To hear singer/songwriter Katherine Wheatley talk of her childhood growing up in Parry Sound, it sounds wildly idylic, wonderous and maybe even a little enchanted in the simplest of ways.
Born to Michael and Diane Wheatley, as one of five children, Ms Wheatley’s days as a young girl were filled with adventure and mischief spending nearly every waking moment with friends in the streets and backyards near her family’s Waubeek Street home.
“We had a fabulous neighbourhood,” said Ms Wheatley of the block with mostly girls, all of whom she still remembers by name. “Our addresses were all between 24 and 31 Waubeek, so we were a stone’s throw from each other. Every day after school and every evening after dinner we played. We played skipping and Yogi and Deer Tag and Hide and Seek and Sardines and Car Car C.A.R. and Nicki Nicki Nine Doors.”
The Wheatley family backyard was big enough for baseball, so a group often played there or in the Snider’s backyard which had a badmontin net.
“We raided the neighbours’ vegetable gardens and apple trees,” she said. “We swam, we skied, we cycled, we did cartwheels and handstands. We were always doing something. We hated being called in for dinner and for bed.”
The months during the long, deep freeze of winter were also spent outside where the neighbourhood girls and boys toboganned and skated on outdoor rinks.
“We’d put our skates on at home, skate down the icy driveway then walk the rest of the way to the DOT along the snowbanks - our blades sinking into the hard snow so that it was just like walking on boots,” she said. “We’d get there early on Saturday mornings and skate until the boys came and hogged the rink for hockey. Back then, girls weren’t playing hockey in Parry Sound.”
The close-knit family also spent a lot of time together, skiing every weekend at the Parry Sound Ski Hill and cross-country skiing at Camp Tapawingo.
“In fact, from about Grade 9 on, the high school cross country ski team was pretty much the biggest part of my life,” she said.
Summer jobs for Ms Wheatley included being a lifeguard for three summers and being a sanitary engineer with her sister in Archipelago Township.
“Which meant we took care of the dumpsites,” she explained.
A portable record player in her bedroom and borrowed albums from older siblings ignited a young Ms Wheatley’s interest in music.
“I’d listen, over and over again, to the albums that my older sister and brother owned - Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Gordon Lightfoot, James Taylor, Simon and Garfunkel,” she said, “I took piano lessons from Olive Perry. I think she was mortified when, every year, I’d ask to play a Burt Bacharach tune at the recital instead of something from the Royal Conservatory book. I loved songwriters.”
Soon after her love affair with music began, the teen “begged” her parents for a guitar because so many of the songwriters she adored played the guitar.
“When I was 14, I remember looking under my parents’ bed the night before Christmas and seeing a big triangular box - it was thrilling. I knew then that I was getting a guitar the next day,” she said. “I played clarinet in the concert band and saxophone in the stage band. John McGuirk, the music teacher at William Beatty and Jim Ferris at the (Parry Sound) high school had put together inspiring and rigorous music programs. They are probably my biggest inspirations.”
Songwriting began shortly after Ms Wheatley got her guitar. However, inspiration came from an unlikely source.
“Back then, I didn’t know how to write lyrics, so I’d go to the Rexall Drug store and peruse the Hallmark Card rack,” she explained. “I’d combine stanzas from different cards and copy them surreptitiously into my diary. Then I’d go home and put music to them. I knew I was doing something wrong, but it got me started.”
Her first public performance was at the Bobby Orr Commuunity Centre in 1978, singing Rhinestone Cowboy with a local band.
“I think I was nervous,” she recalls. “I practiced a lot.”
Following high school in her 20s, Ms Wheatley worked for several summers in northern Saskatchewan with geologist Ken Ashton. She had an interest in the field and considered persuing a career studying rocks.
“Ken loved listening to music and he was a great guitar player. In the evenings, I’d play the guitar while Ken labelled rocks and mapped out our next day’s routes,” she said. “He asked one night, ‘Wheatley, why didn’t you ever go into music?’ I responded by asking, ‘Why didn’t you go into music Ken?’ His answer was simple, ‘Because I love rocks.’ If I was going to enjoy geology for the rest of my life, I better love rocks.
“But I didn’t love rocks. I did, however, love music. That was the moment I began to think seriously about taking up music as a career.”
Although her father had passed away by the time Ms Wheatly seriously considered a musical career, she admits her mother was worried for her.
