# Song for a soldier



## daftandbarmy (8 Feb 2016)

Pete McMartin: Song for a soldier

Anniversary impression: North Vancouver songwriter was so touched by veterans’ stories that he wrote ‘Strong Hands’
In the spring of 2005, Trevor Guthrie of North Vancouver, a singer with the boy band soulDecision, flew, of all places, to the 60th anniversary celebrations of the liberation of Holland.

A neighbour he had befriended, a D-Day veteran named Len McFarlane, had told him stories about the war that touched Guthrie deeply because of the sacrifices they had made. He told McFarlane that he would like to meet some of the veterans, and McFarlane said, why don’t you go to the anniversary elebrations in Europe?

During his 2005 trip, Guthrie attended a service at the Holten Canadian War Cemetery in Holland. During the ceremonies, Dutch schoolchildren put a single white flower on every grave, and at one point, Guthrie saw a group of students who were reading something and looked visibly upset. Guthrie asked them what they were reading, and they showed him. It was a letter from a young Canadian soldier thanking his parents for the gifts they had sent him and that he hoped to be home for Christmas. Guthrie read the letter, and then, looking down, realized he was standing in front of the young soldier’s grave. He had been killed in battle the day after he had written the letter.

“And that’s when I just lost it,” Guthrie said. He began to sob.

And as he did so, an elderly veteran came over to him and put a comforting hand on his shoulder and told him it was OK to cry and that he felt the same way every time he came here because he had five friends buried in the cemetery. And then the old veteran, standing beside Guthrie, began to cry, too.

His name was Murray Quattrocchi, of Smith Falls, Ont. He was 90 years old. He and Guthrie talked for awhile and Guthrie took a picture with him and got Quattrocchi’s address.

Inspired by his neighbour and the veterans he had met overseas, Guthrie returned home and wrote a song about them. It was entitled Strong Hands, and the last four lines of the song referred to Quattrocchi’s comforting words and his friends buried in the cemetery. He sent Quattrocchi a Christmas card that year and a copy of the song on a CD, but Guthrie never heard back from him.
The song would languish in Guthrie’s possession, unreleased. That year, he quit the boy band and struck out on his own as a singles act. Strong Hands didn’t fit into his genre of pop and dance songs.

“I didn’t know what to do with it,” he said.

Time passed. Seven years later, in 2012, Murray Quattrocchi passed away. After his death, his daughter, Marina, from Toronto (who brought this story came to my attention), went through her father’s old correspondence.

“I was going through all his photos and letters,” Marina said, “and I found the Christmas card and the CD Trevor had sent my dad, and I listened to the CD and I thought, ohmigod, this is amazing! I was going to write Trevor to thank him but I was so emotionally distraught and so overcome with grief at the time that I just couldn’t. And I forgot.”

Three years later in 2015, a few weeks before Christmas, Marina heard a song called Strong Hands being played on the radio, and the announcer said it was written and sung by Trevor Guthrie.

“And I thought, this is the same song that he sent my dad! And I went and found the letter and CD, and I went on iTunes and found the song there, and I realized Trevor had just released it, in October, 2015, purposely a month before Remembrance Day.”

The song, sadly, wasn’t quite the same as the original Guthrie had sent Quattrocchi. It had been shortened for radio, and the last verse that referred to the meeting in the cemetery had been edited out.

But Marina was thrilled, nonetheless. Through iTunes and an accompanying YouTube video of Guthrie playing the song, she discovered that all the proceeds of the sale of the song were going to Wounded Warriors Canada, the national donor program that helps wounded and ill soldiers, veterans and their families.

Marina wrote Guthrie a letter thinking him, and sent him a Christmas card, too, since Guthrie had sent her dad one. Several days later, Guthrie phoned her.

“He said that Dad had never phoned him or written him, and he had always wondered what had happened to him.”
(She would find out later from a friend of Quattrocchi’s that had gone with him to Holland that he never wrote Guthrie back because he felt he wasn’t a good enough writer, but that he was touched by the CD.)

As for Guthrie, he enjoyed success as a singles act. And in the years after that 2005 pilgrimage, he had met more veterans, he said, including those from Afghanistan. Some of them had gone through tough times, and he finally put Strong Hands out there, he said, to raise awareness of them in any way he could, and to give them a hand up.

(Strong Hands can be viewed on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUc-6CpXyh8)

http://www.vancouversun.com/opinion/columnists/pete+mcmartin+song+soldier/11701210/story.html


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