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The Hitchikers Featuring the Mighty Pope
Mr. Fortune / I May Have Been a Fool - 7"
Heart - 1971
Michael Panontin
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"I came in December. Now I've never seen snow, and just the darkness. I was totally depressed for months, you know, I wanted to go home."
Earle Heedram was in shock when he arrived in Canada. His parents had sent the teenage Jamaican to Toronto from the small town of Lucea on the island's northwest coast to further his education and to get him away from the malign influences of ska music and rude boy culture. Heedram did in fact enroll himself in school, but he also discovered similar distractions in his adoptive home.
"My mother wanted me to further my studies and what have you," he would tell author Jason Wilson. "And I did do some courses. [With] the lady I stayed with, it was important that you go to school. And it was some data processing course that I was taking, but the minute I discovered Club Jamaica all that stopped, and really [I] just started hanging out there in the week, rehearsing and play on the weekend which I'm not very proud of it, but I didn't want to do anything else."
Club Jamaica, located on Yonge Street where the Eaton Centre stands today, was one of the many Jamaican social clubs around town in the '60s and '70s. It was there that Heedram, much to his parents' chagrin I would imagine, found his people. He started singing for the house band there called the Sheiks. (The Sheiks, whose early members included Eddie Spencer and Jackie Mittoo, were the first Jamaican group to settle in Toronto in 1964. But by 1967, they had started to go a little stale and likely took on Heedram in the hopes of rejuvenating things.) The group issued a little-known single in 1967 called 'Eternal Love' and then disbanded.
Heedram, along with the Sheiks' guitarist Val Bent, was then courted by Frank Motley, whose group the Hitch-Hikers had recently lost their singer - and truth be told main attraction - Jackie Shane. By the late sixties, soul music was growing in popularity around Toronto. Thanks to places like Club Bluenote, just up the street on Yonge, and deejays like John Donabie, who spun the latest hits from midnight to 6 AM on his CKFH show, Where It's At, many Jamaicans started drifting towards soul music. And the Hitch-Hikers were no exception.
The Hitch-Hikers, with Heedram now calling himself 'The Mighty Pope', hit the bricks across Ontario and Quebec, playing in small clubs wherever they could (sometimes encountering racially charged violence along the way). On their 1970 LP, Heedram sings on three of the songs but is mostly overshadowed by the record's blistering funk cuts. His gruff vocal lends a bit of intensity to the Beatles' 'Let It Be', while his and Bent's deep-soul ballad 'Memory Lane' offers hints of southern soul singers Otis Redding and Wilson Pickett. The self-titled album, issued on Jack Boswell's obscure Paragon label, is coveted by cratediggers these days, with decent copies selling for over 500 USDs.
But that pales in comparison to this seven-inch single, which came out the following year on the tiny Heart imprint. 'Mr. Fortune' was penned by the group's guitarist Wayne McGhie. It's a powerful slab of sound that most definitely lives up to its billing (by Vienna's vaunted Record Shack) as "one of the funkiest pieces of wax to come out of this country". Heedram's vocal is a muscular gut punch of raw emotion and Motley's trumpet accompaniment, especially his deft solo midway through, is simply awesome. It's no wonder that the collectors are all over this - 'Mr. Fortune' has sold for over $1500 (USD)!
Heart Records took out sizeable ads in RPM throughout January promoting 'Mr. Fortune', but it was to no avail. Heedram was undaunted. As the Mighty Pope, he would soon find his voice, ironically as a silky smooth modern-soul singer. In the mid-seventies, he signed with RCA - the first Jamaican-Canadian to sign with a major label - and scored a top-twenty hit with his version of 'Heaven on the 7th Floor' (which handily beat out the more well-known Paul Nicholas version up here in Canuckistan...#14 vs. #49).
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