Holding the physical weight of Larry Mercey’s autobiography, *Have Mercey: My First 60 Years Making Music*, feels like gripping a literal piece of the Canadian country music foundation. It is 423 pages of grit, melody and the kind of institutional memory that modern Nashville, with its polished algorithms and snapback hats, has largely forgotten. Mercey is a seven-time Juno winner who spent six decades grinding out a career that defined the Mercey Brothers sound. He is not just an elder statesman; he is a survivor of an era where success was measured in flat tires and handwritten postcards.
The book is a sprawling archive that began not with a publishing deal, but with a mother’s devotion in Hanover. In 1955, Cecilia Mercey started clipping scraps after Larry’s first turn on the CKNX Travelling Barn Dance. That scrapbook became the DNA of this volume.
"I put it out in January. I’ve been writing it for two years," Mercey says, leaning into the history he spent a lifetime building. "The book goes from 1956 until 2020. In 1956, I was on the CKNX Barn Dance out of Wingham. My mother actually started a scrapbook at that point, right down to what song I was singing, whether my grandparents came that day, or if we had a flat tire."
And there were plenty of those. The early days of Canadian country were less about tour buses and more about the mechanical reliability of a family sedan. Mercey recalls the logistical nightmare of those formative years with a dry, road-worn wit.
"Back in those days we had a lot of flat tires. But I was only 16 years old, so my parents would always drive to these and my mother passed away when she was 42, but she had stopped the book before that," he says. "I kept on, so I’ve got 22 scrapbooks all in chronological order, and I’ve got most of my date books of where we played and what date, so I knew I had a lot of information that I could use to write a book."
The transition from a private family archive to a public-facing memoir was a slow burn. Initially, Mercey just wanted to ensure his lineage understood the sweat equity involved in his career. He wanted the grandkids to know that Grandpa didn't just sing; he built an industry.
"I’ve got three great grandkids and grandkids, and I wanted to have something so they would know what their grandfather did, about his life and so on," Mercey explains. "I was doing something more, just for my family, but as I got going and going, and it’s got 423 pages and 100 some pictures, I might as well be selling this book. That’s how it got started."
Distilling 60 years of data into a readable narrative is a brutal editorial task. Mercey approached it with the same workmanlike discipline he used to run his record label, MBS. He went through the scrapbooks page by page, year by year, ensuring the history of the Canadian scene was preserved alongside his own.
"Yeah, there is. I had the scrapbooks and I would just take one scrapbook and just go through it and write down the things I might like to talk about—what happened, what dates, when that happened and brought it down to one page with the different things to talk about," he says. "Then I would start the first one and eventually I would have that year done. It’s not all about The Mercey Brothers or myself, there’s quite a bit entered about the history of country music in Canada with different people. We had our own record company, MBS with people who started in the business like Terry Carisse out of Ottawa, and Marie Bottrell from London—she was the first one on our label."
The project gained professional momentum when Mercey crossed paths with Tom Ryerson, a writer from Woodstock who was already poking around the history of the MBS studio. Ryerson provided the technical scaffolding Mercey needed to turn a pile of memories into a manuscript.
"There was a fella’ named Tom Ryerson from Woodstock that wrote a number of books. He wrote one on the Brantford music scene, for example. He was writing about MBS, our record company," Mercey says. "He had it in a studio in his house and had a lot of things wrong, so I suggested he come down to Ilderton because I’ve got all the MBS records, and he could get it all from the horse’s mouth. I showed him my scrapbooks—here’s my life here. He said if I wanted to write a book, he’d help. The next day, he sent me a template of how to write a book. I just kept going and started one. I put my mother’s whole book in my book to start out with. I just took it one book at a time. I didn’t just start doing it, it just happened and I kept on doing it."
Without that initial spark from his mother, the book likely wouldn't exist. Mercey admits he was the only one in the family with the archival instinct—a trait he jokingly labels as a form of hoarding that ultimately paid off for Canadian music history.
"Probably not. I became kind of a hoarder of all these books, my brothers didn’t," Mercey says. "I’m the one that has all this stuff and I think that just shows me how to keepsake, and maybe I was just one of those people who did that, but it worked out pretty good."
