Ron Nigrini

Ron Nigrini spent more than half a century singing his own songs in coffee houses, folk clubs, dance halls and concert halls across Canada, the United States and Europe. A singer, songwriter, guitarist and craftsman, he was the first artist signed to Attic Records, took the Oscar-winning 'I'm Easy' onto the national charts in 1976, and came back in the 1980s on his own Oasis label with 'Baby I'm A Lot Like You', a hit at both adult contemporary and country radio. His warm, unhurried style drew comparisons to Jim Croce and Harry Chapin.

Born in 1948, Ron was playing professionally in Toronto as a teenager. In 1965 he started playing with his friends Ken Harris and Don Heard, first as the folk group The Coachmen and later as the folk-rock band Dan's Heard. With Dan's Heard they opened for The Mamas and The Papas in front of 10,000 fans at Maple Leaf Gardens in 1967. The show led to a two-week stand at the Penny Farthing in Yorkville, the centre of Toronto's coffee house scene.

In 1969 he spent time in New York with Tim Hardin, a strong influence on his writing. The following year he went out on his own, spending two years crossing the United States on the coffee house and college circuit, booked by Marilyn Lipsius of Campus Directions in New York. He played the Midwest, Texas and New England and went down into Mexico. The country was in upheaval over the Vietnam War and the rise of the American Indian Movement, and both found their way into songs such as 'Montana Plain', 'American Sons' and 'Soldiers'.

Back in Canada in 1972, he wrote radio and television commercials with A&M Records singer Michael Hasek and joined Entertainment Nightly, a band fronted by the dynamic singer Sara Ellen Dunlop. They held down a year-long residency at the Arlington Hotel in Collingwood, six nights a week with a Saturday matinee.

In 1974 Ron went to the Colonial Tavern in Toronto to hear one of his favourite songwriters, Jesse Winchester, and met Tom Williams, who was then starting Attic Records with Alexander Mair. Williams asked for a demo, liked what he heard and signed him. Ron was the first artist on the new label, and he was so laid back that the Attic team nicknamed him Flash. His first single, 'Letters' backed with 'Simply Flowers', came out in 1974. The album Ron Nigrini (LAT 1000), produced by Dennis Murphy, followed in the spring of 1975, along with the single 'Lost In Colorado' backed with 'Kitty Star'. The LP grew out of the folk songs he had written on the road, among them 'Signs', 'Horses', 'Red Clouds' and 'Song Of The Spirit', and added Dennis Linde's 'Kitty Starr' and a version of The Band's 'The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down'. It drew good reviews while he kept working the bars and coffee houses.

The song that broke him nationally was 'I'm Easy', written by Keith Carradine for Robert Altman's film Nashville. Attic issued Ron's version in 1975 (AT-116, backed with 'For Someone On The Road'), and after the song won the Academy Award in the spring of 1976 the label sent it back out to radio. By July it was on 123 stations across the country and climbing the RPM Top 100, and some critics preferred it to Carradine's own recording. RCA released it in the United States, where Carradine's version had already charted. It anchored his second album, Rich Things (LAT 1010, 1976), again produced by Dennis Murphy, with Bruce Pennycook's string and brass arrangements giving his songs a fuller sound. It made the RPM album chart. Alongside 'I'm Easy' it carried originals such as 'Trillium', 'Jainie', 'Molly', 'You're The Reason' and the title song. That summer he played the Atlantic Folk Festival near Halifax, the Home County Folk Festival in London and Hamilton's Festival of Friends, and in the fall he played live guitar as the score for an Open Circle Theatre production in Toronto. On November 19 he shared an Attic showcase at the University of Toronto's Convocation Hall with labelmates Ken Tobias and Shirley Eikhard, backed by John Stockfish on bass and Aden Mason on guitar, in a concert CHUM-FM taped for later broadcast. The hit brought work with Kenny Rogers, Roberta Flack and David Bromberg, an East Coast tour with Hagood Hardy that ended with shows together at Massey Hall and Ontario Place, and appearances on The Tommy Hunter Show and CBC Radio's Morningside with Peter Gzowski. He rounded out the decade with folk festivals, club dates and studio work as a singer and guitarist.

Around 1980 Ron and John Stockfish went to Los Angeles to record demos of new songs with some of the city's leading session players. Ron stayed on with management there for more than a year and toured the West Coast with the Hawaiian act Cecilio and Kapono. Back in Canada in 1981, he returned to the club circuit and took small film roles, among them a musician at the camp in Ticket to Heaven (1981).

He went back into the studio in 1983, this time on his own label, Oasis Records, which he set up to release singles. One session produced 'Baby I'm A Lot Like You' along with 'Secrets', 'Thin Line' and 'If I Lose You', all his own songs. The single (OA-5351) came out that fall, around the time he opened for Roberta Flack at Ontario Place, and by the end of December it had climbed to No. 14 on the RPM Contemporary Adult chart and crossed onto the Country 50. Its earnings paid for the next Oasis singles, including 'Secrets' in 1984, and eventually for an album.

The Drift (OA 1200), released in 1986, was his first album in about a decade. Produced by Ron Burrows, Bob DiSalle and Tony Laviola at Marigold Studios and McClear Place in Toronto, it gathered songs written over eight years. Its working title was Thin Line until Ron decided the title song summed up the collection better. 'If I Lose You' began as a commission from someone hoping to win back a former partner; Ron rewrote the last verse for the album and sang it as a duet with Shirley Eikhard, an old friend from his Attic days. He credited Hoagy Carmichael's touch for the melody and chords of 'Puppet', and wrote the uptempo country bar song 'All Night Shoes' purely for fun.

With his band Western Radio, Ron toured France in 1993, 1995 and 1997, playing Le Scenario in Paris and the Rock 'n' Roll America stage at Disneyland Paris. In 1993 the band also began a 25-year run playing the Harvest Dance at Commanda Hall in northern Ontario every September. With Western Radio and producer Garth Mosbaugh he made his fourth album, Above The Noise.

Songs From Turtle Island followed in 2002, produced by Paul Mills, the roots producer behind nearly all of Stan Rogers' albums. The release concert at Hugh's Room, the Toronto folk club, with Rodney St. Amand, Mitch Lewis and Anne Lindsay backing him, became an annual show that ran for 18 years and drew guests from across the Toronto scene.

In 2003 Ron moved to northern Ontario, where he teamed up with the North Bay blues guitarist Jake Thomas and played the north as a duo. He recorded Undisguised Hearts in 2009 at Andy McClelland's Silversmith Barns Studio in Commanda, and returned in 2013 to make Directions Home with McClelland producing and Thomas helping bring it together. The album took stock of where people stood in an increasingly fractured and troubled world. Over the next few years he also travelled to San Antonio, Mexico, to play benefit concerts in the town.

His last album, The Quiet, came out in 2019 and launched a farewell tour, mostly through Ontario. It ended with a final concert at Hugh's Room and a solo show presented by Jazz at the Junction at the West Ferris Legion in North Bay, billed as the close of 52 years of professional performing. Ron retired from performing in 2020 and settled into a quiet life in northern Ontario with his wife, Maryanna.

-Robert Williston