With a swelling, nasal tenor voice and steel-guitar accompaniment, Marcel Martel was one of a handful of Canadian singers who wrote and sang a francophone version of American country and western music. Beginning in the mid-'40s, this Hank Williams of the Great White North glorified family, wide-open spaces, and cowboy life in simple and throat-catchingly sincere songs that brimmed with rural nostalgia and occasionally channeled the nascent, feral energy of rockabilly.