Singers in a Dangerous Time: Making Contact with Bruce Cockburn

by Marco Adria
The Canadian Forum
November 1987
pp. 24-27

In January of 1972 Time magazine named Richard Nixon man of the year. In that same issue, Canadians as well as Americans were witnesses to war profiteering with a twist: smugglers were cutting open the bodies of slain American soldiers, stashing heroin in the corpses, and sewing them up for shipment to the U.S. It was a grisly revelation that perhaps symbolized the social decay to which members of the counterculture were pointing. For his part, Bruce Cockburn was writing the songs for Sunwheel Dance, an album whose lyrics, in the words of Katherine Gilday of The Globe and Mail, are filled with "stars and streams and blue space." Cockburn had retreated to a house in the country and was content to sing about the glories of domestic rural life.

The first song on the album even plays on the feudal titles "my lady and my Lord" referring not to a serf's masters, but to the poet's wife and God. It was this coyness that prevented Cockburn's music from becoming part of the Canadian mainstream. Cockburn says that like many of his artistic colleagues, he was "reacting to the tenor of the times." But while they chose to use their art as a weapon against social decay, Cockburn's response was to withdraw, to set up contemplative distance between himself and the world.

Myrna Kostash, who met and wrote about Cockburn in 1972, said later that most of Cockburn's contemporaries were no longer living in the country: "The culture of that period was raw and dirty and mean and urban. I hated this throwback to rural values, when none of us were living there anymore, this innocence of the Canadian patriot when we were just as corrupt as any other industrial society."

Not that Cockburn didn't have an audience. "Going to the Country" from Cockburn's first album provided an inspirational starting point for filmmaker Tom Radford, now director of the National Screen Institute, who first heard Cockburn perform in Edmonton at Garneau United Church in 1971. Cockburn provided the sound track for Radford's Ernest Brown -- Pioneer Photographer, which included the title track from Sunwheel Dance. Radford says that Bruce's music echoed the rediscovery of the land many young Canadians were celebrating.

Cockburn's interest in Christian themes was not unusual in the world of popular music in 1972. Two albums that sold well that year were Godspell and Jesus Christ Superstar. But it is difficult even to begin to compare these high-budget musicals and their slickly produced LPs with Cockburn's understated lyrics and acoustic sound. Neither was Cockburn's social conscious out of the ordinary for the times. It was the year of the Concert for Bangla Desh, a live album that featured Bob Dylan, Leon Russell, George Harrison, and Ravi Shankar. Again, however, there were few similarities between the gritty, outspoken political statements of George Harrison and the gentle ironic aphorisms of Bruce Cockburn.

The glimpse of perfect ecstasy, power, freedom, and beauty that Cockburn saw in nature and wrote about in his early songs echoes the theme of the writings of Charles Williams, a 20th-century English poet, lay theologian, and novelist, whose work Cockburn read at the time he was writing the songs for Dancing in the Dragon's Jaws, released in 1979. In the liner notes of that album, Cockburn mentions his indebtedness to Williams for influencing his lyrics. Actually, the seeds were planted much earlier. Cockburn used the image of the Holy Grail - which in Williams' War in Heaven represented a passage between this world and the next - in "Lament for the Last Days" from Joy Will Find a Way, released in 1975 Cockburn sings:


O Satan take thy cup away
For I'll not drink your wine today.
I'll reach for the chalice of life
that stands on Jesus' table.

The religious ecstasy of Williams' Shadow of Ecstasy is hinted at in "Keep It Open" from the 1970 album Bruce Cockburn:


When thoughts rush by
and your signals seem to fly
keep it open.