One was a visionary who helped build Alberta’s music industry by shepherding talent behind the scenes. The other was a guitar-wielding, story-telling virtuoso who lived it on stage.
Neil MacGonigill and Tim Williams, both 77, were Albertans deeply connected to their province’s ranches, ranges and other rural locales, and both were eulogized last week in the legislature.
A promoter, a manager and a label owner, MacGonigill helped point Longview icon Ian Tyson towards a cowboy poet focus imbued with the ranching culture of the Alberta foothills. He also worked with Jann Arden, k.d. lang, Billy Cowsill, Diamond Joe White and others. After hearing Paul Brandt, he helped the future Canadian country star land a record deal.
Innisfail-born MacGonigill, who died suddenly in Calgary Oct. 31, executive produced the ground-breaking Tyson album Old Corrals and Sagebrush in 1983. He’s credited with helping create the cowboy music genre and prying western music away from the more pop-oriented country of the day coming out of the American South.
Joe Ceci, the NDP’s arts and culture critic, told the legislature that MacGonigill had an encyclopedic knowledge of music and demonstrated a steadfast commitment to artists. MacGonigill believed that success in the industry is about the song and how it’s delivered.
“Neil’s influence helped put Alberta on the map in the music industry, and his encouragement shaped countless careers,” said Ceci, the member for Calgary-Buffalo.
Williams was a folk and blues guitarist and performer who stepped aside from the industry for 14 years to be a ranch-hand and wrangler in Western Canada, after moving north from California.
A fixture on the rural music circuit, his documented appearances include the North Country Fair in Driftpile as far back as 1991, the Tongue on the Post winter festival in Medicine Hat, and the historic venues of the Empress Theatre in Fort Macleod and Fensala Hall in Markerville.
He didn’t just sing about horses. He bore scars from them.
“I had a couple of wrecks with horses that kept me from being able to sleep more than a few hours at a time over a period of several years,” Williams once told the Okotoks Western Wheel in an interview before a Turner Valley concert.
“I would sit down and play the guitar and the thing that I always played to put my mind at ease and put me in a place where I could go back to sleep was the blues.”
Williams, who died of cancer in a Calgary hospital Nov. 28, put out an album in 2010 called When I Was a Cowboy. In the liner notes, he explained that the songs were not covers — they were reportage.
The songs were traditional cowboy tunes I learned from family and friends and stuff that I wrote when that was the life I lived,” he explained.
Ceci called Williams “a master guitarist, storyteller and mentor whose passion for blues and roots music inspired generations.”
But his impact went beyond chords and melodies. “Tim was known for his kindness, humility and his ability to make every performance a lesson in history and heart.”
Williams and MacGonigill were “remarkable figures who shaped Calgary’s music community and left an indelible mark on Alberta’s cultural landscape,” Ceci said.
