Stanley Triggs, a self-taught musician who released a now-classic album of BC folk songs and photographed East Kootenay communities just before they were drowned by dam construction, has died at 97.
Triggs passed away on Aug. 30 in Hemmingford, Que., where he had long lived.
Triggs was long interested in folk songs, oral history, and photography. In 1961, his album Bunkhouse and Forecastle Songs of the Northwest appeared on Folkway records. It collected songs from BC logging and construction camps, railway gangs, and tugboat crews. Triggs sang and accompanied himself on mandolin.
In a 1986 interview with the Edmonton Journal (which he claimed was the first media interview he had ever given), Triggs said he learned to play the mouth organ when he was five, then picked up button harmonica and mandolin. While he only performed for friends and colleagues in the bush, someone convinced him to record a demo tape. “I sent in the tape and they produced it,” he said. “It surprised the heck out of me.”
Triggs was paid $125 and received 25 copies of the album, but no royalties. That was despite the fact that he included a few originals like The Oda G., a song about the oldest working tugboat on the west coast. He also wrote the Lardeau Valley Waltz, a sprightly instrumental.
Between 1969 and 1972, Triggs and his family travelled to the East Kootenay each year for a week or two at a time, camping out of their van. They visited Kootenay River communities like Waldo and Wardner that were about to be drowned by the construction of the Libby dam.
“When I heard the government decided to flood the valley and destroy the homes against the will of many people, documenting it seemed like the natural thing to do,” he said in Amy Bohigian’s Knowledge Network series Dreamers and Dissidents.
Triggs donated his photos of region’s people and the landscapes to the Nelson Museum, which used them in 2010 to create an exhibit called Changes Upstream. It was the start of a renaissance for Triggs’ work, both photographic and musical. Over the next few years, he released CDs with previously unheard material from the 1960s and 1990s.
Triggs was born in 1928 in Nelson and his childhood was filled with outdoor adventure. His father was a purser on local sternwheelers. As a young man, he worked for the BC Forest Service in the Lardeau and Duncan valleys, and he returned to a cabin at Lardeau each year for decades.
In 1953, Triggs left the West Kootenay to attend the Brooks Institute of Photography in Santa Barbara and then moved to Vancouver to study anthropology and fine arts at UBC. In 1965, he was hired to work at the Notman photographic archives in Montreal, which consisted of hundreds of thousands of glass negatives and prints. He remained there until 1993, becoming the leading authority on the work of William Notman and sons.
Triggs is survived by his wife Louise and eight children.
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