Sylvia Tyson’s literary career began in 1962, when she wrote her first song, You Were on My Mind, a buoyant tune with a simple lyric that is still providing the Toronto-based folk-music icon with steady income due to its undying popularity in dozens of versions and almost as many languages – now in film and on television as well as radio. But its most important recent contribution, in the eyes of the artist, has been to help finance the creation of Tyson’s first novel, Joyner’s Dream, a sprawling 420-page family saga that is as far removed from her big hit as 50 years of life could make it.
With almost as many plots as there are characters listed in the genealogical chart at the beginning of the book, fresh adventures on almost every page and a 200-year time frame, Joyner’s Dream is no ditty. But it is a song – the title is shared with a tune that figures large in the novel – and the artist sees her new turn to long prose as the natural evolution of her life’s work.
“I’ve been a writer all my adult life,” says Tyson, unusually youthful at 70, relaxing in the comfortably cluttered Rosedale mansion that is another legacy of halcyon years spent performing with former husband Ian Tyson in the pioneering 1960s folk duo Ian and Sylvia. “It’s just that I’ve been writing songs instead of books,” she adds. “So I finally got to expand a bit.”
Quite a bit!
“And went a little crazy,” Tyson admits. “It’s a fairly hefty book. But it didn’t have to rhyme. That was good.”
A silver thread connects Tyson’s earliest literary awakening – reading song books as a girl at the public library in Chatham, Ont. – and Joyner’s Dream. “It’s the stories in the songs that were fascinating,” she says, adding that most of her own songs told stories too.
As a documentarian, host of CBC-Radio’s Touch the Earth, Tyson learned that “people are endlessly interested in each other’s lives.” As a novelist, she has conjured up a head-spinning abundance of characters and incidents in a multi-generational tale rich with the same gothic atmosphere that pervades so many of the old, weird ballads that first inspired young Sylvia Fricker.
Joyner’s Dream follows a family of musicians and thieves from Southampton, in 1788 England, to present-day Toronto, their stories passing through multiple generations in a common family journal kept by the heirs to Old Nick, their ancestral fiddle. The book’s scale is unabashedly Victorian, and names like Dickens and Hardy pop up in conversation and on the dustcover.
“I love a good read,” Tyson says. “I always have. Something I can really sink my teeth into. I love the language, too.”
But she is leery of claiming literary influences, having learned better in her youth. “When I was starting to sing, a lot of the singers I listened to were male,” she says, “because I thought if I did become influenced by them, nobody would be able to identify it.”
Naturally enough for a book that imagines the roots and growth of traditional music, Joyner’s Dream is replete with references to the many songs and airs that animate its characters’ lives. But after writing the novel, Tyson realized that the next job was to write the music that ran through it. The result is a new album of 11 original tunes performed by Tyson in period style, accompanied by a small group of early-music specialists.
“It’s not songs about people in the book, it is music that would naturally occur in the narrative,” she explains, adding that she is currently working with recording engineer Ed Marshall to shape it into a kind of soundtrack to accompany upcoming book readings.
Long-time Tyson fans will know not to attend the events expecting to hear any of the old hits, neither the “gentle mountain murder ballads” she sang so sweetly as a youth nor the feminist story songs she wrote in her prime. “The past is prologue for me,” she says, repeating a favourite phrase. “The truth is I’m so much more interested in what I’m doing right now than I am in anything I’ve done in the past.”
It must be said, however, that Canada’s newest novelist speaks with a familiar voice, one that has inspired fans for half a century while constantly exploring new frontiers of expression.
Join Sylvia Tyson in conversation with Canada’s Chief Booklover Heather Reisman at Indigo Manulife Centre, Tuesday, March 22, 7 p.m.
