Chris's Picks: Candy Man, Salty Dog

[By Christopher Eckart, from the Fall 2025 issue]

There are 32 tracks on Sharon, Lois and Bram’s 1978 debut album One Elephant, Deux Éléphants and I listened to and loved all of them. I probably got the vinyl record at the age of five in the early eighties. I would listen to it and go on an audio adventure through schoolyard rhymes, big band choruses and world music styles. The voices of three spectacular singers performing many songs together but also singing their own signature songs led me on this journey. Bram Morrison sang a few as a soloist—"Michaud," "Ho Ho Watanay (Iroquois Lullaby)" and "Candy Man, Salty Dog."

The latter song arrives around the middle of side one with a fingerstyle guitar introduction that caught me as a kid and holds me to this day. It’s hard for me now, as a guitar player and songwriter, not to think about harmonic structure and folk fingerstyle techniques, but I can still connect to my child’s mind that heard a sparkling melody, with counterpoint harmony over a steady bass rhythm, all seemingly played by one person on one guitar. How could it be? I wondered, and a little speck of something lodged in me that would take decades to grow into a little pearl, created, year by year, by the need to play guitar like that.

The history of fingerstyle guitar in the U.S. and Canada is the subject of much writing and many YouTube videos. Stefan Grossman is the authority on early American players like Mississippi John Hurt and Rev. Gary Davis and the diverse styles they interpreted and authored. Bram likely found inspiration in the Folk Revival in the U.S. which was going strong in the sixties and chose to adapt and perform the traditional song "Candy Man, Salty Dog" to bring that beautiful folk guitar tradition as well as the element of interactivity central to much folk music to Canadian children and families.

Listening today, I hear and feel that Bram’s "Candy Man, Salty Dog" is a masterpiece of performance, even more so in his vocals than in his expert and effortless guitar playing. He delivers what I think is essential to the best children’s music—humour, play, imagination and interaction. He creates a performance together with the audience of kids we hear in the recording. His singing, his high and low silly voices and most of all, his invitations to follow his random imaginings are beautiful. Once you’ve sung “Salty Dog” in repetition after him, why not sing about Santa Claus and the Gingerbread Man? I learned from that song that if you’re going to captain a zany imaginary journey, kids will sign up to crew it, no questions asked. I sailed on that ship with Bram many times and when I get a chance to set out now, I’m wearing the captain’s hat of a hero from my childhood.