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 The Rankin Family - including Heather, left, Jimmy, Raylene and Cookie - are set to play the Jubilee Auditorium. |
It should have been a triumphant time for the Rankin Family.
A much-anticipated reunion tour was ignited with the release of The Rankin Family: Reunion Exclusive Tour Edition Jan. 9.
But all the excitement was extinguished the next day when the Cape Breton family's sister Geraldine died suddenly in Calgary following a brain aneurysm.
"It's just hard to go from a funeral to a stage," Jimmy Rankin said, the day after resuming the cross-country tour, which brings the group to the Jubilee Auditorium tonight.
"We decided to go ahead. We did our show Tuesday in Victoria and that one was a hard one to do."
Having called it quits almost a decade ago, the Rankins announced a reunion recording and 22-date tour slated to begin Jan. 14. With Geraldine's funeral organized for the following day, the resilient family cancelled its first two dates but decided to keep the music alive.
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Missing the oldest brother and band fiddler, John Morris, who died in a car accident in early 2000, already made for a bittersweet reunion.
John Morris's 19-year-old daughter Molly represents the family's second generation in the group, singing, dancing and fiddling like her father. She also wrote the song Sunsets, which appears on the new full-length album.
Geraldine (Rankin) Coyne, who played piano in the first incarnation of the Rankin Family in the '70s, was just 49 when she died and leaves behind, besides her 10 living siblings, a husband and two young children.
"There were a lot of decisions to be made at a time of grief," said Jimmy Rankin.
The musical family dug deep to solve the logistical and financial problems of rebooking a cross-country tour.
After all, music is a part of the fabric of life for the Rankins. At one point or another, nine of the 12 musical Rankin siblings from the small town of Mabou, Nova Scotia played in the family band.
"(Our parents) had musicians over at the house all the time for house parties and that's sort of where we started," says Rankin, who joined in on the drums at the age of 12. "There was a time when we were all underage playing at dances.
"It was just a natural progression to go on and start making records when the opportunity presented itself. We were old enough and everybody was at a crossroads in their life."
Capitol/EMI signed the musical family and rereleased the band's 1990 independent recording Fare Thee Well Love, which went five-times platinum, selling more than 500,000 copies, while they collected numerous Juno and East Coast Music Awards.
"In 1999, we had done 10 years of basically making records and recordings and dealing with the business and I think basically it had run its course,'' said Rankin, adding that any thought of a reunion at that point was quashed with John Morris's death a few months later.
A longtime promoter of the band suggested a new Rankins recording, which snowballed from a four-song EP to a full-length album, plus a DVD feature and cross-country tour. The family headed down to Nashville to record with Grammy Award-winning producer and engineer George Massenburg.
"We made a record with him in 1997 and Cookie ended up marrying him. So he's family now and when it came time to make this record, he was the first guy we thought of," said Rankin, who just finished recording his third solo album, Edge of Day.
Over the last decade, Raylene Rankin has also pursued a solo career while doing Christmas tours with her sisters from time to time.
Although a great opportunity for Molly to be seen and heard, chances are she'll have to foster a new family band if the Rankins are to carry on.
"I think this is just a one-off Rankin reunion," says Jimmy Rankin, who will start touring in support of his own record later this spring.