Stompin’ Tom Connors, a Canadian country-folk singer whose odes to the vast country he had roamed as a hitchhiking troubadour made him a beloved figure from the Maritime Provinces to British Columbia, died on Wednesday at his home in Halton Hills, Ontario. He was 77.  His Web site announced the death, citing natural causes.  Mr. Connors wrote more than 300 songs, most notably “The Hockey Song,” his paean to the country’s national obsession. His albums sold nearly four million copies.  That music was shaped by his love and knowledge of Canada, gleaned from youthful wanderings in which he worked as a dredge-boat sailor, a tobacco-picker, a short-order cook and a gravedigger. His songs told of a potato-truck driver from Prince Edward Island, a polka-playing musician from the Yukon, and Red River Jane, who left him high and dry in Winnipeg.  Mr. Connors, who was known for his big black cowboy hat, got his nickname from the emphatic way he kept time with his left foot. Unlike most successful Canadian entertainers, among them Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and Gordon Lightfoot, he shunned the American music world, confining his touring and recording to Canada. Canadians who sought American success, he said, were “border jumpers.”  In 1978, Mr. Connors began a decade-long retirement to protest what he saw as the Americanization of Canada’s music industry. A particular gripe was Canadian songwriters who rhapsodized about places like Alabama and Tennessee. He returned only after a new generation of Canadian punk performers had discovered his music.  With three-quarters of Canadians living within 100 miles of the United States border and flooded by American media, many Canadians strive to preserve a distinct cultural identity. Mr. Connors seemed eager to lead the fight. In a letter he had asked be published after his death, he said that all his work had been inspired by “Canada, the greatest country in the world.”  Prime Minister Stephen Harper hailed Mr. Connors as “a true Canadian original.” On Thursday, members of Parliament gathered in the foyer of the House of Commons in Ottawa to sing “Bud the Spud,” his tribute to the truckdriver.  “The Hockey Song” first appeared on Mr. Connors’s 1973 album, “Stompin’ Tom and the Hockey Song.” It reached wide popularity when it began to be played at National Hockey League games in the mid-1990s. It still is, on both sides of the border. In 2004, when “Late Night With Conan O’Brien” taped a week of shows in Canada, Mr. Connors was a guest and sang the song. After his death was announced at a Toronto Maple Leafs game on Wednesday night, fans took to their feet when the song was played.  “Oh, the good old hockey game/Is the best game you can name,” the lyrics go. “And the best game you can name/Is the good old hockey game.”  Thomas Charles Connors was born in Saint John, New Brunswick, on Feb. 9, 1936, to an unwed teenager. She left town with him when he was 3, and the two begged and stole in order to eat. When his mother was jailed for theft, he was sent to an orphanage and from there to foster parents, who treated him badly.  In his autobiography, “Stompin’ Tom: Before the Fame,” published in 1995, Mr. Connors wrote that he had started hitchhiking around the country at 12, bought his first guitar at 14 and survived by doing odd jobs and literally singing for his supper. In the coldest days of winter, he welcomed vagrancy arrests in order to have a warm place to sleep.  In the early 1960s, he wrote, this never-ending grind and his apparent lack of a future left him feeling so forsaken that he thought of deliberately freezing to death in a snow bank in Quebec.  Legend, well burnished by Mr. Connors, has it that his big break came in 1964 at the Maple Leaf Hotel in Timmins, Ontario, when he was 28. He was a nickel short of a beer, and the bartender agreed to give him a drink if he would play a few songs. That led to a 14-month engagement at the hotel and the chance to make records at the local radio station. He ultimately recorded 61 albums, 10 of which have yet to be released, according to his Web site.  Mr. Connors said his heroes were “average Joes” whose struggles, in Canada’s uncountable nooks and crannies, he claimed to know like his own palm. His “Sudbury Saturday Night” depicts the city of Sudbury in northern Ontario, home to one of the world’s biggest nickel mines, long owned by the International Nickel Company, or Inco.  “The girls are out to bingo and the boys are getting stinko,” it goes, “And we’ll think no more of Inco on a Sudbury Saturday night.”  In 1973, Mr. Connors married Lena Welsh on “The Elwood Glover Show,” a talk show on CBC television. She survives him, as do two sons, two daughters and several grandchildren.  Mr. Connors once offered the opinion that nobody should die happy. “I think people should die without their dreams being fulfilled,” he said, “so maybe they can have an excuse for coming around again.”
Mr. Connors sang often about his hardscrabble life and shunned American music as he built a wide following in his native country.