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EDMONTON
SUN, AUGUST 4, 2007
Hus: Canadiana cowboy
FOR THIS CALGARIAN, BIG VALLEY IS JUST MORE FODDER FOR SONGS
OF EVERYDAY LIFE
By JENNY FENIAK, SUN MEDIA
Big Valley's main stage has seen all sorts of stardom cross
it.
From classics to newcomers, every angle of country music has
been represented.
Tonight's main stage line-up, closing out with Carrie Underwood,
is just as unique.
Opening the big stage today is Canadiana cowboy musician Tim
Hus, and although he bears very little resemblance to Underwood,
they both have made the relatively new transition between live
stage performances and reality television.
While Underwood's fame followed her American Idol appearances,
Hus's reputation earned him a place on the show Letters.
"It was a bunch of guys trying to win over this one woman,
but they never got to see her. It was a company out of Ottawa
that filmed it and they did it out of the Rocky Mountains and
I guess they wanted all those Western Canadian themes and stuff,"
he said.
'I WAS THE GUY'
"So, I was the guy they called in and that was on an episode
where they all had to write love songs for the girl," Hus
explains from his home in Calgary while preparing for yet another
road trip.
But for the 28-year-old troubadour, who has been praised by
Stompin' Tom Connors, his television appearance is far from
the high point of his young career.
"One of the
coolest things I've done musically was when they sent me down
to Washington D.C. last year to the Smithsonian Folklife Festival,"
says Hus, who has followed Connors's example of heralding everyday
Canadian life in song.
"A lot of people, they
often say they knew from a very young age what it is that they
wanted to do, and I guess I sort of evolved into being a travelling
cowboy singer," Hus says.
"I didn't really grow up in a musical family, but I grew
up in a family of storytellers and travellers."My father
was a sailor for the merchant marines, so he worked on ships
all around the world and saw most of the world that way and
my grandfather's quite a storyteller too.
"But any time we'd go to a party or potluck or something
like that, it would always be my dad telling stories with a
big crowd of people around him because there was rarely a place
he hadn't been and he had tons and tons of stories.
"And I knew I could never really outdo him with the storytelling
unless I had a guitar."
Hus says his love of storytelling attracted him to the music
of Johnny Cash and Woody Guthrie, which was fairly easy for
a new player to pick up.
'ALL TONE DEAF'
He lucked out when taking it to the next level of singing for
an audience by playing for his fellow workers in an isolated
logging camp.
"That was a great bunch of people to play for because they
were all tone deaf from chainsaws and generators and quite entertainment
starved. So I would sing for them in the camp in the evenings,"
says Hus.
"Then I started writing some songs and I think the first
song I wrote was about the logging camp, and of course that
went over really good because it was basically all about what
we were doing there."
Hus has kept up his stories in song as he travels through life,
working as everything from a salmon farmer to brewery driver
to well driller and now a Jamboree main stage performer.
So make sure you catch his show, because one day you may hear
him singing all about it.
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Tim Hus Music Copyright 2008
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