Video: David Gogo

Blues Guitarist David Gogo is sitting outside on a wicker chair playing guitar. Behind him are trees, part of the Gogo Christmas Tree Farm.

[Music]

[David Gogo] I’m a professional musician, have been my whole life.

I have six Juno nominations, five losses, and one disqualification.

For a little while, when my son was first born, I was living in South Wellington, and I really got into the history of the area. Particularly coal mining because I knew that on my dad’s side of the family that his dad and both of his grandfathers were involved in mining. In fact, one of them was even killed in an accident.

I read about an incident that happened where 19 miners were drowned in a highly preventable situation, and you know,w the old mines once they were abandoned on Vancouver Island they’re very deep mines that fill with water right away, so these guys were going in between two old workings and the inevitable happened. They were told to keep going even though they knew they were getting too close, and they blasted through,h and the water just took them all out.

So it took them a couple of months to pump all the water out, and recover their bodies and in the book Boss Whistle [by Lynne Bowen] one of the old-timers remembers that they found one of the workers was way down in the mine and he had one arm wrapped around a timber, like a support timber in the mine, and the other arm he was holding his teenage son. And that’s the way they found him.

So, being a new dad and everything, that really hit me. But then, the weirdest thing was when I went to write the song and it was pretty much written, I decided to go down to the Nanaimo Museum and also talk to some people in Ladysmith and get you know, any kind of information I could get.

I found out from an old newspaper article that one of my great-grandfathers was in fact, killed in that that accident.

Yeah, so I’m reading the names of these guys and then I like, oh, Samuel Wardle that was my great-grandfather. Oh wow!

[Music… David Gogo singing and playing his song about the mining accident called She’s Breaking Through]

[D.G.]The water flows from the North End of the valley, clean on down to Alexandria mine, we’re stuck between there and the Southfield, I think we’re digging on borrowed time.

There’s flooding in the old shafts all around us, I can smell that swamp water leaking through, but you know you can’t complain to the boss man, you’ll be on the blacklist, then what you gonna do?

Well, Dunsmuir wouldn’t show us his old maps. But we got some from Western Fuel, they said everything is fine, we’re 200 yards from the line, but they didn’t check the scale that was used. She’s breaking through, boys, she’s breaking through, and there’s nothing we can do.

No more will you see the sunshine, she’s breaking through boys, she’s breaking through, and there’s nothing we can do, so come hold me son one more time…

[Music ends]

[D.G.] When I first saw the Morden Tipple, it was great because it’s so unique and it’s like one of only two [tipples] in North America that are left. It’s just such a magnificent structure, and I really felt passionate about saving it. But now, I see they actually are saving the structure. So yay!

[Music]