I only met my paternal grandfather Joseph Thibodeau a few times. He was close to 80 when I was born, and he passed away while we were living overseas. I have only a few fleeting memories of him; primarily his large, rough hands and broad smile as he played accordion, while we grandkids danced around his kitchen in Albany, NY.
Grandpa Thibodeau was raised in a tight knit ex-Quebecois farming community in northern New York State, in a tiny hamlet on Lake Champlain called Chazy. I didn’t know until recently that he had a first wife named Albina who died young, in childbirth. Joe married my grandmother Elizabeth some 10 years after Albina’s death.
Grandpa was a farmer. He spent most of his life working on farms and orchards. I flew on airplanes and lived overseas as a young girl, and then became a child of suburbia, whose first job was in a shopping mall. Our lives couldn’t have been more different.
But in the summer of 2016 Joe Thibodeau’s life intersected with mine. I decided to visit Chazy and Champlain for the first time, and see some of the places that had inhabited my family history. “Look for Grandpa’s apple trees,” said my cousin Michael. I said I would, but had no idea how I’d ever recognize them.
We visited the town of Champlain and my grandparents’ and Albina’s graves, and then drove to Chazy. There were certainly hundreds of apple trees - one sign proclaimed Chazy Orchard was “the largest Macintosh orchard in the country!” - but none of them looked old enough to have been around in the 1920s, when my grandfather would have planted them. But as we drove down to Chazy Landing on Lake Champlain, we suddenly passed an ancient orchard of bent, stooped-over apple trees. I immediately knew, without anyone telling me, that these were my grandfather’s trees. I felt like I had been hit in the chest. It was as if he had reached out through the decades since his passing to say, “Look! This is what I left you!”
I wrote “The Fields of Chazy” a few years after that experience. After I wrote the first line, “Grandpa died when I was young, a farmer and a farmer’s son,” the story seemed to pour out of me.
“Today I walk a winding road. I touch the trees my Grandpa sowed. My heart’s here in the North Country, among these fields of Chazy…”
Songwriting can be a mystical process at times. I felt that with this song, and with a few others on my most recent album, The Fields of Chazy. I’m proud to be able to sing them for you, and to share the stage with two wonderful Austin songwriters, Giulia Millanta and Natalie Price this October 5th.
-- Claudia Gibson
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