Bruce Murdoch

In Remembrance

(Thomas) Bruce Murdoch, a Montreal folk singer-songwriter who made a splash in the late '60s before retiring from music for several decades and then making a comeback, has died at age 78. Veteran Montreal and Ottawa music journalist, folk club booker, and radio host (CKUT's Folk Roots/Folk Branches show and CKCU) Mike Regenstreif was a longtime friend and admirer of Murdoch's work. In a 2011 blog post, he recalled that ''I’ve known Bruce Murdoch for a very long time—more than 40 years. His music—I've always thought he was a great singer and songwriter—and his friendship have both been very important to me over the years. ''I was just 15 or 16, early in my involvement in the Montreal folk scene, circa 1969 or ’70, when I first met him. Bruce, who would still only have been 21 or 22 then, was back in town after five years or so of making an important mark on the U.S. folk world. In 1965, at 17, Bruce was one of four then-unknown artists—Richard Fariña, Patrick Sky, and David Cohen (later David Blue) were the others—who made their debuts on The Singer-Songwriter Project LP. Citizenfreak notes that Murdoch ''was signed to Stormy Forest Records by Richie Havens shortly after making his way to New York City. The artist sang in several festivals, including the New York Folk Festival and the 1968 Newport Folk Festival—he even had the pleasure of performing at Carnegie Hall. The folk singer went on to write the campaign song for presidential peace candidate Eugene McCarthy." He later recorded 33 1/3 Revolutions per Minute, a full-length 1970 LP with producer Havens. Murdoch was tipped for big things on the New York City folk scene in those early years, but his career moves didn't pan out. Canadian record industry veteran and art gallery owner Ralph Alfonso tells Billboard Canada one example: ''Bruce told me he lost his Columbia Records deal when he was recording his demo with Al Kooper on keyboards and Jimi Hendrix (then Jimmy James) on guitar. John Hammond suggested he change the word 'damn' in one of the songs, as it wouldn’t get airplay (this was 1965). Bruce said, "No way," and Hammond ripped up the contract. That demo session is unreleased and is sitting in the CBS vaults. I had a friend who deals with CBS to check, and it is indeed still there.'' Upon his return to Montreal in the early '70s, Murdoch became active on the local folk scene. Regenstreif wrote that ''I was instantly captivated when I began to hear Bruce play at places like the Back Door, the Yellow Door and the Montreal Folk Workshop. When I started my first concert series at Dawson College in 1972, Bruce was the first artist I invited to play. Then, in 1974, when I took over the Golem Coffee House, Bruce was the first artist I invited to play there, too. ''By the end of the 1970s, after recording one final LP, the self-titled Bruce Murdoch, and for reasons that I fully understood, Bruce was done with the music scene. He needed to get away from it, to go somewhere where he had no history and start over. So he moved out west, went back to school, and became a high school teacher in small town Alberta. His Martin D-28 sat unplayed in its case for 25 years.'' advertisement Other career detours included work as a firefighter, a civic councillor, a drug counsellor and a first-responder. The itch to create music returned, as Regenstreif recalls. ''In the mid-2000s, Bruce let me know that the guitar was starting to come out of the case again, that songs were starting to come again. He promised that as soon as he was ready, mine would be the first radio show he’d play his songs on. As fate would have it, he made it just under the wire. He was on Folk Roots/Folk Branches with me on July 26, 2007, just five weeks before I signed off the radio show. Bruce’s new songs were different than the ones he was writing in the 1960s and ‘70s. They were generally more personal and less obviously political, but, they were every bit as compelling.'' In 2008, Murdoch released another solo album, Matters of the Heart; marking his return to the stage and the studio after a long absence, followed by another full-length recording, Sometimes I Wonder Why the World, in 2011. After a long spell out West, he returned to Quebec late in life, living in Ormstown, a small town south of Montreal. Murdoch also became an author, writing a short stories collection, The Grampy Tales and Stories, as TB Murdoch . It was published by Amaranth. Although not a household name, even in Canadian folk music circles, Murdoch had a major influence on other artists he befriended and encouraged. One of those was acclaimed folk singer-songwriter Noah Zacharin, who tells Billboard Canada that ''I have always felt him guiding various aspects of my musical voyage over--it shocks me--50+ years.. ''His guitar skills easily went from dramatic to extraordinarily tender. Richie Havens produced his first recording. Havens was, of course known for the voodoo he could do with rhythms, splitting bars of 4/4 into thirteen beats, etc. Bruce used some of that, strumming 16th notes to punctuate the air, and I learned some of that from him, most notably in a song called 'Pure as Love' that I'll be releasing on a record of archival material from before I turned 19. ''Bruce taught me not to be a snob about ONLY fingerpicking, and that the flatpick too has its place. He meant a great deal to me and to all those who knew him. The effect he had on the hearts of those who met him was quite amazing. Ralph Alfonso hired Murdoch for a rare performance at his BBAM! Gallery in Montreal in 2013. He recalls to Billboard Canada that "it was two afternoon shows he did, and at the first one, a guy came in all the way from New York to see Bruce and get his autograph for the Elektra sampler he was on." ''He was a mysterious character. I did notice he played guitar with his thumb coming over the neck, kind of Richie Havens style (on whose label Bruce had an album on). Not very many people play like that. It’s like the thumb making barre chords. You need big hands.'' Present at that gallery show in 2013 was Montreal folk-rock artist Patrick Hutchinson. In a Facebook tribute, he notes that ''I only got to know Bruce a bit this century, in the course of Swift Years gigs in the Chateauguay Valley, where he lived latterly. He was a fine singer/songwriter and raconteur, and general larger-than-life character.'' Keep his work alive in your memory: https://www.citizenfreak.com/artists/100056-bruce-murdoch