Artists:Eddie Baltimore

Eddie Baltimore - The Space Between
Released 2004 (also see SLOWPOKE)

The CD that the late Eddie Baltimore had virtually finished was included with admission tickets to the Memorial Concert at the Silver Dollar on October 5th. On it you'll find a rather more serious artist than the one you may remember from his contributions to Slowpoke CDs. In fact, his voice and delivery remind me of Randy Newman with his sly social commentary. Sometimes, as on "Cold Sidewalk", it's not sly at all. Notwithstanding Eddie's expertise in all kinds of roots music, more than half the songs here are straight blues led by a magnificent Robert Johnson-esque version of "She's a Spy". New Orleans is represented by the excellent "Bull Frog" accompanied only by Lance Anderson's piano. It would take too much space to list all the players but Jerome Godboo, David Raven and Bruce Longman shine throughout. Other fine songs are "Rock and a Hard Place", "Moonlight in Paradise" and the lovely "Winter Blues".

John Valenteyn
October 2004

Eddie Hutchison, aka EDDIE BALTIMORE, and SLOWPOKE have been playing authentic "roots" music since 1990. Delta blues, country, soul , folk--all simmered in a New Orleans gumbo and served up acoustically and HOT! SLOWPOKE has recorded three CDs ("Menagerie a Trois," "Annie Mae's Wedding," and "Rippin'"), and a solo Eddie Baltimore is eoghty percent done. Eddie has performed in New Orleans (with Irma Thomas), Memphis, San Francisco, and throughout Ontario and eastern Canada at innumerable shows and festivals. His guitar playing graces many albums, including Willie P. Bennett's Juno-winning "Heartstrings" (which Eddie also engineered).

Eddie Baltimore passed away on May 30, 2004, at 6:16 a.m. with Patty and Bruce by his side. He spent his last days at home being taken care of by wife Patrica Ormsby, his best friend Bruce Longman (from Slowpoke) and his dog Beauregard. Eddie worked up until the last week of his life because of his passion for the music. Bruce and Eddie were still writing songs two days before his passing. One of his last joys was the return of original Slowpoke member Mitch Wallace and those who saw his final show three weeks ago, with the line-up that included his beloved drummer John Meydam, will never forget it. There's a hard time ahead for all those who loved him personally and professionally and we can only turn to ourselves as a community to get through it. We know Eddie is up there somewhere playing with his heroes.

Eddie Baltimore will probably be most remembered for his quick one-liners, but, man, was he a good musician! I had the privilege of working with him in Slowpoke for a couple of years, getting to know him really well. He taught so many people how to play and be heard. I think I'll always fondly remember his query when seeing me: "How's your leather bag?" (I am a postie). I'll put some Slowpoke on and toast him tonight. May his heaven be filled with divine beagles. -- Steve Fruitman, CIUT-FM

I had the pleasure of teaching at the Harris Institute with Ed for the past 15 years. He and Slowpoke played at my 40th birthday about 12 years ago, so we go back a bit. But far from being a "jaded old fart," he still had more passion for good music than most people half his age. He always had a joke that he couldn't wait to spring on you. Eddie was loved and respected by his students (as head of the department, I got to read the students' teacher evaluations). He was one of those rare guys in the music business about whom you never heard a bad word from anyone. In the words of our mutual friend, songwriter Norm Hacking, "I'm richer for the time we spent together." You were in it for all the right reasons, my friend. -- Doug McClement

TRIBUTE TO ED HUTCHISON

I first met Ed Hutchison as my electronics teacher at Harris Institute for the Arts in Toronto. His thoughtful, patient, and down-to-earth teaching style was extremely valuable to me as a student in that class and was inspirational when I myself became a teacher at Harris Institute years later. Ed was also my first instructor in the school's recording studio--thank goodness! His extraordinary ability to communicate in a clear, intelligent and knowledgeable manner helped me make sense out of what at first seemed like an overwhelming environment.

In addition to our relationship at Harris Institute, Ed and I worked together doing live sound at some very eclectic shows in Toronto. He also kindly took me on as an intern at his studio, The Recording Service. He was immensely influential in helping me develop my taste for acoustic music and my style as a sound technician at the Flying Cloud Folk Club in Toronto. These were wonderful experiences that I will always treasure.

