Fred Eaglesmith: The Long Way Around

The television arrived late on Fred Eaglesmith’s farm. When it finally did, Elvis Presley was in Hawaii, surrounded by girls and sunlight. Eaglesmith had just come in from the barn. He was cold. The farm was poor. The television looked like another planet.

“It was warm,” he remembers. “And it looked amazing. And I said, I’m doing that. That’s what I’m doing.”

He was about 10 years old. He quit worrying about schoolwork and started writing songs.

The songs were bad. Eaglesmith knows this. But bad songs were better than no songs, and persistence became the education he needed. Born Frederick John Elgersma in 1957 in Caistor Centre, Ontario, he grew up with eight siblings on a 200-acre farm. He describes the world as isolated, religious and poor.

“I always say I was raised with agriculture and religion and poverty, which is the formula for rock and roll,” he said. “We were stuck, very religious, very, very stubborn.”

At 15, another television appearance changed the trajectory. Eaglesmith saw John Prine on the David Frost show and hitchhiked 30 miles the next day to buy the record.

“It was like a one-two shot,” he says. “It was Elvis with all the rock and roll and the glitz and the glamour. And there was John Prine with all that earthy, sort of really on the back road.”

Prine gave him permission to stand outside the crowd. Eaglesmith brought those records to high school while everybody else was listening to Genesis.

“They’re all looking at me like I got three heads,” he says. “And that’s when I started to break away from society a bit.”

His first guitar cost $12 and came from Zeller’s, a Canadian department-store chain. Eaglesmith had to persuade his father to buy it after months of hauling hay.

“It buckled in the heatwave eventually,” he said. “But 12 bucks.”

He pounded that guitar through the nights, often until three in the morning. He had insomnia, and songwriting became an outlet for a childhood he describes as traumatic.

“I was really terrible, like exceptionally terrible,” he said. “But by the time I was 20, I had already written songs for eight years.”

School had not given him much of an education, either. Eaglesmith says he had severe learning disabilities and left with less than a ninth-grade education. Books became his substitute classroom. He read Steinbeck and other writers voraciously, absorbing whatever he could.

“Eventually, you’re wrapping yourself in that literature,” he said. “You’re surrounded by it. And eventually, it’s like anything, when you surround yourself with it, eventually you become part of it, it becomes part of you.”

The freight trains and highways taught him things school never had. Eaglesmith hitchhiked, hopped freight trains and learned the particular freedoms, and dangers, of being young and broke in America.

By the time he was traveling, he says, the romantic era of wandering America was already changing.

“We had some adventures, that’s for sure,” he said. “And just to know that that time will probably never be in history again, like that sort of, and I was a little part of it, you know, pretty great.”

By his 20s he was playing with the Flying Squirrels. David Essig was there early; Ralph Schipper came aboard; Willie P. Bennett joined at a festival and, Eaglesmith says, “never left.” The band eventually crossed into the United States in a 1956 Wayne bus, sleeping in it when the night’s earnings didn’t cover a hotel. They worked radio stations, building an audience one broadcast and one town at a time.

“Sometimes we’d play the radio station and people would drive up,” Eaglesmith says. “People would hear us on the radio and come down.”

The American club circuit eventually became a second home. Seattle’s Tractor Tavern. The Iron Horse in Northampton. The Columbia Jazz Club in Santa Cruz. Green Hall in Texas. Places where musicians and audiences aged together.

“You go, I’ve been doing this for a long time and I stopped in these clubs and they’re like my home,” he says. “They’re like our living.”

He had arrived from Canada at a time when the American roots-music circuit was still taking shape. “I started out, I was just this guy from Canada,” Eaglesmith said. “I didn’t even know the scene existed.”

The music wouldn’t stay put, either. Country gave way to bluegrass, bluegrass brushed against rock, and folk could make room for soul. Eaglesmith has spent a career moving between forms without allowing any of them to become a permanent address. His record, “Dusty,” which he considers one of his favorites, alienated some longtime listeners.

“I’ve changed my music so many times,” he said. “I love to explore something and then I like to be done with it.”

His bluegrass years remain in the music, but he has no interest in becoming a museum piece of any particular tradition.

“I would never want to be just a bluegrass musician,” he says, “because rock and roll is too much fun. And I would never want to be just a rock and roll musician because bluegrass is too much fun.”

Changing direction costs something. Friends disappear. Audiences sometimes get angry. Eaglesmith has lived through that cycle several times.

“When you do make that big change,” he says, “you lose your friends. You’ve got to start over. It’s almost like reinventing yourself.”

Then came the illness. Eaglesmith spent six years largely confined to bed, dealing with serious physical problems, depression and powerful medications. For a songwriter whose identity had been built around movement, the stillness was brutal.

“Since then I haven’t been able to write very well,” he says. “I might be done.”

But he is still here. Still touring. Still playing for audiences that now include younger listeners who weren't around for the records that first made his name. He says the majority of his audience is now under 28.

He doesn't want to sentimentalize any of it.

“I try not to get precious,” he said. “I don’t want to be just another old guy with tears in my eyes.”

He has also stopped worrying much about what to call the music. He was No. 2 on the second Americana chart, and he accepts the Americana tag with gratitude. But country works. Rock ’n’ roll works. Folk works. The label is less important than the freedom to move.

“Labels prevent you from changing,” Eaglesmith said. “Call me Americana, I’m grateful. Call me country, I’m happy. Call me rock ’n’ roll, I’m grateful.”

Then he puts the whole thing in simpler terms.

“An artist has to be alone. You have to be alone. For me, labels never made for good art. You have to be prepared to not be liked.”

Performance: Fred Eaglesmith performs at Whiskey Creek Zócalo in Silver City on Nov. 28.