By Richard Bell
Long-time Eastern Shore musician Foster Newcombe will be playing his Stompin’ Tom Connors Review at Memory Lane heritage Village on June 22. AT 84, Newcombe has been entertaining people across Canada for decades. In May, he will be playing at least 6 gigs across Ontario in a tour to raise money for veterans.
“I was born in Musquodoboit Harbour,” Newcombe told the Cooperator, “but we moved to Murphys Cove when I was baby, and that’s where I was brought up. I worked in the woods as a kid, did some lobster fishing, and went to the docks in Halifax as a stevedore. I did 5 years in the Navy and came back and set up my own flooring business.”
“My father was a singer, and my mother played the mouth organ,” Newcombe said. “The cousins would come to the house, and I watched them jamming. I managed to buy an old guitar. We had a family band, me on guitar with my brother-in-law on the fiddle, nephew on drums, one sister on guitar singing, another sister on the banjo.”
Newcombe recorded his first CD in 1995 and has gone on to make more than a dozen more, writing most of his songs and winning awards along the way. As a former lobsterman, he got the idea for a lobster-shaped guitar. “I searched the Internet and couldn’t find one,” Newcombe said. “A friend sent me to a luthier in Moncton, the late Don Fitzsimmons, and he finally agreed to make me one. The first time I used it at a show in Hillsboro, people stood in line for two hours after the show to take pictures.” When he played in the southern U.S., “nobody knew what a lobster was. They thought it was a crawfish!”
For more info on Newcombe’s music, go to https://frasernewcombemusic8.godaddysites.com, or email [email protected].
