Joe Hampson; Bassist with The Travellers
Hyfler/Rosner
Bassist with The Travellers wrote protest songs and was a
spectacular dancer
F. F. LANGAN
Special to The Globe and Mail
Joe Hampson played with the folk group The Travellers for
more than 40 years, and last played with them at the
Canadian Auto Workers convention in August last year. "The
Travellers are the entertainers of choice for union
conventions and NDP meetings," said his daughter Randi
Hampson, a Toronto family lawyer. "He had a deep involvement
all his life with many causes. I remember growing up with
the ideas of Cesar Chavez and the Californian farm workers.
There was always something like that around the house." Talk
About Peace was Mr. Hampson's signature song, an anti-war
ballad he wrote during the Vietnam era.
There's a whole lot of people in this old world living on
nothing but hate /
If things don't change around pretty soon, it's going to be
too late. Those are the first two lines of the song, and
these are the last two before the chorus: You better listen
to the people when they talk about peace, / Hear the
children when they call.
"It's as relevant today as it was 35 years ago," said his
wife Sharon.
The Travellers hit their peak of popularity during the
protest era of the mid- to late 1960s and early 1970s, which
coincided with the Vietnam War. "The group was popular on
university campuses during the 1960s and early 1970s,
corresponding with the years of campus unrest, and its LP of
labour songs, A Century of Song (1967), established The
Travellers' profile in the Canadian labour movement," says
the Canadian Encyclopedia of Music. Centennial year, 1967,
was one of the busiest for The Travellers, and they
performed more than 100 concerts across Canada.
All during his time with the group, Mr. Hampson wrote music,
not just for The Travellers but for his wife, who is the
Sharon of the group Sharon, Lois and Bram. Although it might
be easy to slot Joe Hampson as a bearded folk singer, he was
much more. For one thing, there were few years when he could
make a living just playing for The Travellers, so he did
other work.
For a long time he was a carpenter building sets on dozens
of movie projects in Toronto. He also renovated houses as a
general contractor working all over Toronto and designed
furniture.
He was a computer fiend who got into personal computers just
as the first models were coming out in the late 1970s and
early 1980s. He spent a lot of time advising his friends and
family on their computer problems.
Joe Hampson grew up Indianapolis, Ind. He didn't have much
of a socialist background. His father Joseph owned a coal
mine and was once given a terrible beating by striking coal
miners. He had gone out to reason with them but they made
him run the gantlet and hit him with baseball bats and
sticks.
His mother Dorothy played the piano in silent-movie houses,
although she soon gave that up since Joe was born four
months after the first "talkie" hit movie theatres, doing
away with the pianist's job. His mother did make sure he had
grounding in music.
He was also religious as a young man and trained to be a
clergyman. Although he died "a pseudo secular Jewish
atheist" -- his wife's description -- he studied to be an
Episcopalian (Anglican) priest at the University of Western
Kentucky. After he dropped out, he moved to Los Angeles and
drifted into the edges of the entertainment business.
At one stage he applied to join into the U.S. military but
was turned down because of a trick knee. In spite of the bad
knee, he mastered ballroom dancing, working for the Arthur
Miller dance studios -- and competing in dance contests with
the owner's wife, Catherine Murray, as a partner. Joe
Hampson was a spectacular dancer all his life and loved to
show off. He last did a turn on the dance floor at a wedding
in May of last year.
He opened several studios for the Arthur Murray group,
including one in Oklahoma City. As well as teaching dancing,
he also played in bands. One of his musical partners, John
Horton, recalled he walked into the Gourd Club in Oklahoma
City in 1957 and asked if he could join in.
"I told him no. But he persisted [and] noticed we had an old
stand-up bass that was in pretty bad shape. He asked if he
could repair it, would we let him play? He fixed it and
joined us," said Mr. Horton.
This was the beatnik era, when poetry recitals and folk
music filled coffee houses. Mr. Hampson and John Horton
played folk music with a few groups, the main ones being The
Wayfarers and the Phoenix Singers. One of the early partners
in the group was Mason Williams, a guitar player who
composed the hit Classical Gas and was a regular on the
Smothers Brothers' TV show.
They branched out and played at rodeos as back-up for an
actor called Dale Robertson. He was famous for his role as a
Jim Hardie, a troubleshooter in the TV series Tales of Wells
Fargo. Mr. Horton recalled that they didn't play country
music at rodeos, but stuck to folk.
On one occasion, the two men were playing back-up for a
black group in Virginia Beach, Va. It was 1963, and Mr.
Horton remembered Martin Luther King had been through town
just the week before. When they went to get their motel
rooms, the owner told them there were no rooms for the black
musicians.
"We said you can have our rooms," recalled Mr. Horton. All
of a sudden there were no rooms for anyone. The two men
decided they couldn't ignore the issue so they called the
sheriff who settled the dispute by escorting everyone to a
friendlier motel.
There was a more pleasant incident a couple of years earlier
when the group was playing in Denver and Mr. Hampson spotted
a young folk singer in the audience. He announced that he
was going to marry her, and he did, although it was two
years later.
She was Sharon Trostin from Toronto. At first the couple
lived in Indianapolis, but Mr. Hampson was asked by the
singer Jimmy Rodgers -- whose biggest hit was Honeycomb --
whether he wanted to play with his group. Joe and Sharon
Hampson moved to Los Angeles. After a couple of years she
became homesick and they returned to Toronto and stayed
there. It was 1964, and the next year Joe Hampson joined The
Travellers. He stayed in Canada for the rest of his life.
Along with playing bass in The Travellers, he was trained as
a timpanist -- someone who plays the kettle drums,
triangles, glockenspiel and other percussion instruments in
a symphony orchestra. He was listed as a timpanist with the
musicians' union and 10 years ago he started playing with
the North York Concert Orchestra. They honoured him at a
concert in December.
Joseph Lawrence Hampson was born on Feb. 19, 1928, in
Indianapolis. He died of lung cancer, although he had quit
smoking decades ago, in Toronto on Nov. 30. He is survived
by his wife Sharon, his daughter Randi and his sons Geoff
and Joe.