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“Nor Do Ye Spare a Thought for Me”:
Making Stan Rogers a Hero

In the past, when I’ve pointed out that the legends about Stan are probably not true, I’ve been accused of “destroying people’s fantasies.” In fact, I do no such thing. I support people’s fantasies, and celebrate their stories. But I treat them AS fantasies rather than as facts, which sometimes makes them mad.

Perhaps this is an occupational hazard of being a folklorist. Accepting that a story might be fantasy opens up another range of meanings that folklorists generally find more interesting than “did it really happen?” The fact that many people tell the story of Stan’s heroism (although in several different and mutually incompatible versions) suggests important questions: what does it say about us, and what does it say about Stan, that this is the story we like to tell?

Stan Rogers was a beloved figure who wrote and sang believable stories about heroism. He also had a reputation as a kind, generous, and honest person – if sometimes brash and stubborn too. This, I would argue, is why we want to believe Stan died heroically. His personal qualities, combined with the fact that we associate him with the heroism in his songs, makes it believable that he would stubbornly refuse to let the fire claim more lives than necessary, brashly pick up unconscious passengers and carry them out, and generously give his own life for others. If Stan Rogers were a person whose public image was snide, rude, and unkind, and if he wrote songs to match—if he were a figure like, for example, Johnny Rotten circa 1977—we would probably tell a story about him pushing old ladies out of the way to save himself.

While the story we do tell is not strictly true, it still speaks well of Stan’s character that his friends, acquaintances, and fans see it as plausible. And it says something about the storytelling community, his fans, that we want it to be true, rather than wanting him to be an antihero. These aspects of legends are what folklorists study, and while they are affected less than one would think by the strict accuracy of the stories, it’s helpful to know at the outset if the story is true or not, because this affects many of the other questions we ask about it. Because of this, folklorists sometimes do end up “debunking” legends on our way to understanding their meanings.

The Captain and the Singer:
Stan’s Legend and Stan’s Song

Another thing folklorists just can’t resist is comparative analysis. In this case, we can learn a lot by comparing the story we tell about Stan with the story he tells about the captain of the Nightingale in “The Flowers of Bermuda.” In both cases there’s a wreck, and the people aboard are tantalizingly close to safety. But they can’t all get clear of the craft at once, so one of them heroically holds back to let the others escape first. That heroic figure dies.

Both stories also include one or more eyewitnesses giving a firsthand account: the sailor who narrates Rogers’s song parallels the woman who reports being pushed out the door, and other firsthand witnesses who report Rogers’s heroism in more elaborate versions. Listeners sometimes believe that the witnesses aboard Air Canada 797 are real people, but when you try to find them, there’s no more evidence of their existence than there is for Rogers’s fictional sailor. They are, it turns out, characters in the story.

Given these close parallels, folklorists might well consider the legend surrounding Stan’s own death and the tale he recounted in “The Flowers of Bermuda” to be variants of the same “tale type.” Or, without the folklorists’ jargon, we might say that the same tale that Stan told so beautifully to his fans ended up being told by them about him.

Stan Rogers and another musical legend, John Allan Cameron. From the Stan Rogers website.

John Gorka wrote a song about Stan Rogers entitled “That’s How Legends Are Made.” The only time it really answers the question of how Rogers’s legend was born is with the lines:

When he left, the music stayed
And that’s how legends are made

This is an astute observation, and like many astute observations, it seems obvious once it’s pointed out. Songwriters become legends when the songs stay after the songwriters leave. Especially when the songwriters leave for good, and the songs stay for good.

That certainly seems to be case for Stan Rogers. In the folk worlds I move in, everyone can sing a Stan Rogers song, and most of us can sing more than one. And it’s not just folkies. I’m in a sea shanty group (yes, I admit it!) and I remember one memorable gig where we sang for faculty members of various maritime academies, including the U.S. Naval Academy. When our formal songs were over, we were approached by a small group of men and women who wanted to sing with us. The song they asked for? “Barrett’s Privateers.”

In Canada, you don’t have to be interested in folk music OR the sea to know about Stan Rogers. Being Canadian is enough. Rogers’s classic “Northwest Passage” has been called an unofficial Canadian anthem by Prime Minister Stephen Harper. It was selected as the 4th greatest Canadian song of all time in the 2005 CBC Radio One series 50 Tracks: The Canadian Version. The CBC also picked Rogers as Canada’s 13th-greatest songwriter ever.

And yet, most of the people who sing Stan Rogers’s songs, and most of the people who know and tell legends about his heroism, didn’t really know the man at all. What they really knew, what they really loved, was the sum total of his songs. That’s what stayed with us after Rogers left, so that’s what we had to build a legend from. It’s no coincidence that his legend is just one of his songs in disguise. If we pull the mask off of “Saint Stan” we do not find the real Stan Rogers. We find his own creation, the Captain of the Nightingale, a brave smile already on his lips as he breathes his last breath, perfumed by the flowers of Bermuda.