d worked day jobs,
she’d tried university, and felt they weren’t for her. So in 1963, at the age
of 21, she auditioned for her first paying gig at Café André, a bar near McGill
University that featured folk music.
Penny passed the audition and worked at Café André for the
next three years. It was a grueling
schedule. “I did five or six sets a night, six nights a week for three weeks of
each month.” The long running gig made Penny a star in her hometown. She
started there as an unknown but was soon filling the club every night with crowds drawn by her stark but
effective guitar-playing, her throaty voice, and most of all by her astonishing
ability to connect with audiences.
But three years into the Café André gig,
Penny had had enough of the heavy grind. “I was ready to quit and look for
another way to earn a living,” she said. But on her last night at the club,
Penny was approached by an agent for the Bitter End, a club in Greenwich
Village, New York City’s folk music Mecca.
Working with side musicians like guitarist Roma Baran, harmonica player Don Audet and, briefly, pianist Kate McGarrigle, Penny became a touring
musician. “I played in New York about four times a year for about three years,”
she said, “at the Bitter End, but mostly at Gerde’s Folk City.” She also played
at fabled coffee houses like the Caffé Lena in Saratoga Springs, New York
and Le Hibou in Ottawa, Ontario and at
all of the gigs, big and small, that had sprung up in Montreal in the late
1960s like the New Penelope, the Yellow Door, the Back Door. Penny also played
at folk festivals and was in demand for bookings at high schools and
universities. My own first encounter with her was in 1968 or ’69 when she
played a memorable afternoon concert at my Montreal high school.
Although Penny was in high demand as a
performer in the late-‘60s, a recording contract never quite happened for her. Once,
while performing at Gerde’s Folk City, she was approached by a couple of record
executives who’d heard her sing “Suzanne,” a haunting song written by Montreal
poet Leonard Cohen. “They knew it
would be a hit, but they wanted me to record it with an electric band,” Penny
recalled. “I told them ‘no thanks, I’m an acoustic musician.’” Not long after,
“Suzanne” was a hit for both Noel
Harrison and Judy Collins.
Looking back, Penny is glad now that she
didn’t have that hit with “Suzanne.”
“I probably would not have lived,” she said.
Penny didn’t yet understand that she was living in the grip of bipolar disease.
“They called it manic-depression then. I’d go from being very high to crashing
into severe depression.”
Luckily for Penny, her band mates Don Audet and Roma Baran realized something was very wrong. “In 1968, those two
close friends dragged me kicking and screaming to the psych ward at the Vic
(Montreal’s Royal Victoria Hospital). Later, I was hospitalized for four or
five months.” More than 30 years later, Penny is grateful to Audet and Baran
for their intervention and has remained under care for her bipolar
condition.
Penny also credits control of the condition
with allowing her to find her muse as a songwriter, something she hadn’t had
before. Her repertoire until then was all songs that she’d found from folk,
country and blues sources or from the many contemporary songwriters of the day.
In 1970, Penny was pregnant with her son Jason, himself now a professional
musician. She realized that her years as full-time performer were coming to an
end, at least for a while. On a whim, she decided to do her last gig in grand
style before giving birth. “I was driving with my band and we passed by Place
des Arts,” Montreal’s high-end performing arts complex. “I had always wanted to
play there, so we parked the car, went in and rented the hall.”
The concert, in the sold-out 700-seat Port
Royal Theatre, was a triumphant success for Penny. “It was very exciting, it
felt right to be doing it,” she said. Penny’s Montreal fans cheered her on and
she remembers the night as a high point in her career. Two weeks later, Jason
was born.
Life as a single mother was difficult for
Penny. “I tried working as a performer in bars, leaving Jason with baby
sitters, and it was terrible.” Over the next several years she played only
occasionally in Montreal, in bars and coffeehouses and on the occasional
concert bill [some of which, at Dawson College and the Golem Coffee House, I
produced].
In the mid-1970s Penny and Jason moved to
Morin Heights, a small village in the Laurentian Mountains north of Montreal. Occasionally,
Penny gigged at Rose’s Cantina, a tiny coffeehouse there.
Penny eventually moved back to Montreal so
that her son could have the advantages of city life as a teenager. But, she’d
only rarely perform. In 1989, she reluctantly accepted an invitation to do a
concert at the Golem, then Montreal’s prime folk music venue. She accepted the
invitation with a condition.
“Dave
Clarke was booking the Golem then and it’s his fault I became a performer
again,” Penny said with a laugh. “I didn’t want to come back and just do one
show. So I told Dave if he found a manager who would see me perform and maybe
work with me, I would do it.”
Clarke booked the show and arranged for an
agent, Heidi Fleming, to come and
hear her. Soon after, Fleming and Penny
were working together and Fleming remains Penny’s agent and manager to this
day. Before long, Fleming had Penny touring regularly again and in 1990, 27
years after her first gig at Café André, Penny finally recorded Yes, her
first album. By the end of the decade, she’d record five more CDs to much
critical acclaim.
Penny’s first six albums were all released
on the She-Wolf label, a boutique record company operated out of Fleming’s
office. In 2000, she signed with Borealis Records, a Toronto-based label at the
forefront of Canada’s folk music scene. However, Penny’s stroke brought her
career to a halt.
Making a new album for Borealis would have
to wait. In the meantime, Fleming put
out a call for old tapes of Penny’s performances from the 1960s and ‘70s. They
quickly began to surface. A performance at the YMCA in 1963, a couple of songs
from gigs at Expo ’67, a couple more from the Place des Arts concert, some
coffeehouse recordings from Ottawa, some studio demos and CBC recordings. As
Penny recovered from the stroke, Fleming compiled 18 of the songs onto Gather
Honey. It became Penny’s first release on Borealis. The CD will bring back
fond memories for Penny’s legions of fans from those years, and for the new
fans she’s gathered more recently.
And since the release of the CD, Penny is
performing again. “Performing is something I’ve always loved,” she said. “I
have a big heart for the music and I love passing it on.”
-30-
--Mike
Regenstreif
