Songwriter
Story Teller Extrodinaire
Bob Chartier, a true late bloomer, started singing in the sixties … his age not the famous decade. He found his buried voice at FAMI camp and for the past dozen years he sings every day, has written over 100 songs and has performed in venues such as the Ness Creek Bluegrass and Old Tyme Festival and the Water Valley Music Festival.
He was one of the founders of the Music Mile project that saw a music district formed in the heart of Calgary. He founded and hosts the Songwriters in the Round at the Gravity Café on the Music Mile in Inglewood.
He has a number of impromptu music accomplices (The Coffee Row Orchestra) who try to make him look good … Bob is a singer songwriter and performs many of his own songs as well as a variety of Roots/Americana type cover songs. He is partial to gospel but stops at taking up a collection …
A taste of Bob’s songwriting. More examples are on his video page.
My first hockey here was also the first indigenous player to make the NHL. Fred Sasakamoose come home from Chicago to burn up the local league and make us young guys crazy for his slapshot. It was a thrill to meet him and give him a copy of the song.
A song inspirted by a short story found on the internet of parents putting money away each month to provide for a better life for their children and grandchildren. And the personal experience with a “dumpster diving” grandma. An apt story in these times when the economy is hurting so many.
This piece was written through a grandfather’s tender eye as he watches his four granddaughters grow up on horseback and heartache.
Written during the August 2013 FAMI Songwriting class with Tim Williams and recorded live during the Open Stage at camp.
Runner up in the ATB Alberta Songwriter’s Contest 2013
Gone – written by Bob in 2010.
A tune written for my father reflecting on how trucks, dogs, towns, boots and people were once about the work they helped us do not the fashion statement they made.
One of the first songs I wrote when I started singing over ten years ago. Inspired by a childhood friend and mentor, Howard Roberts who never walked, used crutches instead of a wheelchair because of the black dirt mud of the farmyard. He worked twelve-hour days on the farm by converting all the implements to hand controls. When his old 1957 Harmony Newport came into my life, the song came alive and Tim Williams picking made it sing. Kit Johnson was on the bass.
Another piece for my father written with deep respect for the blue collar world of journeymen and craft.
A song written about the joys of singing, playing, dancing and being in community in the old halls in rural Saskatchewan. I got to play with my farmer friends Larry Marshall, Merle Wood, Irma Brunsdon and her legendary fiddle playing, bandleader husband Don Brunsdon
DAD …
I was moved to write this after listening to a CBC documentary about the death of the upright piano. I can stand a lot if things ending up in a landfill but draw the emotional line at musical instruments.