“Music is a great career in terms of what you do and who you meet, but it’s difficult financially - she knew that. I considered staying in science. I started a masters degree in Environmental Science at the University of Calgary with a focus on groundwater contamination. After a year of graduate work, I realized that unless there was passion driving me to be dogged in my studies, I might not succeed. I left the program and continued working for the Geological Survey. Through all my studies and my work in geology, I’d play at coffeehouses. I was starting to get work singing back up. It was becoming clear that music was my true passion.”
A year after getting her masters, Ms Wheatly went to Africa where her sister Michele and her husband Michael were teaching in Botswana through World University Services in Canada.
“I knew it was the best opportunity I’d have to see Africa first hand, not through a tourist company,” she said, “I couldn’t take my guitar with me. It would have been too big to lug around given the way I wanted to travel. I was without my guitar for the first time since I’d gotten one. My fingers were so itchy to play. Instead of playing, I wrote. Writing became my creative outlet. That’s when I started writing lyrics. When I got back from Africa, I had a bunch of lyrics to set music to.”
However, it wasn’t until many years later that Ms Wheatly recorded her first album, Straight Line.
“Boy, it’s been so long since I made that record. Probably the most popular song on that album was Water Moves Me. Fishing and Main Street got a fair amount of CBC radio play. Straight Line was the only song on the album that got commercial radio play. The title to me suggested, not loss of innocence, but a longing for what used to be.”
Just four years later Ms Wheatley released her second CD, Habits and Heroes with most of the tracks being what she calls “character songs.”
“I wanted to reveal the characters’ heroism as well as their habits,” she explained. “Mrs. McIvor, for example, is a woman who’s taunted by the neighbourhood kids because she has some strange habits. But she also has courage. She shows that by being independent and different and by just getting things done despite something tragic that’s happened to her son. There were enough instances on the CD of ordinary people being heroic that I decided Habits and Heroes would be a good title.”
Ms Wheatley said she has always looked up to the lyrical style of Canadian folk singer Gordon Lightfoot and still aspires to do the same.
“I always admired how Gordon Lightfoot was able to use images from nature as a metaphor for the human condition,” she said. “Growing up in Parry Sound, there are many images to draw from. So I find myself drawing on both the landscape and character of home.”
In addition to performing solo, Ms Wheatley also performs with singer/songwriter Wendell Ferguson’s back up band Smoking Section.
“Wendell and I perform together in a number of combinations,” she said. “I hire him to back me up. He hires me to back him up (as part of the Smoking Section). We are often booked as a double bill. It all started with me hiring him to back me up about 10 years ago. At our sound checks, he’d often sing one of his funny songs. I couldn’t believe how good they were. I was touring a lot in northern Ontario at the time, so I started to perform one of his songs, Rocks and Trees. People loved it. One night I said ‘Wendell, why don’t you play it yourself?’ He did. And then as time went by, I asked him to perform more and more of his songs at my shows.”
The duo also play in the Betty and Bobs, a seven musician band.
“We’re all good friends. We’ve played together, in the studio or on stage, with other bands or backing up other musicians,” she said. “We all happened to be at Summerfolk Festival in Owen Sound about 10 years ago, singing our hearts out at the hotel we were staying at. It was then that we noticed that we love to sing together. And we loved to sing songs we’d never perform in our own bands. We decided to form a band.”
Ms Wheatley said the best part about her job is the musicians she works with, whether she sees them every week or once a year.
“Even though I love performing and writing songs - for me - it’s all about who I’m working with,” she said, adding that it has taken her time to learn to enjoy the experience of being on stage. “For a number of years, I’d often get off the stage wishing I could start all over again. It was because I’d forgotten to breathe and to focus. It stills happens. In fact, it happened (recentlly) at a show in Boston. Now, though, I have enough experience that if I find myself on stage unhappy with my performance, I try to breathe and focus right away. It’s all about being present.”
Most recently, Ms Wheatly was working with eight local Grade 7 classes writing songs about Parry Sound’s history to be performed during the Festival of the Sound in July.
“Oh my goodness yes,” she said of writing songs about the area. “I’ve been working with (the) classes in town writing songs about the history of Parry Sound. We’re writing about Depot Harbour, Bobby Orr, the Avro Arrow, the Parry Sound train robbery, and the natural history of the town. This summer I’ll be leading a CD camp for kids and I’m hoping we’ll write a few more songs about the area.”
Although her family moved away from the Parry Sound in 1980, Ms Wheatley said the area is still very close to her heart.
“We still have a cottage here, and it is the family gathering place,” she said. “I see people I grew up with or friends of my parents whenever I’m shopping or stopping for a coffee. It’s still home for all of us. It really is a very big part of my life.”
Katherine Wheatley
Katherine Wheatley
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