The early years were a family affair, even if the musical talent was just a hobby for his parents. His mother, Cecilia, played a bit of fiddle, while his father tinkered with the guitar. They were the engine behind the Mercey Brothers' early momentum in Hanover and Wingham.
"My dad played guitar a little bit and my mother played a little fiddle, but it was just for fun," he says. "That was fun in those days and she was certainly a push for me, my dad was too. My mother died when she was 42, and Raymond, my brother, started in 1958. We were very lucky that we were close. We lived in Hanover, Ontario and Wingham was only 30 miles away. They had a TV station and we were close enough."
That proximity to the CKNX station was the catalyst. Raymond Mercey’s debut wasn't a quiet affair at a local hall; it was a high-stakes television broadcast that would terrify most seasoned modern performers.
I’m finding that they’re getting a much better understanding of what a musician’s life is like. People that have read the book can’t believe how much we traveled, and how much we worked. ... We were always our own roadies.
"Raymond’s first appearance singing any place was live on television," Mercey recalls. "It wasn’t at a Legion Hall or Catholic Women’s League meeting, it was right on television. There were probably two scared guys right there because everything was live in those days. We were on a show called Talent Caravan in 1960, which is like an American Idol and we won second in Canada that year. Our mother passed away in April, and we won in the finals in June. So she really never saw us do well on that or see it because that was really the big start of our careers."
The Mercey Brothers lost out on the top spot to Homer James, a gospel singer, but the exposure was the real prize. They became staples on the national circuit, appearing on *Country Hoedown*, *Red River Jamboree* and the legendary *Don Messer’s Jubilee Show*. Mercey is a firm believer that television was the only real way to build a national footprint in the pre-internet age.
"We were second to the fella that won first, his name was Homer James—and he was a gospel singer that went on to work with the Billy Graham organization," he says. "From that we got onto Country Hoedown, Red River Jamboree in Winnipeg and Don Messer’s Jubilee Show in Halifax. There’s nothing like television to get you going."
But television was only half the battle. The other half was radio, an industry Mercey says has lost its soul through corporate homogenization. In the 70s, DJs were tastemakers and personalities, not just voices reading scripts between commercials. Mercey treated them like partners.
"I think it’s the changes that have been made in it that are really the big thing here," he explains. "In the early days of radio, and putting out records, you could go to any radio station—and we did and we wouldn’t go through a talent agent to a radio station—they would welcome you, they would do an interview with you, and they were personalities themselves, like the disc jockeys. It was important to us that when we’d be playing in a bar, often in between sets, we would go and write a personal letter to the Disc Jockeys at radio station, because it became very personal. If you were thankful for them for playing your product, playing records, it went a long way. I still have friends who were Disc Jockeys way back from the 70’s."
The hustle didn't stop at the radio station. The Mercey Brothers ran their career like a grassroots political campaign. They collected addresses at bars and sent out postcards to ensure their return dates were packed. It was a manual version of a mailing list, and it worked.
"This isn’t radio, but in the bars, we were friendly, we would go down to tables, we’d talk to people, and we would get their address, and if we were going to say, Kingston or something, we’d have a whole bunch of addresses and we would write a postcard out and saying, ‘We’re coming’," Mercey says. "On a Monday night, we had good crowds. It isn’t just about singing it and playing it, it’s also a business, and that’s how I ran it. It was a form of promotion to get those cards out to people and then they’d come and see you."
This boots-on-the-ground approach led them straight to the very first Juno Awards—then known as the Gold Leaf Awards—at St. Lawrence Hall in Toronto. Mercey shares a rare photo from that night, standing alongside heavyweights like Stompin’ Tom Connors and Anne Murray.
"We were at the first Juno Awards, I think it was called the Gold Leaf Awards, and we were there at the first one at the St. Lawrence Hall in Toronto," he says. "I’ve got a picture with Stompin’ Tom, Pierre Juneau (who the Juno Awards are named after), Anne Murray and Myrna Lorrie. That was a good one. Any of them were good. There were so much better when you won (laughter), but we were lucky to have won seven over the years."
The business took a modern turn in 2020 when Mercey decided to sell the rights to the Mercey Brothers catalogue. The catalyst was a sync placement in the Netflix juggernaut *Stranger Things*. When "Whistle On The River" appeared in the show, Mercey realized the potential of his filing cabinets was being wasted.
