The sound that mandolin makes

A year and a half ago, I wrote about my experience in the Tom Thomson Gallery in Owen Sound, where I encountered the famous painter's twelve-string mandolin encased in plexiglass.

I though it odd and sad that his paintings should still sing so boldly, while this lovely little instrument had been forever silenced. What songs, I wondered, did Thomson send into the night on mandolin wings?

Well, this past Saturday night at about 4 AM, in a hotel room in back in Owen Sound, with the sounds of Summerfolk still ringing in my ears, my heart was suddenly pounding with a startling new truth about the music of Tom Thomson.

I was lying awake, thinking about the songs I'd be doing in the Ian Tamblyn workshop the next day. I thought about how he's carried the ghost of Thomson in a lantern, casting shades and shadows of song into the landscape around him. I thought that if anyone ought to play that lonely mandolin, it would be Ian. He'd coax the beauty back out of it, for sure. I imagined running off to the museum that morning, somehow convincing them to let me have it for an hour, just so Ian could play it onstage for a few minutes...

It wasn't a practical plan. Tuning a mandolin at the best of times is a drag. Tuning a 100 year old, 12-string antique that's been in a climate controlled gallery and suddenly hauled into the summer sun would be insane.

But then it was all okay. I realized Ian didn't have to play that mandolin; nobody did. Because I suddenly knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that it wasn't silent at all, not now, and not for the last thirty years, and maybe never again.

Tom Thomson's mandolin still makes music, and people come from across the land to camp by the bay, like Thomson did, and lend their ears and arms and voices to the choir. There's a sweet sunny sound that drifts across the water in Owen Sound.

It's Thomson's mandolin singing, and Summerfolk is its song...