EDMONTON - Back in his ’60s-’70s heyday, Stompin’ Tom Connors would, indeed, stomp a hole clean through a piece of three-quarter-inch plywood in just one show.

The 70-year-old Canadian icon writes and sings as well as ever, but his signature stompin’ board will be considerably thinner when he hits the Jubilee Auditorium’s stage tomorrow night.

“I’m down to a quarter of an inch thick and it takes several shows now to get through it. The foot still goes, but it’s not with as much power as it used to be,” Connors says during a rare interview ahead of his current Canadian tour.

According to Connors, the big reason he avoids the media as much as possible is because of the unflattering imagery attached to his character.

“I don’t like the spin that comes on it at the end ’cause somehow, I’m always painted as the renegade or the stompin’ mad guy, you know, the holy terror and all this,” says Connors. “The name Stompin’ I guess doesn’t help me too much. People who don’t know me, they take that word stompin’ and they figure that’s what I do day and night, 24-7.”

It’s hard to imagine a Canadian not knowing about Stompin’ Tom, whose songs include Bud the Spud, Tillsonburg and The Hockey Song, part of our national identity. And although stories about his hard-drinkin’, hard livin’ ways are mostly true, he’s one of the most loyal and patriotic figures the country has ever known.

“I’ve travelled the country back and forth, oh I don’t know, thousands of times on foot, so I know every blade of grass,” insists Connors, also known as the Man of the Land.

In his more than 40 years as a recording artist, Connors released just as many albums of songs documenting the people and places of Canada, along with two autobiographies detailing a life that began in St. John, New Brunswick in 1936.

Born Charles Thomas Connors to a teenage mother, his early years were spent living with her hand-to-mouth on the streets until he was seized and put up for adoption.

The Aylward family of Skinner’s Pond, P.E.I., finally took him in and after several failed attempts, he finally managed to run away for good, with a guitar over his shoulder, at the age of 15.

“I learned to play the guitar in a boarding house. A French guy showed me three chords or something and I went from there,” Connor recalls. “But I had written songs before that. My first song was written when I was 11. It was called Reversing Falls Darlin’ and it was a song about St. John, New Brunswick.”

For the next 13 years, Connors hitchhiked from coast to coast before winding up one day a nickel short of a beer at the Maple Leaf Hotel in Timmins, Ont.

A few songs got him the beer and a contract to play a gig there weekly as well as a regular spot on the local radio station, which resulted in his first handful of recordings.

During the ’70s, Connors went on to win five consecutive Juno Awards until the industry, he says, finally got the better of him. In protest, he returned all of his Junos in 1978 and went into a self-imposed exile that lasted another decade.

“If it hadn’t of been for the fans, I never would have come back. I was just cheezed off at the whole way things were operating,” Connors says. Specifically, it was the expatriate Canadians winning awards and taking them out of the country, famously coined “Juno Jumpers’’ by Connors back in the day.

“I kept writing songs and travelled everywhere from the Beauford Sea to Labrador and all through the North and everywhere through Canada because I’m a traveller at heart,” says Connors, who took along his wife Lena and “young fella” Tommy who now works as his road manager.

“I was getting so many letters to come back, so I decided to form a new label,” Connors says, referring to ACT (Assisting Canadian Talent) Records, which released his first two comeback albums. Connors, who worked out a favourable deal with EMI, hasn’t slowed down since then, releasing his last album, Stompin’ Tom Connors and the Hockey Mom Tribute in 2004.

“I don’t get to hitchhiking much anymore, so a lot of my inspiration has come really, from the past. I’ve got almost like a bottomless pool, reservoir, whatever you want to call it, of experience I draw from all the time.” He also says: “I try and take current events, and throw them into a song and if I can put some humour in there, I do, which you may have noticed.”

But his biggest inspiration as of late isn’t his own writing. It’s a new generation following in his footsteps. “I think our writers should be writing about this country and I find it encouraging to see some of the new guys coming up in country music out of Alberta right now doing just that. I think it’s a great sign,” says Connors, referring by name to Calgary’s Tim Hus and our own Corb Lund. “A Canadian can’t write a song about the States as good as an American can, as well as saying in the reverse, that Americans can’t write about this country. But they don’t anyway.”