I loved the Cowboys Fringants. Passionate.
Like many others, I took the liberty of paying tribute to Karl Tremblay on Wednesday, and I noticed that these tributes were coming from all over the place.
From the left, from the right, from sovereignists, from federalists. People who normally shout at each other took the time to express their sadness at the death of a man who knew how to give a voice to our culture, who knew how to do what I like with his cowboys call breathing new life into “his” Quebecois.
root
What I mean by this, and I repeat it to anyone who will listen, is that every people has its own sound.
The Irish have theirs, the Scots too, the Italians of course, the Portuguese, let’s not forget them. Quebecers also have their own, and in every generation we find a group capable of expressing this and touching our most intimate fibers.
Archive photo, QMI Agency
This is not about politics, but about something much deeper: I’m talking about a relationship with the world, a way of singing about the world that goes back to childhood, and not the childhood of our parents, but of their parents.
This sound evolves in loyalty to its origins.
Beau Dommage embodied the Quebec sound.
The Cowboys took over by reinventing him.
They combined the happy rhythm of our people, as we know it from New France, with an overwhelming melancholy that runs through almost all of their songs.
- Listen to the live broadcast of the meeting between Mathieu Bock-Côté and Richard Martineau every day at 10:30 a.m QUB radio:
melancholy
They knew that life was shaky, approximate, workmanlike, completely awry and yet beautiful, moving and luminous, even as time passes without us truly understanding what is happening to us.
Karl Tremblay shouldn’t have died so young. He is no more.
But his work will remain. And listening to the cowboys will be enough to rediscover the vitality of our people.
