The Warm Maritimes b/w When I See Rivers

Barry Stagg was born in Montreal on April 9, 1944, and lived there for his first twenty-nine years. An only child in a home filled with books and classical records, he wrote his first song, ‘Linda’, at eleven. He took up guitar at thirteen and soon formed his first group, the Triumphs, playing YMCA dances and school shows around the city.

After university Barry met Montreal songwriter Anthony “Tony” Green, who encouraged him to record. They made a simple two-track demo with Ben Kaye, who brought it to Daniel Lazare at Gamma Records. The result was the 1969 album Anthony Green & Barry Stagg, Gamma’s first English-language release, and its opening track, ‘To Love Means to Be Free’, which Gamma released as a single early in 1970. The song reached No. 42 on the RPM 100 and No. 3 on RPM’s Canadian content chart, and was licensed to United Artists in the United States, Barclay in France and EMI in Australia and New Zealand. BMI Canada gave it a 1969 Certificate of Honour. The duo appeared on CTV’s Nashville North with Anne Murray, Bobby Bare and Sylvia Tyson, and Barry also remembers a television spot with Kenny Rogers and the First Edition. Green and Stagg followed with ‘Face of the Sun’ and later singles on London Records.

At twenty-nine Barry left Montreal for Nova Scotia, his home for more than three decades. He kept writing and performing wherever work was available, and his long friendship with Ben Kaye helped secure a contract with RCA Records. He recorded his self-titled 1978 album in Halifax at Audio Atlantic with East Coast players he trusted, including a brass section and background singers familiar from CBC broadcasts, among them Karen Oxley. Looking back, Barry laughed about hearing his younger self on tape: “On that album… I sound like Donny Osmond. Now I sound more like Tom Waits and Rod Stewart.” The record produced singles including ‘Blue’, ‘Children of the Dream’ and ‘My Town’, written about his adopted town of Truro.

In the 1980s Barry turned to the stage. With theatre director Norman Hines he co-founded the NOSCO Academy of Theatre Arts, which grew to four campuses in Canada and the United States. By his own count he wrote roughly two hundred musicals over the next three decades, twelve of them full-length operas, and thousands of young performers passed through the academy. His first opera, Sometimes We Die, starred Raylene Rankin in its only female role, and another ran for seven consecutive weeks in Buffalo, New York.

In 2002 Barry was commissioned to write Psalms From the Ark, a sixteen-piece musical work for the High Country Youth Ballet in Spruce Pine, North Carolina. In 2008, after marrying Dr. Barbara Stagg, a physician, he moved permanently to the Blue Ridge Mountains. In 2013 the couple opened The Dispensary & Upper Club in Spruce Pine, a small venue for local musicians and touring artists. In November 2025 he was still playing there every Tuesday night with a group of long-time collaborators.

He kept recording throughout. Slaughterhouse of Love (2004), made in Truro with Dan Doiron from songs first written for his stage works, is one he still counts among his best. No More Mountains to Cross (2009) and One Heart at a Time carried him into Americana and roots radio. ‘Private Edwin Jennison’ won him Songwriter of the Year at the Southern Heritage Music Awards, and ‘Appalachian Prayer’ reached No. 1 on Cashbox’s Americana chart. The double album One Heart at a Time, its cover built around a photograph of his parents as a young couple, led to a 20-city U.S. television promotional tour.

Since then he has completed a double album, Let the Soul Speak, and a fourteen-song collection, Reflections, paired with a book of nearly two hundred spiritual meditations drawn from his daily writing. Later singles including ‘Shine a Little Light’, ‘Crazy Love’ and ‘Always Requested On the Road’ found play on American and Canadian radio, and ‘Crazy Love’ reached No. 1 on the Cashbox Traditional Country chart. He has performed at MIDEM in Cannes, Live at Heart in Sweden, Lilla By Festivalen and Indie Week in Toronto.

Barry divides his time between North Carolina and Canada and keeps his ties to Nova Scotia. More than six decades into his career, he is still writing, recording and performing. As he put it in our November 13, 2025 interview: “After all these years, I’m still holding on to the bugs. I’m still doing it… every day I’m writing and I’m recording all the time.”

-Robert Williston