Focusing his career exclusively on his native Canada, he is credited with writing more than 300 songs and has released four dozen albums, with total sales of nearly four million copies.

[5] Isabel's family were Irish Protestants, and his maternal grandfather, John Connors, was a sea captain from Boston, Massachusetts, who had died before Charles was born.

This trip was the first time he saw his mother steal to feed them, when she stole food from a Chinese restaurant in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia.

When they returned to Saint John, they moved in with friends of Isabel[11] and she gave birth to Tom's sister Marie, who had to stay in hospital to have a birthmark removed.

[18] Connors spent a short time living with his mother in a low-security women's penitentiary before he was seized by Children's Aid Society and later adopted by Cora and Russell Aylward[19] in Skinners Pond, Prince Edward Island.

His hitchhiking journey consumed the next 13 years of his life as he travelled among various part-time jobs while writing songs on his guitar, singing for his supper.

He worked in mines and rode in boxcars,[20] and in the coldest part of winter he welcomed vagrancy arrests for the warm place to sleep.

[21] These few songs turned into a 14-month run at the hotel, a weekly spot on CKGB in Timmins, eight 45-RPM recordings, and the end of the beginning for Tom Connors.

Throughout the years, Connors never lost touch with Gaëtan Lepine, the bartender he befriended in Timmins; in fact, the two wrote many songs together.

For the first few seasons, Connors appeared in the program's opening credits, before "The Consumer" was replaced as the theme—initially by an instrumental background version and ultimately by a different piece of music.

The proper venue for Mr. Connors was a smoky bar room where people connected by slamming their beer mugs together, hopefully obliterating whatever differences existed between them.

[28] Connors' habit of stomping the heel of his left boot to keep rhythm earned him the nickname "that stompin' guy", or "Stomper".

Various stories have circulated about the origin of the foot stomping, but it's generally accepted that he did this to keep a strong tempo for his guitar playing—especially in the noisy bars and beer joints where he frequently performed.

After numerous complaints about damaged stage floors, Connors began to carry a piece of plywood that he stomped even more vigorously than before.

After stomping a hole in the wood, he would pick it up and show it to the audience (accompanied by a joke about the quality of the local lumber) before calling for a new one.

[30] Connors's favourite guitar was a Gibson Southern Jumbo acoustic that he purchased in 1956 while on his way through Ohio to Nashville, Tennessee, and Mexico.

Most of the Rebel and Dominion albums would be reissued (and in some cases, re-recorded) under the Boot label, and would represent the bulk of his recorded material.

[32] In the book Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda, Romeo Dallaire, the Canadian general who led the UNAMIR peacekeeping force in Rwanda during that country's 1994 genocide reported that he played a recording of Connors's song "The Blue Berets" (about United Nations peacekeeping forces) to keep up his troops' morale while their headquarters was under bombardment.

The following is a list of events in the history of Canada which have been the subject of a song by Connors, who is widely renowned for singing about both well-known and little-known episodes in the country's past.

[33] During an interview on the show, he said they had chosen to get married on television to share this happy moment with his fans across the country whose support had rescued him from a difficult pre-showbusiness life.

[20] Connors always wore his black Stetson in public, and refused to remove it for any reason, even when meeting Queen Elizabeth II at a dinner in Ottawa in October 2002.

Yours very truly, Stompin' Tom Connors[39] He remained in retirement for 12 years, only returning to the studio in 1986 to produce a new album to promote Canadian artists.

[40] That year, Tim Vesely and Dave Bidini of Rheostatics crashed his 50th birthday party and published an article about it in a Toronto newspaper,[41] initiating a resurgence of public and record label interest in his work which resulted in the release in 1988 of Fiddle and Song, his first new album since 1977.

Edwards said that a copy was presented to the CBC's head of TV variety and that he received a reply the next day telling him that a decision would be reached within a few weeks.

Edwards said that he received another letter from the CBC that reinforced its lack of interest in the concert special but said that Connors would have been a great guest to perform a song on the network's Hockeyville series or an excellent subject for a Life and Times project.

In response, Connors said: As far as I'm concerned, if the CBC, our own public network, will not reconsider their refusal to air a Stompin' Tom special, they can take their wonderful offer of letting me sing a song as a guest on some other program and shove it.

[43] The soundtrack was released posthumously on CD[44] at the same time as a DVD & Blue Ray re-issue by Universal Music Canada in 2014.

[2] On March 7, several members of the federal New Democratic Party caucus, led by former musicians Charlie Angus and Andrew Cash, performed a group rendition of Connors' signature song "Bud the Spud" in the foyer of the House of Commons of Canada in tribute.

Tommy Hunter attended, and the celebration included speeches by former governor general Adrienne Clarkson and Ken Dryden.

[71] In 1976, Connors created and sold a perpetual calendar that cross-references dates to days of the week, which is valid for all years from 1 to 3100 AD.