Vancouver Folk Music Festival

Vancouver Folk Music Festival
July 17, 18, 19, 1998.

Alberta Slim, Surrey, B.C.

ALBERTA SLIM IS THE REAL THING. Had he been born south of the border,
no doubt he would have turned up in various anthologies and been cited as an
influence by all sorts of trendy bands. In a truly Canadian fashion, we often know
more about the musical history of other countries than we do about our own.
Alberta Slim (Eric C. Edwards) was born around 1907 and raised on the
prairies. Before the age 10 he learned to ride horses and rope cattle. As a
teenager, he listened to Wilf Carter on the radio, taught himself guitar and was
soon a regular at Cowboy Jamborees and local get-togethers. Along the way,
he also learned to yodel. In the early 1930's, times were very hard on the farm,
so Slim grabbed his guitar and headed for the city. In Regina he met Bill Schultz
and played his first cowboy song on the radio - Wilf Carter's There's a Love
Knot in My Lariat. He soon earned his own radio show on CFQC in Saskatoon
from which he take occasional breaks to tour across Canada and the United States.

Over time he assembled the travelling Alberta Slim Circus - 15 people including Alberta Slim and the Bar X Ranch Boys, Slim's wife Pearl and Bobo the Clown, along with Slim's trained horse Kitten, Blackie, Canada's high-diving dog, Susie the harmonica-playing elephant and two donkeys - one pink and one blue. Slim trained all the animals himself, and he can still give you a quick seminar on teaching mystifying animal tricks. The Circus toured from coast to coast, and everywhere they went, Slim wrote songs. He came to have a vast repertoire and he featured classics like Apple Blossom Time in the Annapolis Valley and Red River Waltz on his radio show. Travelling across Canada gave him a deep love of this country which he shared with his radio audience.

He wrote a lot of songs about life on the prairies, including a tune about one of his heroes, The Hanging of Louis Riel, based on first-hand stories he'd heard as a young man. Alberta Slim released his first record in 1948 and recorded at regular intervals for years. When RCA let his work go out of print, he bought back the rights to his songs which he now sells on CD and cassette. Lately he has been working on a new record, based on songs he has recently written.