How a Virginia-born singer joined with Al Stewart to write a song about Loyalists who fled to Nova Scotia

The year 2026 marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Cardinal News has embarked on a three-year project to tell the little-known stories of Virginia’s role in the march to independence. This project is supported, in part, by a grant from the Virginia American Revolution 250 Commission . You can sign up to receive a free monthly newsletter with updates. Find all our stories from this project on the Cardinal News 250 page.

When Dave Nachmanoff was growing up in Virginia, he learned all the usual stuff about our nation’s founding.

Patrick Henry and “give me liberty or give me death.”

Thomas Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence.

George Washington and the Battle of Yorktown.

There was one aspect of Virginia’s role in the American Revolution that he was never taught. He was never told about the estimated 80,000 to 100,000 Loyalists to the British crown who fled the 13 Colonies, with about half of those eventually making their way to the British Colonies that didn’t rebel — what today we call Canada.

That revelation came to him in college, when he met his future wife, Jen. She was from Chicago, and grew up in Iowa, but her family came from Nova Scotia — and was descended from some of those Loyalists. Their story opened his eyes to a part of history that Virginians (or Americans in general) aren’t really told about — and opened his imagination.

Eventually this Virginia-born and Virginia-raised musician came to write a song about the other side during the American Revolution — and do so with some help from the famed British musician Al Stewart, whose albums “Year of the Cat” and “Time Passages” went platinum in the 1970s.

Nachmanoff’s story begins in Arlington, where he grew up and was something of a musical prodigy. He earned his first review at age 10 in the now-defunct Washington Star when he played with blues and folk musician Elizabeth Cotten. In eighth grade he went to the local library to look up in “Who’s Who” a musician he’d become enamored with — the aforementioned Stewart, whose songs were a staple on FM radio at the time. “There was no internet then,” Nachmanoff explains. He dreamed of someday playing with Stewart — hold that thought.

When Nachmanoff graduated from H.B. Woodlawn High School at age 17 — a year early — his father took a job in London as a banker. “I went over for a year to try my fortune in the music business,” Nachmanoff says. “I was hoping to meet him [Stewart] and maybe play guitar for him. I didn’t know he was in California.” He did get to meet guitarist Peter White, Stewart’s collaborator and sideman — hold that thought, too.

After a year of the teenager gigging in Britain, Nachmanoff’s parents suggested that he might really want to go to college instead. He wound up at Columbia University, studying philosophy, which is where he met his future wife — and started learning about her loyalist ancestors, aided by both family lore and a book that was written about one of her forebears, Adam Bower (or Bauer).

The Bowers’ story is more complicated — and thus more fascinating — than the usual tale of American Colonists who thought the revolution was a bad idea. The Bower family came from Germany, where they were Protestants in a Catholic part of Germany. “There was a big war going on between Protestants and Catholics, so they were basically faced with religious persecution,” Nachmanoff says.

“A guy walks into town one day, says he represents King George III and said the king needed good Protestant farmers to farm the land in Canada, and if they collected all the gold in town, he’d take them to London and then to Canada, where they’d flourish without persecution.”

The townspeople considered the offer and decided to risk it. The offer seemed plausible — George III had family connections in Germany, George I and George II had both been both in Germany, and George III was in line to become King of Hanover in what is now northern Germany. The notion that this very Germanic king in London might send an emissary to recruit Germans for his Colonies across the Atlantic made perfectly good sense.

It also turned out to be a fraud. The gold was rounded up and paid, there was a ship and the German farmers sailed to London — where the supposed Colonial agents absconded with their treasure. “So here were these German farmers stranded on a boat in London,” Nachmanoff says. A German minister in London got wind of this and took their plight to Parliament and the king. “He said ‘they’ve been tricked in your name, can you help them out?” King George III could — he sent them to the Carolinas instead of Canada.

There are differing accounts as to whether the German farmers went to North Carolina or South Carolina — Nachmanoff leans toward North Carolina, based on his research, specifically western North Carolina. “They started plantations, they were industrious and hard-working farmers, everything was going great, except for a little thing called the American Revolution,” Nachmanoff says. “The Carolinas were a particularly brutal place as far as the fights between revolutionaries and those who remained loyal to the king.”

As the story goes, Adam Bower’s oldest daughter — about 17 or 18 — was suspected of spying for the British. Revolutionaries “took him out back and said we’ll beat you up” unless you help the cause of independence, Nachmanoff says. Bower’s response was something to the effect of “Sorry, we owe everything to the king, we won’t join the fight.” The revolutionaries carried out their threat, beating him with a metal rod so bad that he lost an eye.

