Morrison Lake
My uncle Joe Kelly had a cottage in Muskoka when we were growing up. Muskoka is an area of 6735 square kilometers in central Ontario. Its most southern boundary lies about 160 kilometers from Toronto. If you’re lucky, and the traffic is up to speed, you can do it in an hour and 40 minutes.
Morrison Lake is a little further. The drive from our home in Mississauga took about two and a half hours.
My brother Pat and I loved it up there. Swimming, water skiing, toasting marshmallows, treats from the little store 20 minutes by boat across the lake, radios always tuned to the rock station and our very cool cousins Susan and Paul who were hipper than anyone at home and a lot of fun. Susan inspired the theme of the song you can listen to at the bottom of this post. She told us that the cottage at Morrison Lake had been her anchor. She passed away just a few years ago. The song is dedicated to her.
Geography Lesson
It was just such a different world. The topography changes drastically as you get 25 minutes north of Gord’s hometown, Orillia. Granite, pine, lakes, rivers…..the Canadian Shield.
Southern Ontario, where we live, is mostly rolling farmland. The sudden change is almost spooky in the evening twilight, which was the time of day we usually crossed the Severn river, gateway to Muskoka.
We would arrive Friday night and leave late afternoon on Sunday two or three times each summer. Occasionally we’d stay a week.
Timeline
We went up twice in 1967, and that was it for 47 years. It wasn’t until 2014 that we (Pat, my sisters Mary and Jane, plus a handful of nieces, nephews, and spouses) decided to rent a cottage just a few properties down the road from Uncle Joe’s. He and Aunt Marg had passed a few years previously, but son Paul and his wife Sue were still there. Also, Susan had a cottage just three doors down.
Storm Clouds
A word or two about 1967: when we arrived at the lake on August 5th, we were still shell-shocked. Our mother had passed away in late March after battling cancer for 18 months. We were a very young family. Mary was six and Jane just four. Pat was fourteen, and I was thirteen. How we were able to pull together and not just prosper but thrive as a family over the next crucial 15 years is for another blog post. For now, I will just say that my father and brother entered into an incredible collaboration with little apparent plan or discussion, and because of this selfless sharing of responsibilities, most of the needs of a growing family were met.
I think of that weekend as pivotal. My father said later it was the first time he’d had any fun in two years. There were six adults and sixteen kids spread between two cottages and a small house trailer. Right off the bat, Mike Kelly and I got some singalong tunes together on our guitars, and that first night we had a hootenanny on the screen porch that ended up with all the kids over twelve in the water fully clothed for a late-night dip. The adults likely weren’t pleased, but we couldn’t stop laughing in outrageous adolescent euphoria long enough to notice.
It would take another post to relate all the antics of that weekend and at least one more to describe the feeling of sunshine peeking through that grey cirrus canopy we had lived under for two years.
Genesis
The idea of vacationing at the lake germinated in a pub near Chicago. Mike Kelly (cousin of my cousin Paul) and his wife Colleen had come out to a show we did in St. Charles, Illinois, in March of 2014. Afterward, we met in the bar at my hotel. We came up with a plan to gather at Morrison Lake in July.
As things were getting organized in April, I exchanged a few emails with Paul Kelly. He half-jokingly suggested that I should write a song about the place.
I thought about it and decided to wait until I got there. That way, I could enlist someone to collaborate with who had been there more often than once in 47 years.
The Song
So the first day I was up there, I asked Mike Kelly to write a few lines about the lake and come see me the next day to write a song. He was skeptical, but he showed up, and together (including the lead singer, my sister Jane), we wrote a rough draft of the lyrics. We worked them into a melody and song structure I’d already composed and we were happening.
On Thursday of that week, we had a party at our cottage. The twenty or so people attending were either residents or were visitors who had been to the lake many times. I had a keyboard, a few guitars, and a PA that I had brought up with me, and over the week we had put together a little band.
Jane ….Lead and background vocals
Francie (niece) ……Keyboard bass and background vocal
Vinnie Boom Batz (nephew) … Lead guitar
Mitch (Francie’s boyfriend) ….Second Lead guitar
Me …. Guitar, Keyboards, and vocals
We played the new tune “Morrison Lake” after some instructions I gave to the crowd. “When cued,” I told them “yell Morrison Lake as if it was a hockey or ball team you’re cheering for.”
We were set up to record the voices to use them later in a professional studio production.
I thought it worked well. Judge for yourself. By the way, I’m aware that the first two lines are plagiarized. I knew it when I wrote it. Let the Gershwin estate sue me. There’s nothing like high profile litigation to advance a songwriters career.