You know you’ve married the right woman when she happily agrees to a 1,000-mile drive from Nashville to a small town on the Ontario-Quebec border to see an obscure Canadian singer-songwriter in a rented social club hall. But, I knew Fred Eaglesmith wouldn’t let us down.

Neither did the sold-out crowd of several hundred Fredheads – some of whom traveled farther than we did - who were just as happy to see their bearded leader again as we were.

Eaglesmith has been off the road for four years now, after more than four decades on it. His Covid hiatus stretched well past the end of the shut-down, due to a health issue he mentioned during his show but didn’t elaborate on. Whatever it was, he recovered and served up a two-hour foot-stomper at the Germania Hall in Pembroke, Ontario to prove it. 

It was his third show on a limited summer schedule, with all shows in Canada. If Friday’s reaction was any indication, there is pent-up Eaglesmith demand among his small, but loyal following.

An iconoclast revered on the Outlaw/Roots/Americana scene by folks who know a well-crafted song when they hear one, Eaglesmith has been covered by major label stars like Miranda Lambert and Toby Keith. More notable, perhaps, are Fred fans like Mary Gauthier and Todd Snider, artists more likely to be covered themselves. Both have put Eaglesmith songs on their albums.

Eaglesmith has been producing and releasing his own music for years, after butting heads with the music industry and setting off on his own. He’s made a living playing to loyal fans on the road, and selling his merch and music at shows and online. 

He’s had flirtations with greater stardom, at one point appearing as a musical guest on the David Letterman Show in 2011. I recall seeing him at a Chicago show about 15 years ago, when he casually told the crowd that he’d been invited to open for - if I’m remembering correctly - the Dave Matthew Band. As we all smiled at the thought that Fred might be getting his big break, he shared his emphatic rejection - something along the lines of having no interest in playing for a “bunch of people sitting there staring at their fucking phones.”

But wider acclaim seems to be knocking again, thanks to scores of Tik-Tockers uploading his 2012 song “Trucker Speed” to the platform during Covid. The song has more than 11 million plays on Spotify – hardly Taylor Swift numbers, but a legitimate bump for a guy who promotes and sells his own music. 

“I got really famous while I was layin’ in bed,” he told the crowd at the Pembroke show, before offering the muted first chords of the stripped-down tale of a heartbroken long-hauler who is triggered by an old note from an ex. 

“Got a letter in an old mailbox

I forgot I had, in a little truck stop

I read it once, and I read it again.

I could hardly keep from crying

I’ve been driving around the last a week or so

With an empty truck. I don’t have a load

But to tell you the truth, I don’t mind

Cause I think I might be dying.

And it’s trucker speed, benzydrine

percacets, amphetamines

Black beauties and west coast turn-arounds

When the coast is clear, I drive with my knees

Mix it all up like a recipe

Coca Cola and coffee to wash it down

Sometimes I feel like my wheels ain’t touching the ground”

Although observers often point to Eaglesmith’s many songs about cars, trains, farm implements and dogs, his real sweet spot is insightful, vivid stories from the shadows. His narrators often possess guns. But while modern country music tends to fetishize firearms, Eaglesmith’s songs offer them as the tools of rural life, or perhaps ironic symbols of rural powerlessness.

“Indiana Road,” which he ended Friday’s show with, is the lamentation of a subsistence farmer who has plowed out a happy life for himself and his young wife, only to find that “a government man, with a fat cigar” is seizing his land in the name of progress.

“I told him I would meet him on the Indiana road with a gun in my hand, but he never showed

He said he couldn’t bring himself to sink himself that low

I told him I would meet him on the Indiana road with a gun in my hand, but he never showed

He went back to Ottawa or Toronto, or wherever it is they go.”

The song ends with the wife moving back to her family while the narrator lives in an old Ford van clinging to his defiant, hopeless bravado.

Although he started as a bluegrass act, touring as Fred Eaglesmith and the Flying Squirrels with all the strings and harmonies that genre requires, the latest incarnation is a straight-up, stripped down, guitars-bass-and-drums rock and roll band. Tiff Ginn, his wife and collaborator who was playing mandolin and stand-up bass last time I saw him, backed him up ably on a telecaster. She also dropped vocal accents at all the right times. Andy Dmytryshyn (bass), and Costa Chatzis (drums) filled out the band. 

This electric setup took some of his classic early bluegrass songs off the playlist. But if anyone missed old favorites like “He’s a Good Dog,” “John Deere,” “Forty Years of Farming” and “Last Six Dollars,” no one said anything. There was plenty left in his songbook, and there appears to be plenty left in the tank 

Indeed, Eaglesmith has been known to travel in a self-modified tour bus that ran on cooking oil he procured from gigs along the way. Might be time to fire up that bus again and head south for a visit.

Eaglesmith’s shows have always been embroidered with stories and the sharp wit he’s known for. Friday was no exception. He summed up the world after Covid with one observation.

“Everybody got pissed off!” he said. “All my old friends are pissed off at me because I got less pissed off and they are really pissed off.”

Indeed, the 66-year-old Eaglesmith looks great – slimmed down with a bushy white beard. And he seemed to be having fun. He called out visitors who’d bought tickets from Seattle, Cleveland, California and other distant locales. And, judging from the folks singing along to many of the songs, Fredheads are ready for another tour.

 Find out more about Fred at the links below:

Website

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Spotify