Paul Helstrom

Paul Helstrom was a Saskatchewan farmer-singer from Gray, a small prairie community southeast of Regina, whose privately issued recordings preserve a warm mixture of church-singing tradition, old sentimental favourites, prairie humour, and Scandinavian-Canadian novelty material. Born in 1908, Helstrom came from a family rooted in the treeless wheat country around Gray, where his parents had settled in 1905. That prairie origin is central to his album Songs I Like To Sing, whose liner notes describe the region’s flat, fertile gumbo soil, wheat fields, summerfallow, harvest colours, and the hard early years when settlers avoided the land because there was no wood, no wells, and the sod was too rough for horses.

Helstrom’s music was not made for the commercial pop market. It belonged to church gatherings, family occasions, local halls, and the kind of community entertainment that existed before rural performers were separated from their audiences by industry machinery. Local-history references remember him singing solos in church, and his first known LP, A Treasurechest Of Old Favorites As Sung By Paul Helstrom, appears to have been recorded around 1962 with organ accompaniment by Sharon Frei and Ron Moats at church locations in the Regina area. That earlier record placed him firmly in the sacred and sentimental vocal tradition.

His second self-released album, Songs I Like To Sing, appeared in 1972 and shows another side of his personality. Credited as Paul Helstrom Sings With Ron Moats, the album pairs Helstrom’s vocals with Moats’ electric organ, and on “The Old Wooden Rocker”, a seventy-year-old reed organ. The first side is billed as “Enjoyabul Scandihoovian Toons,” leaning into rural Scandinavian-Canadian humour with songs such as “The Poor, Poor Farmer,” “Aunt Freda’s Enjoying Poor Healt’,” “The Picnic Song,” “Goin Back To Whur I Cum Frum,” “Hilda, Oh Hilda,” and “I Yust Go Nuts At Christmas.” The second side shifts toward familiar favourites including “El Rancho Grande,” “Lucky Old Sun,” “Galway Bay,” “Danny Boy,” and “The Old Wooden Rocker.”

The album’s liner notes reveal Helstrom’s own sense of purpose. He describes the record as a collection of songs he and Ron Moats liked and hoped others would enjoy too, moving from comic prairie characters and homemade dialect humour to Mexico, Ireland, the American South, and old parlour sentiment. He gives special thanks to Ellis Howlett, who recorded the sessions, and to Moats for his organ accompaniment, calling the project “a family effort,” with Helstrom, their uncle, supplying the vocal. That family-and-community setting is essential to the record’s charm.

The cover image also places the album deeply in Saskatchewan. Helstrom explains that the colour photograph was an aerial view of his hometown of Gray, taken by noted photographer George Hunter. The image had previously appeared on the cover of Imperial Oilways and in Kramer News in January 1966, and Helstrom thanked Kramer Tractor Ltd., the Saskatchewan Caterpillar equipment dealer, for the loan of the colour materials. For Helstrom, the image was not decorative; it was a visual statement of origin, showing “God’s green earth turn to gold at harvest time.”

Helstrom died in 1992, but his two private LPs remain small, distinctive documents of Saskatchewan vernacular music. They preserve the voice of a prairie farmer who sang from the world he knew: church pews, family gatherings, wheatland humour, immigrant memory, sentimental standards, and the stubborn pride of a community built on open land. Songs I Like To Sing is exactly what its title promises — not a commercial bid for fame, but a personal record of songs, stories, family, and place.

-Robert Williston