"El Plantador"
by Baba Brinkman
As much as anyone else in Canada, I can say treeplanting is in my blood. My mother planted trees when she was six months pregnant with me, and my father founded the company that pioneered this country’s treeplanting sub-culture, Brinkman & Associates. As a kid I spent my summers running around camps with the other planter spawn while my parents and their friends worked. We drove Honda trikes (no quads back then), climbed trees, went fishing in the creeks, and got our grubby hands into everything. Then at fifteen I took up the shovel, planting for ten years while paying my way through school.
Treeplanting also gave me my sense of rhythm. I would rap to myself all day to the rhythm of the stabbing shovel, the screefing spade, the stomping foot. Sometimes I would catch hell from my foremen because I was freestyling and daydreaming up stories instead of watching my spacing...ah well. I was a conscientious planter, if not always a conscious one. I began writing raps when I was around nineteen, and El Plantador was the first full track I wrote, back in 1999. I was trying to capture the frenetic speed and intensity of the highballing experience with the cadence of the words. I performed the piece for years as a spoken word poem before finally recording it to music in 2004 as part of my first rap album, Swordplay. The chorus harmonica was originally recorded by Hank Van Tuyl as the soundtrack for the 1977 treeplanting documentary, “Do It With Joy”, and skillfully remixed in the track by John Tennant. And the beat goes on...
Treeplanting also gave me my sense of rhythm. I would rap to myself all day to the rhythm of the stabbing shovel, the screefing spade, the stomping foot. Sometimes I would catch hell from my foremen because I was freestyling and daydreaming up stories instead of watching my spacing...ah well. I was a conscientious planter, if not always a conscious one. I began writing raps when I was around nineteen, and El Plantador was the first full track I wrote, back in 1999. I was trying to capture the frenetic speed and intensity of the highballing experience with the cadence of the words. I performed the piece for years as a spoken word poem before finally recording it to music in 2004 as part of my first rap album, Swordplay. The chorus harmonica was originally recorded by Hank Van Tuyl as the soundtrack for the 1977 treeplanting documentary, “Do It With Joy”, and skillfully remixed in the track by John Tennant. And the beat goes on...
Credits:
Vocals: Baba Brinkman
Produced by John Tennant
Harmonica: John Tennant and Hank Van Tuyl
Produced by John Tennant
Harmonica: John Tennant and Hank Van Tuyl
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