Of all the exceptional faculty and staff members at Harris Institute, no one engaged me musically the way Ed did, and he treated me like a colleague from the first time I walked into his classroom. If I could say one thing to Ed today, it would be "thank you." May he rest in peace and may God bless and comfort his family and friends. -- Clinton C. Somerton, Music Industry Math Instructor, Harris Institute for the Arts; Community & Media Relations Manager, Metronome Canada Foundation.

Edward Stephen Hutchison, aka Eddie Baltimore, 55,bluesman, Oct. 25, 2004 05:39 a.m.

Catherine Dunphy, Obituary Writer

Eddie Baltimore was born to a poor sharecropping family in the Don River delta area of southern Ontario. With the postwar industrial boom, Eddie's family, like many others, moved north in search of work. In his early years, Eddie was exposed to the simple rhythms and melodies of the accordions and bagpipes that many of the early British Isles settlers favoured while working the fields. Or so he said in his bio sheet.

Edward Stephen Hutchison, however, grew up in Don Mills, the son of a department store carpet buyer. He only became Eddie Baltimore (of the Don Mills sharecropping family) midway through an eclectic musical career that encompassed raucous, prank-filled rock road tours, stints as a backup musician and, for a brief time, half of a duo that played Stevie Nicks standards at Holiday Inns.

In recent years, with his acoustic trio Slowpoke, he played at Mariposa, Harbourfront, festivals in Kingston and Belleville, and on boat cruises. He played Quigley's in the Beach, Allen's on the Danforth, Chicago's and, of course, Grossman's.

In New Orleans he sat in with members of Fats Domino's band. He opened for the Winter Brothers and the Ali Farka tours, and wrote the music for the Canadian film Stolen Heart. He taught in the Blues in the Schools program and at the Harris Institute.

Impresario Bernie Finkelstein once told him he would be a big star. But he wasn't, probably because he had too much fun.

"He played with the most heart I have ever heard," said best friend Bruce Longman, a member of Slowpoke. Baltimore played electric guitar, mandolin, dobro and slide guitar, sometimes using his prized bottleneck slide from old bluesman Booker White. His email address was eddiebigears, signifying his openness to any kind of music. He played it all, too.

Other than the Baltimore-raised Patricia Ormsby, his love was the blues. Mississippi Delta Blues. Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters blues. Robert Johnson blues. Each spring, he went to the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, "where there were all the forms of music he loved," Ormsby said. He had a mojo bag given him by a voodoo priest. He kept red dirt from the Delta in a beautiful coffee-table container.

They were beside him as he lay dying of cancer in a bed set up this spring in the living room of his quirky East York bungalow. His recording studio was in the basement (Baltimore won a Juno for engineering Willie P. Bennett's Heartstrings, recorded there), along with thousands of CDs and almost as many toys. "He was a big kid at heart," Longman said.

Baltimore was a shy, introverted 16-year-old student at St. Michael's Collegiate when he spent a year battling Hodgkins lymphoma. To help pass the time, his parents bought him a guitar, a gift that sealed his fate.

Playing mostly as a sideman in the burgeoning downtown music scene, he was never nondescript; his hair was silver by his 20s and he had his own sense of fashion: beret, big turquoise jewelry, leather vest with Highway 61 and Highway 49 pins.

He became a front man about the same time he became Eddie Baltimore: in 1983, when he and Ormsby were driving in the U.S. to visit her family. A sign showed Baltimore in one direction, Philadelphia in the other.

"He said, 'I like that,' and he decided to be Eddie Baltimore," she said. "For years he wouldn't admit it was because of me."

With Slowpoke, he was famed for his musical talking stories. Surreal, rambling, might-be-true stories of, for instance, found his beat and invented all western music. (That one involved alligator purses and slid from Buddy Holly to Graceland to the '60s British invasion.) "They could be 15 minutes long and he would have everyone with him. It was his mastery," said Longman.

Baltimore did his last show May 7 at the Q Club in the Beach, seated and smiling. "Eddie put on one hell of a show. It was one of those magic nights. Everybody enjoyed it. They didn't know he was on morphine," Longman said.

Slowpoke had three CDs, but Baltimore had never cut a solo disc. While sick he wrote 22 songs. When he died, on May 30 at age 55, half an album had been mixed. It was launched this month at The Silver Dollar, with plenty of musical friends on hand, because, as he wrote in that fanciful bio a long time ago, "enjoy the music--it's real.".