The Kootenays (My Home and My Land) b/w In a Special Way

Allan Everett Davis was born in Creston, British Columbia, on November 13, 1922, and grew up in nearby Wynndel. He worked as a carpenter in Castlegar before joining the Royal Canadian Air Force in the Second World War, and in the late 1940s he bought the family farm at Wynndel. He spent his working life building in the Kootenays. He was a foreman on power plants for Northern Construction and on bridges for Storm's Construction, a building inspector, Works Superintendent for the Village of Creston in the late 1950s, and a field supervisor for Smith and McCullough, Architects, of Trail. Then he went out on his own, establishing A.E. Davis Construction. With his wife Betty he built and ran Creston's City Centre Motel, and he invented and patented panel-log construction, a building system made from the cores left over at the plywood plant. He was elected a Village of Creston commissioner in 1963 and later served the Town as an alderman.

Davis loved the outdoors and published stories in B.C. Outdoors magazine, and that love gave him 'The Kootenays (My Home and My Land)'. The song is a portrait of the country he was born in, climbing from the lakeshores and forests through marshes and valleys to the alpine meadows and the Rockies, with its wildlife, its changing seasons and a wild, quiet beauty he says no painter's brush could capture. In the last verse he asks that when he dies his ashes be placed high in the mountains, so he can always be part of the Kootenays. His daughter Brenda remembers the family's years on Kootenay Lake, at the cabin at Kuskanook where they spent summers and for four years lived full time, with relatives and friends always coming through the open door.

In 1979 the song was recorded at Southern Sound Studios in Lethbridge, Alberta, which Dave Filchak had built in the basement of the Southern Sound music store. Jim Maguire and Warren Huscroft sang it with Summit. The B-side, 'In A Special Way', is Geri Buchanan's own song, sung by her with Summit. The following year Davis married Geri Buchanan-Ness.

Davis died at Creston Valley Hospital on August 11, 1984, at the age of 61. He had told his family what he had already put in the song's last verse: his ashes were to be spread in Creston. For his funeral at the Presbyterian Church two days later, Brenda had his song slowed into a hymn, and soloist Marj Comm sang it with Edith McLennan at the organ. A month and a half later Brenda was married. "There was not a dry eye," she remembers, "as we looked up at Goat Mountain and felt him near."

-Robert Williston

MoCM exclusive. Biographical information, family photographs and the original record courtesy of Brenda Davis, daughter of Allan Everett Davis, 2026.