New Glasgow – Before there were the Beatles, there were the Blue Cats.
It was December 1957, and Harold Borden was playing with another fellow at a concert. Bob “Titchy” Ferguson, Jimmy Haggart and Bob George were playing at the same show at St. John’s Church – the only two acts in the place that chose to do rock and roll numbers, a genre of music still in its infancy at that point.
“They asked me to go out on stage with them, when the encore came, and we seemed to gel,” Borden recalls.
Over the next month, they added Reggie O’Haggen to the mix and the Blue Cats were born.
It was the start of something big for Pictou County, its first rock and roll band, its first racially-mixed act and a band that would garner the love of so many fans that five fan clubs were formed.
Borden was just 20 years old when he signed on to be the group’s vocalist. They were practicing for the first or second time and began toying with names.
“We were supposed to go on the radio, CKEC, and we didn’t have a name. We were saying all kinds of stuff, it was always something about Cats. We used to say we were cool cats. Someone said Blue Cats and that was it. Some of the guys wanted such and such and the Blue Cats, but we didn’t want that. We wanted everybody wanted to be the same and equal.”
That was the underlying principal that ran through the band while it was together. Borden is black, and the rest of the guys were white, but it didn’t matter one bit to any of them, despite the racial tensions still swirling at the time. The band was trendsetting in more ways than one – they’d embraced the hip new music of Little Richie and they’d formed a band that broke down all racial barriers.
“I was the same as everyone else,” Borden said. “I would eat with them, sleep with them, our parents were totally behind us.”
But Borden admits he did hesitate when the chance came up for the band to play in some clubs in Florida.
“I didn’t want to take the chance with the racial tensions down in the States at the time,” he said.
Most places didn’t have a problem with a black man playing in the band, but Ferguson can remember one incident in a club in Newfoundland, where the owner didn’t want Borden to play. That unique connection between the boys sprang up as the other four came to Borden’s defense.
“Jimmy did the booking, and he told him he booked five guys, not four, and the five of us were going to play or none of us were,” said Ferguson, who played the drums. “We did play – and we packed the place. Harold was like a brother to us, we all did it together or not at all. We had a bond between the five of us that nobody could break, no matter what colour we were.”
George is proud of what the band did at that time, although it was never about what colour skin anyone had.
“We were an interracial band, and we did break some ground, I think, in that and help things along. There was a lot of racial tensions in those times, especially in the States. I thought our band helped modify things, to some extent, and Hal was a good representation. He’s a guy I’ve often thought should get more thanks for his way of handling things. He was a real gentleman, and still is.”
George can well remember the first time the band played a dance in Pictou County. Just 17 years old at the time, he was the band’s bassist.
“We hired a fiddler to come with us,” he said in a phone interview from his home in Red Deer, Alberta. “We didn’t know if anyone would come to a rock and roll dance.”
They were wrong. They’d gotten the IOOF Hall in Stellarton cheap for that first dance in early 1958, just after Christmas. They’d been told that hall hadn’t had a successful dance since the war years – and they pulled in the people and raked in the cash.
“We had the fiddler with us for quite some time until we realized we didn’t need him,” George said. “That was amazing, realizing that we were bringing those people in.”
The Blue Cats played all over Pictou County – the police had to be called sometimes, because so many fans crowded the stage, recalls George – and had a following of young people who went from gig to gig.
They soon began to branch out, going to play around the Maritimes and in to Quebec and Newfoundland.
“We had a lot of fun,” said Borden. “We were on most TV stations around at the time. I remember once, we played the American Air Force base that was in Stephenville, NL at the time. They treated us so good, they acted like we were really big games and we were just a few guys from Pictou County.”
TV shows, like PEI’s Teen Hop, a Dick Clarke-style show where bands would play and teenagers would dance, had the Blue Cats on as regular guests. Occasionally, the band would bring their own dancers over from Pictou County to appear with them.
“The fans followed us, wherever we’d play,” Ferguson recalls.
The five of them all dressed the same – white sport coats, white buck shoes and black pants.
“We looked just like movie stars, we did,” Ferguson said.
The band played covers of the popular rock songs of the day, like Good Golly Miss Molly and Rock Around the Clock.
“I don’t think anybody was writing their own rock then,” he said.
Good Golly Miss Molly became something of a signature tune for the band and was the song they used for a CBC TV music contest they entered.
“Harold just belted it out,” Ferguson said. “A girl from Cape Breton beat us in that contest, because everybody put letters in the same envelope and they’d only count them as the same vote.”
The fans took notice of them, though, forming five fan clubs around the Maritimes. Fan mail came in – Haggart saved all the letters, including a few letters of love-sick girls – and there were a few cases of girls scrawling their phone numbers in lipstick on their cars.
“It was like Beatle mania, right here in Pictou County,” Haggart often said to his younger siblings.
Haggart was the one who got most of the mail, said Borden.
“Jimmy was the pretty boy – they never bothered me very much. But we had fun, I enjoyed every minute of it,” Borden said.
