A few months back TheGuy and I went to a Schooner Fare concert at Wolf Trap and heard, for the first time, one of their early songs, “Quebecois.” It’s a good one and I now sing it periodically to TheLittleGuy. See, TLG is part Quebecois, so why not? My grandmother spoke French before she spoke English, and her parents and that side of the family were Quebecois who migrated back and forth across the Canadian and Maine/NH borders. (I remember back in the 90s when identity politics were all the rage I’d joke that I was Canadian-American). Anyway, TLG will be born in Virginia (birthplace of Presidents, so I can’t really complain) but I’ll be looking for ways to remind him of his northern roots, too.
Oh, we are the folk who quietly toil,
In this new land of hope we have found
In the woods, on the sea, in the hard, rocky soil,
In the factories that clutter the towns.
And we raised up cathedrals to the glory of God,
They were built of our blood and our tears.
And we made it through hard times and hunger and flood,
And we’ll be here for thousands of years.It is work, it is family, it’s church, it is God,
(C’est le travail, c’est la famille, c’est l’Eglise, c’est Dieu)
It is why we came here to this land,
To make a new life and be what we are–
The proud and the strong Quebecois,
The proud and the strong Quebecois.
Tom Rowe, who wrote this song, grew up one town over from where I grew up, coincidentally.
