The Third Coast is an permeable border shared by Canada and the United States. Both have East and West Coasts. Canada has the Far North, and the U.S. has the Gulf. But the Great Lakes region is their common coast, shared with the indigenous people. The coast is marked by border towns that have (until the pandemic) allowed a free flow of culture. Troubadour Ron Leary has a longstanding interest in the Detroit-Windsor border from a music industry and cultural perspective. He has performed throughout Canada, but he thrives on the cultural fusion that occurs as he goes from the relatively “small town” of Windsor to Detroit — at least before the border was locked down by the pandemic.
Leary’s interest in the music culture of the region is academic as well. He focused his master’s work on the Great Lakes region through the remarkable story of CKLW. In the 1960s, the regional manufacturing economy was humming, largely driven by the automotive industry. Detroit was also producing great pop music: its trademark Motown soul music and the hard rock typified by the MC-5, Stooges, and later White Stripes. Detroit had radio stations, but for what can only be explained as an accident of history, a Canadian station adopted a dynamic format, with a remarkable music director and sensational news department. “The Big 8” took the best of Detroit rock and Motown, mixed it with required “Canadian content” and produced a dynamo that had listeners throughout the region, dipping deep into Ohio and well into Michigan. It dominated the pop music market for over 30 years offering a format that mixed music common to white and black audiences in a way that had no precedent nor a successor.
In his University of Windsor paper, “Breaking the States: Windsor’s Gateway Radio Market (1967-1999),” Leary focused on CKLW and 89X, a later, edgier format that held a measure of popularity. His paper was as much a study of the local radio industry as a cultural statement. The study is worth considering from that perspective. What’s interesting is a comment regarding the struggle of Canadian artists to define a musical culture within the dominance of the Americans — ironically, through a Canadian broadcasting signal:
“Concern has been centered upon the aesthetics of Canadian music created throughout the second half of the 20th Century, and how it fails to separate and distinguish itself from American popular music. An aesthetics approach seems almost absurd when considered within a borderlands context such as Windsor, though, which is so heavily integrated regionally with its American neighbor. The cultural fluidity of the region is extensive, as seen through the daily cross-border flow of business, workers, leisure seekers and the numerous intermarried Canadian-American families on both sides of the border. To imagine a uniquely distinct Canadian culture developing separate of this daily experience is unimaginable. Thus the aesthetics-based arguments on Canadian music are non-applicable within such a borderlands context. Cultural influence crosses the border freely in both directions and this is experienced especially through the media broadcasting. This reality would prove to be a significant obstacle for the federal government in applying its cultural nationalist agenda and would result in a watered down version for the border communities.”
Leary, who also hosts “Traveling Salesmen Radio Hour,” a radio show on a college-based station in Windsor, CJAM, has taken his interest beyond the the music industry to explore the broader question of what the culture of the Ontario region is, as reflected in song. “I’m a traveling songwriter. I’ve always had this sort of weird feeling that I’m like a used car salesman traveling across the country, singing songs, picking up here and there.” Leary is researching the music of the area north of Lake Superior on down to Lake Erie. “Ontario is a really big province,” he says. “You can drive from Toronto to the Manitoba border and it would take you 24 hours. Up in northern Ontario the songs tend to be more resource based — a lot of mining songs, lumber songs, resource extractions, working class songs…In Southern Ontario it’s more commercial, attached to New York ad Michigan.” Unlike the Canadian West and East coasts, Ontario doesn’t really have an identity. It has a lot of territory, a lot of Canadians, but its culture isn’t really evident — outside of the American influence. Yet, along the border there is a sense of place, he says — a fusion of what it means to be in an industrialized region.
When he’s not touring, Leary conducts research for Canadian universities. He’s interested in another aspect of the region’s shared culture — the Underground Railroad, which connects Black Americans and Canadians. He’s fascinated that as CKLW was pumping Stevie Wonder hits hundreds of miles an every direction, he and other Motown acts were playing small venues in Chatham, Ontario. Their fans from Detroit followed them to the shows, likely to join relatives and friends in Canada.
Leary says life in the border space of Windsor-Detroit is unlike anywhere else in Canada. “I have a lot of really close friends in Detroit. A couple years of being disconnected from that has been a real drag.” Leary looks at culture partially through a historical lens noting that the narrowing of the waterway was at one time all French territory — a settlement on the northern side and one on the southern side. Even with the border, it has really all been one natural place. Only when the the United States implemented Homeland Security measures following the 911 terrorist attacks, and then the pandemic shutdown of the border from both sides, did it feel like Leary was stuck in another place, with radio now longer carrying the music culture across the border as it once did, even if it was a Canadian radio station broadcasting mostly American music.
Post written by Dennis Archambault
Photo of Ron Leary provided by Ron Leary