“We weren’t interested in love letters, we were interested in packing the halls,” Ferguson added. “We came out right after Elvis, and people flocked to us.”
The fans wanted autographs, and even today, Ferguson still finds himself signing the odd picture.
“A woman came into the store the other day with a picture of us, she wanted me to autograph it for her,” he said.
George experienced the same thing the last time he was in the county. He and Borden went to a dance at the Stellarton Legion together and two women were thrilled to see them.
The only thing the band was lacking was a record deal. Haggart acted as the band’s manager and spent countless hours sending letters on the band’s behalf, trying to book them on major shows and trying to get a record.
Haggart died several years ago, but brother Don kept the letters he sent on the band’s behalf all those years ago.
“One of them wrote back and said, ‘thanks for your interest, but rock and roll will never last’,” Don Haggart said as he flipped through the letters, carefully preserved in an album. “He had great aspirations for that band. He worked so hard. He wrote to California, to radio stations. He was a teenager, just 18, and he had a lot more nerve than I ever did.”
But the record deal never came.
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“For a rock and roll band, it was almost impossible to get one,” Borden said. “I don’t think they thought we’d last. Even one of the agents in Montreal told us that we boys had it hard.”
Ferguson still believes the group could’ve made it, if only they’d gotten that deal.
“We were one of a kind, we were by ourselves with a sound all alone, black and white together. The Beatles couldn’t compare to us. We didn’t have the right connections – if we had, we would’ve gone places. I wouldn’t be sitting here today.”
That’s a sentiment George agrees with.
“You’d be surprised how good we were, because we were good,” he said.
“I think I was the weakest link. Reggie was a wicked piano player and Jimmy, could he ever handle a guitar. Hal was an amazing singer and could Titchy play the drums.”
The Blue Cats were one of the few bands at the time that made some money, but in the end, it just wasn’t enough.
“We’d play six nights a week, but the drawback was we didn’t make any real money,” Borden said.
They drove old, beat-up cars – Borden’s brother bought one for them at one point, which enabled them to get from venue to venue.
“It’s only because of him we had a car, ours were falling apart,” Ferguson recalled. “There was once, when were travelling, we got a flat and didn’t have a jack. We had to pull a speed sign pole out of the ground and all of us used it to jack up the car. One guy took off the tire and patched it.”
But all good things must come to an end, including the Blue Cats. After several years of playing together, the boys had realized the time had come to move on.
“The money wasn’t all that great,” said Ferguson. “I can remember some times that, after we paid all our expenses for travelling, we only made a quarter. But we were happy.”
They’d often drive all night long, going from gig to gig. Back then, he said, “We were only young and had more vinegar than we knew what to do with,” but eventually it became harder and harder.
George was the first to pull out. Before they headed to Montreal and Quebec on tour, he’d put in an application with the RCMP. While they were up there, his mother called, telling him the Mounties wanted to interview him.
George joined the force in September 1960, but not until the boys played one last gig together in a hall just outside Halifax. The next day, he joined up.
When he came home for Christmas, he got to watch the Blue Cats play together one more time, but they didn’t last much longer.
Borden decided to join the army, O’Haggen worked with the ambulance in Halifax and Ferguson went back to his old job as a window-dresser in Goodman’s. Haggart and little brother Don eventually went on to work together as a country act.
That wasn’t the last time the group played together, however. They reunited in 1999 for a performance at the New Glasgow Stadium.
“It felt good – but not like the old days. We were all old and fat and the sweat came out on us a lot quicker than it did when we were young,” kidded Ferguson. “But it still felt the same. We still felt the same.”
The feeling of hugging those four other men still remains with George.
“We were all in tears, hugging each other,” he recalled. “We loved Pictou County, all the fans we had. Everybody was good to us and it was only because of that we were such a success locally.”
For Borden, those years were among the best in his life.
“It was the greatest experience I ever had in my life,” said Borden. “We were like brothers, we were that solid. We had our ups and downs, the same as anyone else, but as far as the music goes, we always seemed to gel.”
It’s been more than 50 years since the Blue Cats rose to fame, and over the years, they’ve had a few losses along the way. Reggie O’Haggen passed away back in 2004, just a few weeks after he’d jammed with Borden in Ontario, and Jimmy Haggart died in 2006.
Bob George now lives in Red Deer, Alberta, while Borden and Ferguson still live in Pictou County and are as close as ever.
Still, Ferguson misses the old days.
“I miss sitting with the boys and joking and the things we did together,” he said. “Harold and I still get together and talk, we’re still as close and will be as long as we live.”
George still calls Ferguson and Borden and visits whenever he comes home to Pictou County.
“I think about that time every day,” he said. “There was no time in my life I enjoyed any better. I have pictures of us all crowded around with our arms around each other. That’s just how we were, a pretty tight crew, and we still would be if we were altogether today.”
The News selected the Blue Cats as one of the inductees to its Virtual Music Hall of Fame, something that the three remaining members called an honour.
“It is certainly an honour and it’s nice to know that people felt that way about us and still do. We wanted to have fun and we wanted our fans to have fun, and that’s what we did.”
