Music has always been an important part of Thomas A. Ryerson’s life, being involved as a musician, record label owner, and writer.
In 2017, Ryerson, decided to embark on a project that would see him chronicle, across three books, a record label that reflected a golden age of music in Brant County history, after wanting to find out more about a country musician.
“I grew up in Park Hill, which is just north of London and south of Grand Bend. There was a diner across from my high school. The local hero in Park Hill was Roger Quick. He was a country singer and his albums were always on display at this diner. I would wonder what his music was like, and then he ended up going to a jamboree. My dad was into country music, so we went to the event and it was a great experience…fast forward to around 2015, I was in a reflective mode reminiscing about the good old days and I thought back on Roger Quick. I did a Google search and I discovered that three of his four albums were on this label called Thunderbird Recordings. And that’s when I started to look into Thunderbird,” explained Ryerson.
One of the first people who helped Ryerson find out more about the Burford-based Thunderbird Recordings and its founder/owner Jim Allison, was Marilynne Caswell.
“She was a booking agent who had booked some acts from Thunderbird and she knew Big Jim Allison from Burford. She helped me with some of the history and the pieces of the puzzle slowly came together. I found close to 20 acts on the label and I met all these great people from many different bands that were on Thunderbird like Dusty Road…Janice Stevens, the Muirs and the Whiskey Hollow which included Jim Windle, and Bob Silverthorn…and before I knew it, the idea of a book came together,” said Ryerson.
However, the driving force of Thunderbird was Jim Allison, who steered the label for just four short years.
“By the time I started doing this research, he’d been gone for 11 years already….Big Jim was a dreamer…he saw himself as a successful promoter, but unfortunately, he wasn’t. He came into some money…about 20,000 dollars which was a lot of money back in the 1970s. Originally, he wanted to open a bar, and he got talked out of that and then decided to start the label. And he quickly burned through all his money.” Ryerson said. “The label was basically a vanity press where people would pay for their records. He would charge them about 10% more than what it would cost him, [and] get the record done…after that, they would be on their own. The first artists didn’t have to pay for their own album, because that’s when he still had money. But then once he got through the money, he realized he had to get people to fund the recordings.”
Nevertheless, Thunderbird Recordings released several hit singles and truly defined the Brant Sound of the era.
“At the time, it was an influential label and as I remember during my research going through the Brantford-area newspaper from 1974 to 1980, I found that the Jim was well known and the label was successful. They released Janice Stevens’ and her first song ‘Little Girls Dream,’ which went to number one at the Brantford radio station when it came out. And the Muirs did a song for the city of Brantford’s Centennial in 1977 which was pretty successful as well,” he noted. “But overall, Thunderbird did define the ‘Brant Sound’, or as I call it, the ‘Grand County sound,’ with a certain country twang. Aside Desert Fox, which was a rock band, many bands on the label were country. And some of these musicians were used on other recordings that the label was producing.”
While Allison had the right intentions, and released several hits, he simply couldn’t properly manage the label.
“He was always meant to do the right thing [and] people I spoke to usually had a good impression of him but, the thing was his head was in the stars [and] he was always hoping that the next good thing would be coming around the corner. But he was in debt. Even with the last hit he had with Jo Brennan and her son Rik, who were from Mount Pleasant, which went to number one with their instrumental in Edmonton, but that was when they were promoting it themselves,” he recalled. “Jim had released it and it kind of fizzled out. So, they released it themselves and somehow, through their network, they got the song pushed and became an immediate hit…Jo would then have a pretty good career away from Thunderbird.”
Nevertheless, Ryerson, who has written many books spanning non-fiction and fiction, released three books spawning from his extensive research into Jim Allison and Thunderbird Recordings.
“The original book, titled ‘That Brant County Sound! The Ballad of Jim Allison and Thunderbird Recording’ (and we call it the yellow book because of its yellow cover) led to a second book which had pictures related to bands and acts that were with or associated with Thunderbird. That came about because I met all of these people that had these great photographs and I wondered what I was going to do with all of this material. The second book is called ‘In Pictures: That Brant County Sound!’ and I believe was a bit more successful than the original book, because readers enjoyed going through the photos of people and memorabilia,” he said. “And the third book was called ‘That Brant County Sound! The Discographies’ and was more technical. It was the biographies of the bands, [and] their discographies…including every single and albums that was released as well as chart positions. So, the discography basically takes all of those acts that have anything to do remotely with Thunderbird and puts that information into this book.”
Ryerson, who has released multiple albums himself over the years, headed various events in Brantford to promote the books.
“I did two jamborees. One at the end of 2017 and the other one in 2018. We rented a hall in Brantford on Henry Street and I did a musical event where I brought back original artists from the Thunderbird years. And for the second jamboree, held at the Gunners Club, we hired a backing band called Southbound that learned all the songs and could play them so that the Thunderbird-era musicians could just come out and sing the guy, the guys would come out and sing and have this band behind them,” Ryerson recalled.
These books would also get significant exposure through the Bookworm, a local bookstore in Brantford.
“Kerry and Kyle Besta were two of my biggest supporters right out of the gate…and were pretty excited about the project. The book took off from word of mouth and some media coverage, and I ended up selling half of my total copies of all three books through the Bookworm,” he explained. “They continue to keep all three books in stock and if it wasn’t for them, my three Thunderbird books would not have been as successful as they have been.”
And along with the books, Ryerson also released two compilation CDs and other CD projects.
“Eventually, in 2016 I absorbed Thunderbird into my own catalog. I re-registered everything so I could start to collect all the royalties for those artists on the label, and basically, I paid them when they would get played. It also gave me an opportunity to create and release two Thunderbird compilation CDs….[and] they’ve sold well. I also released the album ‘Bright Fine Gold – The Best Of’ by Gary and Everill Muir in 2020…so what I wanted to do was bring these artists [and] their music out and give a new generation a chance to discover them…because most of that music was released on vinyl,” Ryerson said.
Ryerson also worked with Roger Quick on an interesting project that brought a classic unreleased album to light.
“Allison couldn’t afford to pay Roger what he owed him in the 1970s, so he gave him the master tapes of a Charlie Leuven record. Jim Allison landed a contract with Charlie Louvin, and he was fairly big in the United States. Charlie recorded an album for Thunderbird, but in typical Jim fashion, he fudged that up because he didn’t have the money so it went unreleased. Jim then couldn’t afford to pay Roger what he owed him, so he gave him the master tapes of that record,” explained Ryerson. “Roger didn’t know what to do with these tapes, so he put them in his safe for four decades. And I came along 40 years later and after meeting Roger, he mentioned he had these tapes…[we did the proper work on restoring them] as they were old and it was then remixed. So, ‘A World of Give and Take’ by Charlie Louvin was the first major release on my label, coming out at the end of 2016.”
After multiple books, compilations and album releases affiliated with Thunderbird, Ryerson has done as much as possible to chronicle that special time in Brant County’s musical era.
“I believe I accomplished what I wanted to do [and] tell the story of Jim Allison and Thunderbird the best I could with what I had…so I think I’ve really taken it as far as I could unless we were to unearth something new like a long-lost album or something like that…and as for Jim, I think his heart was in the right place, but at the end of the day he just didn’t have the financial backing to really pull it off,” concluded Ryerson.
