#12: Something To Sing About by the Raftsmen

City: Montreal, PQ
Radio Station: CJAD
Peak Month: December 1963
Peak Position in Montreal ~ #4
Peak position in Vancouver ~ #21
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ did not chart
YouTube: “Something To Sing About” (Travellers version)
Lyrics: “Something To Sing About”

The Raftsmen was formed by Louis Leroux, Martin Overland and Marvin Burke. Overland had been the lead singer, guitarist, and music arranger for the 1950s Montreal trio The Strangers, along with his sister Arlene on claves and drummer Leon Segal. They began getting regular gigs at folk clubs in Montreal and Toronto in the early ’60s. They sang for NASA astronauts in Cap Canaveral, Florida, the Chicago Playboy Club and the Famous Grill of the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City. They also began to tour in Canada and the USA with Ian & Sylvia, The Travellers’ and Joan Baez. On the Raftsmen III album in 1967 the bio for Louis Leroux states “One day while practicing to be Attorney-General, in the local phone booth, with his wire-tapping kit and armed with his genuine replica oof a C.I.A. badge (Canadian version), he decided to call his U.N.C.L.E. As fortunes of the Cold War would have it, his A.N.T. answered “Hello? Napoleon?” In a fit of frustration he screamed back T.H.R.U.S.H.” You guessed it – all screamers get hit records.” This flavor of folk humor from the Sixties may be lost on some readers today.

In 1961 the Raftsmen recorded their debut album Down in the Valley with RCA Victor. The album contained folk classics “Frozen Logger”, “Red River Valley”, the anti-war “Last Night I Had The Strangest Dream”. In the summer of 1961 “Yellow Bird” charted in the Top 40 in Montreal.

In 1963, the folk group released This Land Is Your Land and later a self-titled The Raftsmen album. The first of these again featured several tracks from their debut album, as well as “Shenandoah” and “Yankee Doodle”. On The Raftsmen appeared a treatment of the Ukrainian folk tune “Aye Te Tze Nye Te”, the gospel-folk tune “Children Go Where I Send Thee”, and “Something To Sing About”.

Oscar Brand composed “Something To Sing About”. Brand was born in Winnipeg (MB) in 1920 to a Jewish family. At the age of seven, he moved with his family to Minneapolis, followed by Chicago and Brooklyn (NY). He wrote various books on the folk song and folk song collections, including The Ballad Mongers: Rise of the American Folk Song, Songs Of ’76: A Folksinger’s History Of The Revolution and Bawdy Songs & Backroom Ballads. He hosted the radio show Oscar Brand’s Folksong Festival on Saturdays at 10:00 p.m. on WNYC-AM 820 in New York City, which ran into its 70th year.

Oscar Brand on WNYC
The show ran more or less continuously from its debut on December 10, 1945 to September 2016, making it the longest-running radio show with the same host.

Although Brand was anti-Stalinist and was never a member of any Communist party, the House Committee on Un-American Activities referred to his show as a “pipeline of communism”, because of his belief in the rights under the First Amendment of blacklisted artists to have a platform to reach the public. Accordingly, in June 1950, Brand was named in the premier issue of Red Channels as a Communist sympathizer, along with Paul Robeson, Josh White and Pete Seeger. He appeared at the five times at the Mariposa Folk Festival (held in various cities in Ontario) in 1962, 1968, 1969, 1987 and 2010.

In 1952, Brand wrote the lyrics to the song “A Guy is a Guy” (1952), which became a number-one hit for Doris Day. From 1963 to 1966, Oscar Brand hosted the variety show Let’s Sing Out on the CTV and subsequently on CBC from 1966 to 1968.

(Above) Joni Anderson (Mitchell) and Oscar Brand performing on October 9, 1965 on Let’s Sing Out

In 1965, along with Lead Belly, Oscar Brand participated in the Selma to Montgomery civil rights march.

