A Rove Down Memory Lane ⇒

This is the story of how the music of the Rankin Family has woven itself in my life for the past 14 years.

One fall evening in 1993, my roommate Erica and I tried to get into Felicitas (Uvic's nightclub). The bouncer refused to let me in on the grounds that I was under age and he didn't believe that the ID I carried was really mine. He asked me if I had any other photo ID such as a passport "Who the heck carries a passport to the bar?" I pled. In fact, I was 21 years old. In third year. Certainly of age. We never got in.

We went to the Sticky Wicket where we killed ourselves laughing over the stupidity of the aforementioned case of mistaken identity, attracting the attention of a man who introduced himself as the captain of David Foster's yacht. We proceed to go with this man (whose name I cannot remember) to the yacht (naive and probably stupid to be sure, but we would be safe in each other's company, we reasoned). We passed a very nice evening on David Foster's yacht (Oh yes! It WAS his yacht!) and the captain played us a song from a group from Cape Breton called the Rankin Family. The song was Fare Thee Well Love. Erica and I were hooked.

Shortly after that evening, Erica bought their two CDs and we listened to them constantly in our apartment. In the summer of 1994, we saw them perform outdoors at Agrifair in Abbotsford. The stage was set up on the track and there were only a few hundred people there. After the show we stayed to meet the group and got our tickets autographed. Erica took lots of photos but when she got the film developed, the machine malfunctioned and the shots were all lost. Seeing them perform live was amazing. Meeting them in person was even more so.

Since then we have seen them probably most of the times they have performed in Vancouver.

I remember the day I heard the sad news in 2000 that John Morris Rankin died in a car crash. It was like losing an old friend and I was sad to think that the group wouldn't sing together anymore, though how could I blame them if they didn't? It wouldn't be the same.

I never tire of their music. It feels like home to me. When I first started listening to them, I was only 21 years old with dreams of getting my degree, owning a home, getting married, having babies. Now I am 34 and all those dreams have come true.

Tonight Erica and I left our kids and husbands at home, had dinner together and went to see the Rankin Family at the intimately small Red Robinson Theatre. We were a little late for the show but the first song we heard was Borders and Time, my all time favourite Rankin song. It was sung beautifully as always by Cookie. I was instantly flashed back to my university years living with Erica (oy vey we had a great time together) two silly girls with a crush on Jimmy Rankin. Jimmy is still gorgeous, by the way, and I told him so in a moment when the audience was quiet and the spotlight was on him....it just sort of came flying out of my mouth! Towards the end of the concert, they played Mull River Shuffle and we couldn't sit in our seats any longer so we ran down to the front near the stage and danced and sang at the top of our lungs.

It was a great to be "home" again.