Ruth Purves-Smith often writes songs about the downtrodden and the destitute—good folks on the wrong side of privilege. Take the title track of her new album, Piano in the Field, which tells the story of a homeless woman living on a skiff of land at the edge of the road near Purves-Smith’s rural Alberta hamlet. The woman moved her son and worldly belongings to the field and then lost them one-by-one. First the boy, then her pickup truck and finally—when she herself moved on—the piano was left out to pasture. She just couldn’t get out from under what life had thrown her, a familiar theme in Ruth’s music.
Ruth grew up dividing her time between the city, the ranch and her family’s 100-year old woolen mill in the sticks. Her parents were 70s back-to-the-land bohemians who would collect lichen in the woods and dye fleece in the bathtub before buying the old wool factory. They lived in a train station turned house that they had bought from the province for a dollar. She grew up wild, spending a lot of time alone on the land: building forts in the willow trees, playing in the mud, learning bushcraft and wrangling horses. She often felt so much a part of the natural world that she would forget how to use language altogether. But it would all come back in the evenings as she listened to her parents sing and play guitar by the fireside, her dad’s tenor voice entwining with her step-mom’s birdlike falsetto.
Ruth got a guitar at age ten, a classical Espana model that was easy on her small hands. By the time she was teenager in the pink and aqua haze of the 1980s, she was touring prairie dive bars six nights a week in shorts skirts and big hair as frontwoman for the band Rodeo a Go Go. She played on the Saskatchewan country music television show, “Number One West,” with Brian Sklar and the Tex Pistols. Ruth married the band’s saxophone player, settled down and had kids—but never lost the dream of making music and being on stage.
Fast forward a decade and Ruth got inspired to write her own songs after meeting Fred Eaglesmith. “He wrote about dogs, old ladies and tractors,” Ruth reminisces. “Something just clicked. I realized you could write about what you know.” She knew a lot by then—hardships, a tough marriage and lots of people who had fallen through the cracks in society. “By the time I found out you could write a happy song, it was too late,” she laughs. She had already found her calling. Her first album, Out in the Storm, tracked in the top 100 on MTV but her second outing, Faster than the Speed of Dark, came out when she herself had fallen on hard times.
Ruth’s new album, Piano in the Field, brings her full circle. While her songs are often stories about other people’s lives, they’re also metaphors for her own experience, and the difficulties of modern life writ large. “Call An Angel,” co-written with Fred Kohler (who has collaborated with Nanci Griffith and John Prine), underlines the growing wealth gap in our world. She sings, “Call an angel / call a cop / call in the army / to make it stop.” “Chelsea in the Walmart Parking Lot” is about Ruth giving her last ten dollars to a tear-stained homeless woman she met outside the big box store. The album has two songs dedicated to her late father. “Cross Over to You” starts with a scene of Ruth as a child on a rickety bridge, too scared to cross and in need of her dad’s help. It’s a song she wrote while he was still alive and she hoped he would sing harmony on but he “couldn’t get his head around the song.” She later realized he meant that he couldn’t sing it without crying, which is often true for her now. “Leonard Cohen Cover” includes some old recordings of her dad talking and singing, a ghostly presence in the atmosphere.
Ruth Purves-Smith is back, living out her legacy spinning stories into songs.
(Written by Jayme Stone)