In 1966, Oscar Brand’s Tony Award nominated musical A Joyful Noise opened on Broadway. The plot concerned a Jewish fiddler who arrives in a small Southern town and shocks the stern community with his exuberant love of hillbilly music and life in general. In 1968, his musical The Education of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N, opened at the Alvin Theatre in New York City. In 1976, Oscar Brand wrote the Democratic Campaign song for Presidential candidate Jimmy Carter titled “Why Not the Best?” In 1982, Brand was given the Peabody Award for broadcast excellence for his broadcast The Sunday Show on NPR. In 1995, he was awarded the Personal Peabody Award. over the decades, Oscar Brand released over a hundred albums. He died in 2016 at the age of 96.

“Something To Sing About” is a list making song celebrating and naming some of the towns, geography and images of Canada. This includes:
1) The Grand Banks of Newfoundland
2) Ridge of the Miramichi
3) Stone coast of Labrador
4) Great Northern Sea
5) Vancouver Island
6) Alberta highlands
7) The Prairies
8) The lakes
9) Ontario’s towers
10) Mount Royal’s chimes
11) The Maritimes
12) Vancouver
13) The Rockies
14) Fields of Saskatchewan
15) Bay Bull (NL)
16) Red Deer (AB)
17) Grand-Mère (PQ)
18) Silverthorne (ON)
19) Moose Jaw (SK)
20) Hudson Bay
21) Quebec’s morning dew
22) The leaves of the maple trees

In 1963, “Something To Sing About” brimmed with hope for Canada as the lyrics concluded:
“Yes there’s something to sing about, tune up a string about,
call out in chorus or quietly hum.
Of a land that is still young, with a ballad that’s still unsung,
telling the promise of great things to come.” 

“Something To Sing About” peaked at #4 in Montreal, #21 in Vancouver (BC) and the Top 30 in Moose Jaw (SK). The song was also recorded by The Travelers who charted their version on CHIQ in Hamilton in the spring of 1964.

As well, in 1963 the Raftsmen recorded a live album in Montreal titled A Night At Le Pavillon.

In 1964 The Raftsmen recorded Here And There With The Raftsmen. The album featured covers of the Haitian folk tune “Yellow Bird” and the Israeli “Hava Nageela”. By 1966 Martin Overland and Marvin Burke left the group and became session players. They were replaced by Gil Pilette and Donald “Don” Steven. Born in Montreal in 1945, Don Steven was performing and arranging folk music before he was invited to join The Raftsmen.

A final album by the Raftsmen titled Raftsmen III was released in 1967. It included a covers of several Gordon Lightfoot songs including “In The Early Morning Rain”.

Canadianbands.com states “After the band finally folded for good before the end of the decade, Leroux toured with Nana Mouskouri for the better part of the next ten years, then became a highly respected Latin guitar player in session work, and then released a pair of instrumental solo albums. He also became a highly sought-after guitar teacher. Pilette moved to Florida and played around there, mostly at church and the occasional gig.” The website also states “Overland and Burke both passed away – Overland in the late 1990s, Burke in the mid ’00s.”

After the Raftsmen split, Don Steven studied music at McGill and Princeton. In 1975 he joined the Faculty of Music at McGill, and in 1987 won a Juno Award for Classical Composition of the Year. In 1992 he became dean of the Conservatory of Music at Purchase College in Westchester County in New York State. He has also worked at the Citadel Military College of South Carolina and Rider University in New Jersey. Over the decades Steven has composed dozens of classical works.

* at the time of this publication there is no Raftsmen version of “Something To Sing About” available to link to YouTube. If this changes, I’ll update the version of the song above which currently links to the version by The Travellers.

June 13, 2025
Ray McGinnis

References:
Michael Brown, Bruce Eder, Linda Monks, Rich Schuette, “The Raftsmen,” Canadianbands.com. April 11, 2022.
“Donald Steven,” Wikipedia.com.
Paul DeRienzo, “Oscar Brand: He’s still playing in the AM band,” The Villager, December 18, 2014.
Audie Cornish, “Oscar Brand, Host Of WNYC’s ‘Folksong Festival,’ Dies At 96,” NPR, October 4, 2016.
The Raftsmen, “Down In The Valley“, 1961.

CJAD 800-AM Montreal (PQ) December 14, 1963