In Search of Billy James

This morning I went on a radio show to talk about busking.

A couple of other panelists were on the show, including a woman who produced an excellent radio documentary on the history of subway music in Toronto and another local singer who had experimented with busking herself and is now focusing on other projects.

Before going into the studio, I listened to the documentary in the station's waiting lounge. It featured conversations with buskers past and present, including the very first one, who was awarded a Permanent Lifetime License by the TTC when it began its licensing program in 1979. His name is Billy James.

In 1979, I was a high school student in Winnipeg. I moved to Toronto in 1981, to attend Ryerson Polytechnical Institute (now Ryerson University) and study Radio and Television Arts. The school is located at Yonge and Dundas, a stone's throw from Dundas subway station and the Eaton Centre. For one of our first radio assignments, we were instructed to interview someone at that crowded and colourful intersection.

Winnipeg was, of course, a considerably smaller city, and I was just 17 years old. I was terrified to interview anybody at Yonge & Dundas.

But I was a good student.

There was only one stranger I could imagine interviewing. He was a subway musician, playing in the lurid yellow-green walkway underneath Dundas Station. I heard him almost every day, because I took the subway to school, and I liked the songs he played and thought he was good-looking. As I try to picture him today, I believe that he looked like a cross between Burton Cummings and my husband--which of course would be pretty good.

I remember that he was friendly and forthcoming and that I was shy and awkward. I almost definitely did not tell him that I was a budding singer-songwriter myself and that I'd secretly moved to Toronto partly because Bruce Cockburn lived here. After all, I had set such childish dreams aside to pursue a lucrative and glamourous career in the mainstream commercial media! If I actually talked to the subway musician about my own music, why, he might encourage me to check out a coffeehouse or two...maybe connect me with some other young songwriters. We couldn't have that! No, that'd be dangerous. That'd threaten to derail the whole respectable-career enterprise.

That's probably why the interview didn't exactly take flight...there was a lot under the surface not being said.

I was too shy to tell him (or anyone) that I was a songwriter. I was too polite to tell him that I didn't quite get it. I didn't understand why somebody would choose to play guitar and sing so well (and he did play well) while everybody passed right by.

I would not have been consciously aware that, like other self-confident young artists, I thought I was destined for bigger and better things; that although I couldn't play half as well as he could, I thought his "station" was beneath me. I wouldn't have told him that, at the time, I didn't see the point of singing at all unless I was on a much grander stage.

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(Ha! Aren't I being hard on myself, 23 years on! After all, it was only a 15-minute interview.)

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Anyway, I completed the assignment, handed in the tape, and graduated from Ryerson with a degree. I landed a respectable job as an advertising writer for Eaton's, which was located in the tower above the Eaton Centre, directly above Dundas Subway Station.

I hung on to a copy of that cassette for years. It gathered dust with other tapes from Ryerson and from my stints as an advertising and broadcast writer. I forgot all about that subway musician--I didn't see him much once I got myself a car--and I quickly forgot what his name was.

Could his name have been Billy James?

In the radio documentary I heard this morning, the man's voice sounded familiar--both his singing voice and his speaking voice. I had read about Billy before, when I was researching the subway musicians' scene and reading about its history, but it hadn't occurred to me that he might have been the man I interviewed when I was seventeen.

This morning, the documentary producer said that Billy now has a 7-month old son. But the musician I spoke to, he'd be too old for that by now, wouldn't he? So much time has passed.

On the other hand, he'd been a young man when I interviewed him. He was probably in his late twenties then, maybe ten years older than I was. That would make him 51 today.

He's still a full-time busker.

I'm going to find Billy James.

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