Legend Meets Legend
From the Audio Book and Writer’s Docks, Wisdom Harbour presents a unique fusion of two legendary talents! Jean Shepherd’s iconic voice with the timeless poetry of Robert Service provides an extraordinary combination of classic artistry.
Shepherd, renowned for his engaging storytelling and unique voice that charmed radio and movie audiences alike—he wrote and narrated the movie “A Christmas Story”—becomes the perfect vessel to breathe life into the vivid and often rugged landscapes of Service’s poetry.
Service, known as the “Bard of the Yukon,” crafted verses that captured the essence of the early 20th-century Canadian wilderness and the colorful characters within it. His poems, like “The Ballad of Blasphemous Bill,” “The Shooting of Dan McGrew,” and “The Cremation of Sam McGee,” are marked by a rhythmic cadence and a narrative style that resonates profoundly with Shepherd’s warm, conversational tone, making the old new again in a celebration of timeless talent.
The Ballad of Blasphemous Bill
The Shooting of Dan McGrew
The Cremation of Sam McGee
Robert W. Service
Born in Lancashire, England 1874, Robert W. Service wrote his first poem on his sixth birthday. He was raised in Scotland by his grandfather, where his interest in poetry grew alongside a desire for travel and adventure.
Inspired by Rudyard Kipling and Robert Louis Stevenson, Service sailed to western Canada in 1894 at the age of twenty to become a cowboy in the Yukon Wilderness. He worked on a ranch and as a bank teller in Vancouver Island at the time of the Gold Rush, gleaning material that would inform his poetry for years to come and earn him his reputation as “Bard of the Yukon.”
Service also worked as an ambulance driver in France during World War I.
A prolific writer and poet, Service published numerous collections of poetry during his lifetime, including his first, Songs of a Sourdough, released in 1907.