By Ray d'Entremont ——Bio and Archives--September 16, 2026
I will have to cut the frequency of these lists. I have a new priority. My wife had a stroke. We are focused on helping her heal as much as possible and prepared to do whatever it takes. Many are praying for her and prayers are welcome as spring flowers. The bond is strong! The hospital staff are impressive, but this being Canada, are seriously overworked. I’m reading a book by Dr. Norman Doidge, whose specialty is neuroplasticity.
It may aid us on this journey. If you recognise his name, it may be because he wrote the foreword to Jordan Peterson’s “12 Rules for Life.” Doidge builds on work by behavioral neuroscientist Edward Taub, whose “use it or lose it” therapy at the University of Alabama earned him a Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the American Psychological Association in 2004. This playlist is about bonding—survival itself for our forebears.
Consanguineal and affinal bonds soon enlarged the pack. Groups hunted better. That led to rallying behind a strongman, organizing cooperation, or raiding neighbouring camps for goods and wives. Once plant and animal tending let one family feed many, specialization followed: tools, weapons, settlements, primitive governance, Campfire stories created solidarity—meaning in myth.
Eventually raid became trade—both sides won, Feudalism morphed to the nation state—prideful banners into patriotic flags. I assume the titles that follow belong under this banner and their inclusion needs no apology. Yes, a few are a tad maple syrupy, but I am Canadian, eh! They run the gamut from intimate bonds to group affiliation to the standards that bind.
During the War of 1812, lawyer Francis Scott Key boarded a British truce ship to seek an American doctor’s release. The British bombarded Fort McHenry for 25 hours and detained Key so he could not reveal their position. Key watched through the night; at dawn the stars and stripes still flew. He scribbled a brief poem and finished it later at his hotel. The tune was a British drinking song. And there you have it: “The Star Spangled Banner.”
Dolly was a great songwriter. I have loved Dolly as a person—like forever. At ten she was singing in church and on local television; at thirteen she had played Grand Ole Opry. The day after high-school graduation she moved to Nashville, met her husband for life on the first day, and soon began her recording career. Over sixty years she struck gold with songs like “Jolene,” and “Coat of Many Colors.” Imagine teenage Dolly on the road with a bunch of virile young male musicians.
She handled it like a trooper. When she left Porter Wagoner she wrote him "I Will Always Love You." That's class. Film followed, including her 1980 “9 to 5” with the title song she wrote. She earned eleven Grammys and ten Country Music Awards, wrote more than 3,000 songs, and never seemed to tire. In 1986 she opened Dollywood in Pigeon Forge—homage to Smoky Mountain culture and jobs for eastern Tennessee.
Dollywood Foundation gave scholarships. Closest to her heart was Imagination Library, inspired by her love of books and by her father, who could not read. It gives books to children under five; more than 300 million have gone out in the United States, Canada, Australia, and the UK. After her death last month, her family asked that those wishing to honor her give to the Imagination Library.
"The President's Own" United States Marine Band: As one of a six-man air-cadet squad, we paraded to the town cenotaph on Remembrance Day with the town band. A cenotaph honours those who never returned. Our feet were lifted by Sousa’s “The Washington Post,” written for a youth essay contest ceremony hosted by the paper.
Few popular songs have thanked a father so well while he was still alive. Fogelberg wrote the ballad for his father, Lawrence, a cabinetmaker’s son who spent decades directing school, university and municipal bands in Illinois. Dan said that if he could have written only one song, he would have chosen this. Lawrence first heard it when Dan brought a tape home in 1981. Dan’s mother said it made listeners wish they had told their own fathers they loved them while there was time.
That last detail gives the record additional poignancy. It reached No. 9 on Billboard’s Hot 100 and No. 1 on the Adult Contemporary chart in 1982. Margaret, Dan’s mother, was a classically trained pianist. Joe Walsh produced the breakthrough album. Fogelberg sang, wrote, played guitar, piano, and bass, arranged, and, having studied art, painted. The finest phrase may be “his gentle means of sculpting souls.” Lawrence did not merely teach; he helped shape people. Dan’s confession that his own life was a “poor attempt to imitate the man” keeps the tribute from turning sugary.
Admiration, regret, gratitude, and humility arrive at once. It begins as biography but becomes something larger: a son seeing his father’s true music was the lives he touched.
Carole King’s song won Grammys for male vocal and Songwriter. Taylor arrived in London in 1967, a troubled, unknown nineteen-year-old. He had been treated for depression, seen his group (the Flying Machine) collapse, and become addicted to heroin. A demo reached Peter Asher, then head of A&R for the Beatles’ Apple label. Asher had him audition for Paul McCartney and George Harrison.
He was Apple’s first non-British signing and recorded his 1968 debut while the Beatles were making the White Album. McCartney played bass and Harrison sang harmony on “Carolina in My Mind.” Taylor’s “Something in the Way She Moves” apparently lodged in Harrison’s memory and inspired the opening of Harrison’s “Something.” Reviews were kind, but elaborate orchestration hid his greatest strengths: the intimate voice and intricate guitar. Asher became his longtime manager and produced the sparser, career-making Sweet Baby James and “Fire and Rain.”
