Stompin' Tom Connors Statue

“The girls are out to Bingo and the boys are getting stinko, and we’ll think no more of INCO on a Sudbury Saturday night,” sang Canadian country legend Stompin’ Tom Connors. In this city, a statue ready to stomp some more stands in his honor.

Born in Saint John, New Brunswick and raised in Skinner’s Pond, Prince Edward Island, Tom Connors ran away from home at age 13 and took many odd jobs across Canada before being a nickel short of a beer at the Maple Leaf Hotel in Timmins, Ontario. Seeing his guitar, the bartender asked him to play some songs in lieu of that nickel. Tom would stay at the hotel and play for 14 months, starting his musical career.

Tom got his “Stompin’” nickname from his habit of stomping his foot to keep tempo. He sang about uniquely Canadian history and culture, such as a potato-hauling trucker from Prince Edward Island (Bud the Spud), working the tobacco fields of southern Ontario (Tillsonburg), the collapse of the Second Narrows Bridge in Vancouver in 1958 (The Bridge Came Tumbling Down), a French-Canadian lumberjack folk hero (Big Joe Mufferaw), his favorite places in the country (My Stompin’ Grounds), a woman from Alberta who sang with a twang (Lady k.d. lang), and what would become a mainstay in NHL arenas (The Hockey Song). Outside of the Canadian musical establishment, he would return his six Juno awards, feeling they were considering artists who moved out of Canada to make their fame.

One of Connors’ best known songs was Sudbury Saturday Night, telling of the many immigrant miners coming together for drinks and forgetting about toiling in the nickel mines(Big Nickel place entry). After Connors passed away in 2013, this statue would be unveiled in Sudbury two years later in front of the local hockey arena, in memory of the singer who sang about a night in this mining town and about his home of Canada.