A Cross Border Country Singer

On the eve of the 90th birthday of Pete Seeger, the father of the twentieth century folk music revival in the English speaking world, we remember another pioneering cross border voice.

Wilf Carter was the father of Canadian country music: the first Canadian country performer to have a hit recording, in 1933.

In some ways his life parallels American Woody Guthrie, born eight years after him and who he outlived by 29 years. Like Guthrie, he work at odd jobs as a youth, and travelled cross country “riding the rods” and singing with hoboes.

He ended up in Calgary, where he became a cowboy, learned to ride and play the guitar. Moonlighting jobs singing and playing at dances led to a gig as an entertainer for Rockies trail rides organized by the Canadian Pacific Railway.

CPR then took him to sea for the maiden voyage of the Empress of Britain, a Titanic-size liner that plied the North Atlantic. En route to the ship, he recorded two compositions at a Montreal studio.

They were My Swiss Moonlight Lullaby featuring a yodeling style he developed after hearing a Swiss performer in his boyhood hometown; and The Capture of Albert Johnson about the “Mad Trapper” killed in a 1921 Yukon shootout with the RCMP.

These became his first hits. While he was at sea, RCA Victor pressed and released them, and he returned to public acclaim.

RCA took him to New York where a secretary, typing the lyrics to one of his songs, decided he needed a more distinctive name. She coined “Montana Slim” which became his trademark in the US, where the Carter Family (no relation) was already prominent.

Carter and his music had been a presence on radio before his first hit. In 1930 he landed a weekly evening slot on local Calgary station. After his visit to New York and broadcasts on the CBS network, his career skyrocketed.

He returned to Calgary married to Pennsylvania nurse Bobbie Bryan. They bought a ranch and raised a family in Alberta while performing and recording in both countries. One Calgary radio station played a Wilf Carter song daily at 7:20 a.m. for 25 years.

A serious back injury from a 1940 Montana car accident took him out of performing for most of the next decade, but he continued to release new recordings. Over his career he recorded more than 40 LP albums for RCA, and later he signed with other labels.

In 1949 Carter moved to New Jersey, returning to Canada in 1957 when American sales of his records declined. In the 1960’s he performed at the Calgary Stampede and appeared regularly on the Tummy Hunter Show on Canadian television.

In 1988 he recorded his last album. Three years later, at age 86, made his last performing tour. Wilf Carter retired in 1992 and died four years later in Arizona at age 91.


Wilf Carter enjoyed fame on both sides of the Canada-US border. Yet despite a growing country music movement in Québec during his lifetime, there is little evidence of any of his work having been translated into French. One exception that lends itself extremely well is In the Blue Canadian Rockies:

Dans les Rocheuses canadiennes
En entend chuchoter le vent
Tout au long du Lac Louise
Les pavots dansent le printemps:
Au bout du monde ils m’appelent
Je suis triste et désolé
Pour les Rocheuses canadiennes
Et la fille j’ai tant aimé

Ah, que je me ressens triste ce soir
Pour la fille que j’ai quittée
Et si je pouvais seulement la revoir
On pourrait tout recommencer...

(In the blue Canadian Rockies
Spring is sighing through the trees
And the golden poppies are dancing
Round the banks of Lake Louise.
Across the seas they call me
When I’m lonesome and so blue
For the blue Canadian Rockies
And the girl I loved so true.

Oh, how my lonely heart’s breakin’ tonight
For the girl I left behind
And if I only could see her tonight
That sweetheart who’s waitin’ for me…)


Tomorrow—Pete Seeger’s 90th—we’ll look at another cross border singer for whom Seeger penned a verse on his 50th birthday.