"What lead to it was one of my nieces heard a Mercey Brother song, 'Whistle On The River' on a program called Stranger Things. We didn’t watch it, but being in the business, somebody owes us money for that, because they’re using our product," he says. "So I searched for five months trying to find out who used the song. I finally got somebody at Columbia Records and they gave me an email address for a supervisor at Netflix. So I sent an email and the next day, I get a call from a guy in Florida saying 'I guess I owe you money'. It was maybe three months before that I had my daughter come over to the home here and showing her the files and the publishing company because I’m 81 years old."
The deal with the Florida buyer was about more than just a payout; it was about legacy. Mercey wanted the music to live in movies and television shows rather than gather dust in Ilderton.
"When this guy mentioned he’d like to buy all the music, I talked to my brother Lloyd and I thought boy, this should be good because it would be my wife or daughter wouldn’t have to worry about what they were going to do with this stuff," Mercey explains. "It was a win-win situation, because he is sending it out all around the world. He really wanted it for television shows, movies, songs like that. When a company is making a movie that’s about the 60s, they want 60s music, or they want 70s music and he didn’t have much country, so when he wanted to buy it, it sounded like a good thing."
The arrangement ensures the Mercey Brothers still get paid as performers while the new owner handles the heavy lifting of licensing. It is a pragmatic move for an 81-year-old who understands that the industry has moved on from the "old type" of music.
"The good thing was that if he gets a song used, and it’s The Mercey Brothers singing it, we get paid as the artist," he says. "Otherwise, the stuff was just sitting in a filing cabinet not doing anything—it wasn’t making anything and there was no chance of making anything, so this way it does. The only thing is, right now with the pandemic we have it started about the same time I sold the company, so a lot of movie companies haven’t been making movies and it’s not quite the same as it was. But of course if we pass away or something like that, our children will still have them, so we thought it was a good thing. The young country artists like Brett Kissel and so on, they’re not doing the old type of music. This was a good way to get it possibly used again. In fact, the famous slogan is keeping the music alive. That’s what this guy in Florida is doing, keeping the music alive."
One of the crown jewels of that catalogue is "America The Great", a song Mercey essentially willed into the hands of the late Charley Pride. Mercey took a talking song he didn't like, salvaged the chorus and rebuilt it from the ground up with Pride in mind.
"Yup, I sold that," Mercey confirms. "There was a friend in Georgia who sent me a song 'America the Great' and I didn’t like it, it was a talking song, but the chorus, I really liked. So I rewrote the song, except the chorus, and I put a new melody to it. I wanted to get it to Charley Pride. I knew that when Charley came up here I had a friend doing some photography work for him, so I called him and asked whether he could get it to Charley for me. He said he couldn’t, but he gave me the managers information, and so on. So I sent it to him. In about two weeks, I got a call that Charley liked the song and he wanted to do it."
The process was slow. It took nine months and a false start involving Pride's wife rejecting several album tracks, but the song survived. Mercey eventually found himself backstage at the Strawberry Festival in Florida, watching Pride rehearse his creation.
"My wife and I were in Florida and Charley was playing at the Strawberry Festival there. We were able to get back into the compound and Charley’s manager came in. He said he thought Charley was gonna sing my song that day. He’s never done it before," Mercey says. "He came back about 10 minutes later and said he’s up on stage just rehearsing it now if you want to go and listen. So my wife and I went backstage and Charley saw me back there and he said, 'here’s my Canadian friend'. To make a long story short, in the middle of the concert, he said 'I’ve got a new album coming out tomorrow and I’ve got a couple of songs that I’d like to do, and one is written by a Canadian.' He introduced me to the crowd that and he started to sing the song. In the first verse, a few people stood up, in the second verse more got up, but by the chorus, 10,000 Americans were standing for this song. I couldn’t buy something like that, to be there and have that happen. Charley said he was blown away and never had a song that he ever did the first time get that type of reception."
Pride's generosity was rare in an industry known for "cut-ins" where stars demand writing credits for songs they didn't write. Pride wanted nothing but the music.
