Clarence Herman

Clarence Herman wrote and sang ‘Maritime Express’, with his band Herman’s Country Four behind him, and C. Leon produced it for Terra-Lee Records, a small Canadian country label. It came out as a stereo 7-inch, catalogue TLRS 4507.

It is a train song. On March 1, 1898 the Intercolonial Railway rebranded its flagship Montreal to Halifax service as the Maritime Express, and Canadian National kept the name running until April 26, 1964. Herman rides it through the Maritimes, naming the destinations along the line.

The flip side is an instrumental by Herman’s Country Four, ‘The Old Man & the Old Woman’. In Quebec it is ‘Le bonhomme et la bonne femme’, which La Bolduc recorded in 1930. Don Messer cut it for Apex in 1950, and fiddlers across the Maritimes have played it as a reel ever since. The label gives no writer for it.

Clarence Juniour Herman was born in Lake Centre, Nova Scotia, in 1934, the son of Guy and Muriel (Kelsey) Herman. Outside of his family, country music was his biggest love, and in the 1970s he was working out of Ontario with Herman’s Country Four.

The band travelled. Newfoundland guitarist Reg Benoit left home for Ontario in 1974, aged 21 and looking for work, and ended up in Herman’s Country Four, playing Thunder Bay, Nova Scotia and parts of New Brunswick. In 1975 Benoit moved on to Harry Hibbs.

Herman followed him. In 1976 Newfoundland papers announced Hibbs’s new band with Clarence Herman on lead guitar, a Nova Scotia native who had played across Canada and the United States with country bands, and Benoit in the lineup beside him. Herman’s obituary remembers him playing bass for Hibbs.

Herman came home to Lake Centre and worked as a heavy equipment operator, among other jobs. He died in Lunenburg on August 2, 2015, aged 81.

-Robert Williston