On the Holleford Road near Sydenham, Ontario, there’s a small curve just before you enter the woods. That curve, just by the marsh perfect for spotting turtles on a summer day, will forever be for me the spot where I first heard Ron Hynes. It was the 1st of July, 1997, just after lunchtime. The CBC was playing music from Eastern Canada, the family was driving to the local Canada Day celebrations, and I was hoping we wouldn’t be late for Cow Patty Bingo. Then a song came on the radio that claimed me entirely. Every time I drove that road afterwards, I remembered that first, and marked the bend where I had suddenly become aware that what I was listening to was quite possibly the saddest and the most beautiful song I’d ever heard.

Sitting on the back deck at the house where he lives, I’m thinking about the honesty of the song that found me on the Holleford Road while Hynes tells me that he’s not in most of the songs he writes. “I’m forever trying to remove myself from things,” he says and adds later that he tries on the characters he writes about as if he were trying on different pairs of shoes—that lovely, homely metaphor for empathy. Ah, but it’s always the same feet, I remind him, thinking how shoes shape to a person’s foot, and how those metaphorical shoes shape to the beauty of the mind that slips them on. It’s the emotional honesty and intense yearning, the authenticity and generous humanity that draw me in Hynes’s songs, and it’s those feet that interest me, planted firmly in Newfoundland. Those feet and the man they bear.

They’re as good as bare for much of his most recent CD. The self-titled release includes several songs Hynes wrote while in recovery from substance abuse. He’ll say so openly—so do the songs, and with a depth of feeling, introspection, and maturity at once startling, raw and natural. Having walked so many paths, tried on so many characters, he’s finally come home to writing his own self, or something much closer to that self. The characters aren’t gone, but they are, many of them, more obviously a reflection of his own struggles. “It would be a kind comfort if one kind soul / Would carry this cross for awhile” (Carry this Cross); “It was not the voice of God / It was only rolling thunder / I stood outside the detox / And the night was rent asunder” (Dry): some of these songs plumb depths I can only begin to fathom.

“I’m not shooting for anything; I’m just a songwriter, and an undisciplined songwriter at that,” Hynes says with something between self-effacement and self-awareness. He reflects back to when he started writing almost 40 years ago, and was extremely disciplined, writing every day with everything laid out and organized. He still has every draft of every song he’s ever written stashed away in boxes somewhere, but he doesn’t write that way any more. Sometimes he won’t write for months and then something comes almost fully born. “You get it and it’s so immediate, you know it’s right.”

And because Hynes is the songwriter he is, I do begin to fathom those depths his songs plumb, and hold in my heart, briefly, the lives of the characters he slips into: the mother whose son is strung out, the man standing outside the detox in the rain, the down-on-his-luck Newfoundlander busking in Nashville. And, from earlier CDs, I step for a short time into the lives of the cabbie who picked up a murderer one night, the pregnant teenager who gave up her baby, the man who found a picture of a puppy tucked under his windshield wiper, the woman who lost her husband to the sea.

These people, and these songs, are so completely present, so fully realized, that they are on the way to becoming part of the landscape of Newfoundland, Many already have. Sonny’s Dream is the island’s unofficial anthem, Atlantic Blue the sorrow of a generation. And what better chronicler of the many faces of this island has emerged? His first release, Discovery, was the first album of entirely original material released by a Newfoundland artist. And in the 34 years intervening, Hynes has never stopped being entirely unique or completely of this place.

Steeped in the country music he grew up with, in the Gerald S. Doyle songbooks and All Around the Circle, Hynes writes songs with the same power of those more traditional songs that seem, to me, to express something otherwise unsayable about this island—ballads like The Barque in the Harbour, In Early Spring or The Champion of Court Hill. His songs are profound, simple and spare, unassumingly intelligent and utterly accessible. Their language is almost flawless, and their melodies—poignant, compelling, and always haunting—walk with you long after the last note fades.

It wasn’t until he went to University, in the late 60’s, that Hynes discovered the Peacock collections of traditional Newfoundland songs. He loved to read them, and continues to love that the songs “are still in the world.” “It’s such a comfort,” he says, “to think of those songs, 500 years after they were created, still alive.” A comfort, too, he continues, to think that maybe, years from now, long after he has passed from history, some of his songs might still be sung: sung not as Ron songs, but as songs whose basic humanity has reached across time, and lodged, like so many of the old songs, in the very blood of a people. “In the end,” he says, “the people own the songs.”

It’s been a long time since I’ve driven the Holleford Road, longer still since that 1st of July. Now I think of July 1st as Memorial Day, think of Newfoundland as home, and know that the first time I heard Atlantic Blue, in that curve of the Holleford Road, I found the sublime in the words of a man who has spent most of his lifetime singing his own way through to the heart of his home.

On August 5th, 2006, the SJFAC presented Ron Hynes with its Lifetime Achievement Award for his incalculable contributions to the music and culture of the province.