"So he did it a lot, like on most of the shows that he did in America, and he did it sometimes if I would be at the show here in Canada. It was really a thrill for me to have him do that," Mercey says. "When you have a song that a big act would like to do, they usually want some of the publishing or they want some of the writing, so they’ll redo a couple of different words, but Charley didn’t want anything. He said, Larry, I don’t have to be greedy. He said if I’m doing more of your songs, I won’t want anything either. Then on his last album, he did three songs that were Mercey Brother songs. I’ve got really good memories of Charley."
The Mercey Brothers also ventured into the studio business with MBS in Elmira. It started as a way to avoid the commute to RCA in Toronto but turned into a full-blown operation in an old Mennonite machine shop. However, the economic reality of the 80s eventually caught up with them.
"I didn’t enjoy it as much as I thought I would because we were all paying for it. I enjoyed it, there’s no two ways about it," Mercey admits. "The reason we closed it was because interest rates were at 19.5% and nobody was recording too much. We didn’t want to go bankrupt, we had owned a few places around it that we could sell, so we sold it, sold off stuff and got out of the business. We’re in for seven years, we had a heck of a good studio. We were at RCA at the time that we had our own studio and we thought we could have a little four track studio and then we could record some stuff home and take it down to RCA and add to it and then I thought maybe we should do an eight tracking. It just kind of grew. In fact, the building we bought was an old Mennonite machine shop in Elmira and we were building a garage onto it with for our trailer or to put our instruments and things in, so we didn’t have them in my driveway or Raymond’s driveway or Lloyd’s driveway—we had our own little place."
The studio was so well-constructed that the clip-clop of Mennonite buggies never bled into the tracks. When they finally exited the business, they sold the building to a local vet—a move Mercey still finds humorous.
"So we put these footings in for a double garage. We ended up building a studio and adding another garage on the back and then we bought the house that was on the corner," he says. "It just grew. Elmira is a pretty Mennonite area. We had this really soundproofed, so we didn’t hear the clickity clacks of the horses outside when we were recording. When we sold it, we say we sold it to the dogs, and it literally went to the dogs. We sold to the veterinarian in town. (laughter)"
Mercey hopes the book serves as a reality check for those who romanticize the life of a touring musician. It was a life of logistical gymnastics, flying across the country with 28 pieces of equipment and acting as their own roadies.
"I’m finding that they’re getting a much better understanding of what a musician’s life is like," Mercey says. "People that have read the book can’t believe how much we traveled, and how much we worked. When you’re young, you can do a lot of things. We were lucky, we didn’t have a bus or something, but we would fly to a job out West or down East. I remember playing once in Prince Edward Island on a Friday night, then on a Saturday night we would be in Nova Scotia and then on Sunday we’d be out in Saskatchewan. We couldn’t do that driving and we would just rent trucks and we’d fly with 28 pieces of equipment. We were always our own roadies. I carried a little book with me all the time of how to load a Dodge van, a Chevy van or a Ford van. We would get a 15 passenger van and have them take the seats out. We decided that we would make absolutely no more money by getting a better lighting system. We’d have to go to different trucks and other things. So our lighting worked for us."
The Mercey Brothers were also a revolving door for top-tier talent, including Darrell Scott, who would go on to write hits for The Chicks and Travis Tritt. Mercey bears no ill will toward those who moved on; he understands the boredom that comes with playing the hits night after night.
"We had some darn good groups too," he says. "When Raymond left in 1980, Lloyd and I continued on with a four piece band instead of three piece. We had some excellent musicians, and they would normally only stay two years, because they would get bored with what we were playing. You would make records, so people got to know you and that’s the songs people would want to hear when they come to see you, and the other guys sang whatever songs and they got tired of it. All of those guys that left after two years were all friends though and there’s no hard feelings. In fact, one fella was Darrell Scott. He wrote songs for The Chicks (previously known as The Dixie Chicks) and Travis Tritt. He was from Nashville and he went back to school in Boston and then to Nashville and wrote songs for The Chicks and bands like that."
Larry Mercey’s story is the story of Canadian country music itself—built on scrapbooks, flat tires and the kind of persistence that doesn't just happen anymore. It’s a legacy worth every one of those 423 pages.