The man who trained me to guide New England tours was from Concord, Massachusetts—solid credentials for an inspired American Revolution spiel. Our seven-day tours began in Manhattan; the clientele came from all over America. They were generous in spirit. They were astonished that a 19-year-old Canadian kid knew the history of almost every house on the road into Concord and the skinny on Old North Bridge, they never seemed to mind a foreign brat teaching them their own history.
That Yankee said he used to see Kate Smith at the Midtown Motor Inn in Albany, and that she was a testament to the quality of the cuisine (a large lady). He had a Johnny Carson voice and timing. I never knew if it was only a joke, but I repeated it on my tours because the elderly passengers loved her. She had a summer home in Lake Placid, roughly 140 miles north, and is entombed there in a pink-granite mausoleum.
Virginia-born, she got the song directly from Irving Berlin, who had written it in the army. Berlin, a Russian-born Jewish immigrant, meant it as gratitude for the country that took his impoverished family in. President Ford gave him the Medal of Freedom. Smith introduced the song on November 11, 1938--the twentieth anniversary of the Armistice and, ominously, the day Americans read of Kristallnacht in Nazi Germany the night before. Reagan gave Smith the Medal of Freedom for her trouble.
Rough-and-ready boys on the street corner bonded with four voices in barbershop accord, then drifted apart. The Four Aces were Philly area talent. JFK loved the song and asked Teddy to sing it at family gatherings. It is about the harmony of fellowship.
Theme of the 1968 British short film of the same name, it is a light, nearly wordless parody of Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg: a young man on a bicycle crashes through a billboard, falls in love with the model on it, and rides around Hampstead looking for her. “A boy and girl on a bicycle, and the boy singing to her,” said the lyricist. You can even sing “les parapluies de Cherbourg” to the same melody. The verses add a reminder that time and dreams are fleeting, so enjoy the ride together.
It is a simple romantic scene. On our honeymoon the entertainer asked us if we had a request. My bride asked for “After the Lovin’.“ He did not know it, but played another song by the same artist. It is our song.
At a mid-1980s Nashville convention, I stayed at the Opryland Hotel. I’d previously sent tours there. The rooms encircled a vast atrium decorated for Christmas; guests sauntered under palms and a soaring glass dome. From my high balcony I watched Lee Greenwood far below.
His finale was a production number I had never heard--“God Bless the U.S.A.” Chills, and I swallowed hard. I imagined hearing that as an American. “A perfect political rally song,” I thought. “It has the same appeal as Irving Berlin’s ‘God Bless America’.”
Lombardo recast the 1917 standard and reworked it in the band’s sweet-dance style, Kenny Gardner on vocal. It was 1942: war raged again, and the theme landed as it had the first time. The musical of the same name (Judy Garland and Gene Kelly) probed fear, cowardice, shame, and redemption: a young man injures himself to dodge the draft and turns off the girl whose brother has made the ultimate sacrifice—and loses self-respect in the process.
One wonders if the story drew from Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim, which novel unfolded around a lifetime of atonement for a weak-kneed moment, but added a Hollywood ending: bells, birds, a preacher, and a little home “for two or three or four or more in Loveland.”
Lombardo, still one of the best-selling dance bands, cut the song to catch the wave, even stamping the 78 “From M-G-M Picture ‘For Me And My Gal’.
Snow married Minnie Blanche Aalders in Halifax on 2 September 1935. After the wedding they had fifty cents left and two rented rooms in the slums; she still dipped chocolate for six dollars a week. The lyric’s “I whispered I do and I’d do it again,” and the poverty-and-sickness vows line up with that start more closely than with any later Nashville sparkle. The first half is almost liturgical--the parson’s questions--then personal testimony.
The second verse hyperbole leaves no doubt that he means it: “I’d cut off my tongue before I’d bring her shame.” Steel-and-fiddle do the rest. Snow’s earnest delivery and the spare 1949 string-band arrangement make the sincerity feel earned rather than sentimental. He did not write it but it was his first U.S. chart record, about #10, landing just before ‘I’m Movin’ On’ elevated them to Nashville royalty. They stayed married until his death in 1999.
One of the most-streamed versions of the anthem on Spotify, well over 2.6 million plays, they also issued it sung in English, French, and bilingual versions. Glocal Orchestra specializes in straightforward mid-tempo arrangements without heavy reharmonization. Music is by Calixa Lavallée, 1880; English words are Robert Stanley Weir’s 1908 text, later revised. Official English lyrics: O Canada! Our home and native land! True patriot love in all of us command. With glowing hearts we see thee rise, The True North strong and free! From far and wide, O Canada, We stand on guard for thee. God keep our land glorious and free! O Canada, we stand on guard for thee. O Canada, we stand on guard for thee.
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A boy soprano, lifelong music lover, and serial starter of things, Ray has worn more hats than most people have ever owned. Music has been a constant companion.
His playlists are an eclectic mix of genres accessed by mood and time. Over the years, he variously played in mostly rock and electric blues bands, but jazz and country too, in the Runic Stones, X-Men of Note, Purple Splintered Night, Broken Vessel, Country Gold, Eddy & The Hubcaps, ORCA, Hardscratch Road 2.0, and several others. His wife of 57 years (high school sweetheart) doesn’t agree that he needs 25 guitars!