SUKANEN PIONEER VILLAGE — You can take the boy out of the country but you can’t take the country out of the boy.
That sums up much of Jeffery Straker’s music and songs and his passion for small town and rural Saskatchewan.
He lived under the bright lights of the big city and chose to come back to his home province as depicted in his song One Foot on Main Street.
His performance of that song teared up some of the 90 people attending his concert July 7 at the Sukanen Ship Museum grain elevator.
The passion for Saskatchewan and rural lifestyle also comes through in his storytelling between songs.
The 1913 tin-sided grain elevator, moved here from Mawer, was but one of seven places with grain elevators he selected to perform concerts.
The elevator concerts salute what he calls Prairie Skyscrapers and an “unusual way’’ to announce his new album Big Sky Country.
Straker said he loves the old grain elevators that are slowly disappearing with less than 200 left, down from thousands in earlier days.
His song, More Than Two-By-Fours and Timbers, highlights the elevators.
The Prairie Skyscraper concert tour included Elbow, Riverhurst, Southey, Hepburn, Horizon, Gravelbourg, which has the oldest restored elevator on its original site, and Moose Jaw.
The Horizon show, done in conjunction with the Ogema tourist train, was held in the elevator, thanks to a rain storm.
With everyone on the weigh scale, he weighed the audience — 55,000 pounds for 68 people. He is booked again for Horizon in 2025.
Straker chose elevator sites he had seen. He likes the Sukanen Pioneer Village and enjoyed seeing that the Prime Minister John Diefenbaker homestead shack is here, moved from Regina.
“It was in Wascana. I always wondered where it went.’’
Since the tour was announced “more elevators have surfaced” and he plans more elevator concerts.
One concert will be in August at the gateway to Grasslands National Park, the Val Marie elevator, which has been restored to a community events centre.
Hopefully he will be back at Sukanen next year.
Ron Walter can be reached at ronjoy@sasktel.net
