This is a commemorative year for Sackville’s Enterprise and Fawcett foundries, the once bustling manufacturing businesses that served as anchor employers in the town for decades.
Janet Crawford remembers the heyday of the foundries, and together with musical collaborator Ray Legere, has chanelled some of those memories into a new album. Foundry Town features ten new original songs dedicated to Sackville’s Enterprise and Fawcett foundries, which first fired up 150 and 170 years ago, respectively.
The pair are performing the album this Sunday at the Sackville Legion along with fellow musicians Frank Doody and Bruce Dixon, and writer Susan Amos who will share some stories from her book and play about the foundries, also released in this commemorative year.
CHMA dropped by Fog Forest Gallery this week to chat with the musicians and hear more about the project.
This isn’t the first collaboration for Legere and Crawford. They also worked with Live Bait Theatre in 2019 to create a musical project celebrating the 150th anniversary of the Intercolonial Railway in Sackville.
Crawford lived in town when the foundries where still major employers in Sackville, and has woven some of that experience into the songs, which she says are really an homage to all working people.
“I remember very, very clearly what it was like when the Foundry whistle blew,” says Crawford. “And when, you know, 400 people went to work every day. And what it was like on Friday night after they all got paid.”
Crawford even spent some time up close and personal in the Enterprise foundry in 1979, working on a Super 8 film documenting the sand casting process used in making molds. That short film has recently been digitized and Crawford hopes to get it online for public consumption sometime soon.
“It was a very vibrant time in the community,” says Crawford. And, in working on this project, gave me an opportunity to go back into those memories, and draw from them ideas that we could then use as starting points with songs.”
And that’s where Ray Legere came in. “We’d get together and Janet has some ideas based around maybe a lyric or phrase,” says Legere. “And then we find a nice melody that goes along with it, some nice chords, something different.”
Legere is a multi-instrumentalist who started out on the mandolin, and eventually discovered his calling in bluegrass. But the songs also include elements of country, folk, swing, and even gospel. “Every song is a little bit different going from the house party theme to maybe a little harder electric sounding music,” says Legere.
Crawford and Legere are performing this Sunday at 2pm at the Sackville Legion. Tickets are available at livebaitheatre.com