The Germans promptly fled for the second time — this time to Nova Scotia, a colony where pro-British sentiment was much stronger (thanks partly to both the economic and military influence of the British fleet anchored in Halifax). They settled around Shelburne Bay and, in recognition of his injury, Bower was granted a pension of 12 shillings a year. “The problem is the land up there is beautiful but not really a place for farming,” Nachmanoff says. “They did not exactly prosper.” Instead, the Germans adapted and became boat builders for the fishing industry. In all, about 33,000 of the estimated Loyalists settled in Nova Scotia, so many that for a time Shelburne was one of the largest cities in North America. (Today it’s home to only about 1,500 people.) Other Loyalists went to what is now Ontario; one of the most prominent statues is modern-day Hamilton, Ontario, depicts the Loyalists fleeing what the inscription describes as “the pitiless persecution of their kinsmen in revolt.” We don’t know how many Virginia loyalists wound up in either place, but we do know that about 900 Black Virginians escaped slavery and made their way to Nova Scotia, which became home to the largest free Black settlement in North America. (See accompanying story on the heritage of those Black Virginians who settled in Nova Scotia.)

When Nachmanoff first visited Shelburne, he noticed the Bower family name was still around. “I thought, wow, this is not what I was taught in school in Virginia about the revolution — it’s a whole different story. I thought it was fascinating — the fact that they were refugees twice.” The song, though, was still years in the future.

Before Nachmanoff returned to the music world, he spent years in academia, eventually earning a doctorate in philosophy from the University of California, Davis. He wasn’t interested in pursuing the usual route to a faculty position, though. Instead, his passion for music beckoned.

While Nachmanoff was in grad school in California, Stewart’s sideman White passed through town. “He remembered me 10 years later,” Nachmanoff said, and “reluctantly” agreed to jam for a while. White was apparently impressed. “I didn’t know he was about to leave Al Stewart to embark on a solo career,” Nachmanoff says, but one day a call came inviting him to audition as White’s replacement. (One advantage Nachmanoff had, he says — Stewart hates to rehearse and Nachmanoff already knew his songs.)

“I didn’t actually get the job right away,” Nachmanoff said, but Stewart liked him enough that they stayed in touch — and Stewart used him as a substitute guitarist whenever the need arose. And that’s how the song “ The Loyalist ” came about in 2000.

“I had started working on a song about my wife’s ancestors, but it was about 25 verses — the whole thing was very unwieldy. I called Al and said ‘this is more your kind of thing, a historical song, I don’t know what to do about it.’” Stewart invited Nachmanoff to his California home.

“We sat down at the kitchen table; he came up with a first verse,” Nachmanoff said. After a little more playing, “he said, ‘well, I think you’ve got enough to go with, why don’t you go work on it?’” So Nachmanoff did, discarding the whole backstory in Germany in favor of a much tighter five-minute song focused on the Bower family fleeing the Carolinas for Nova Scotia. “I don’t know if it was my idea or Al’s idea,” Nachmanoff said, but the song is told from the point of view of Adam Bower’s ghost still hovering around Shelburne.

Nachmanoff recorded the song at a studio in New Jersey, Stewart called him with another idea — a “ghostly vocal” in the background. Nachmanoff wasn’t sure what to expect, but he sent the track to Stewart in California, who recorded the vocal part he had in mind and sent it back. The result was a big name guest vocal on what became Nachmanoff’s album “A Certain Distance.” Nachmanoff says he makes sure to include the song whenever he plays in Canada, where it always gets a good reception; but he has played it in the United States. The only place he regretted playing it was a show in Dublin, Ireland, where “loyalist” has a very different meaning and is used to signify the Ulster Protestants in Northern Ireland. The audience didn’t object, he says, but he probably won’t play the song there again.

In time, Nachmanoff moved up from a substitute to a regular sideman for Stewart and toured with him for about 17 years, playing venues as big as the Royal Albert Hall in London and appearing on “Uncorked,” a live album released in 2009 — “Al Stewart with Dave Nachmanoff.” Stewart punctuates his live shows with stories. On that album, there’s a 1:11 minute break for “Auctioning Dave,” a fanciful story about Stewart auctioning off his accompanist.

Along the way Nachmanoff has also pursued his own solo career, sometimes opening for Stewart, sometimes appearing separately. He’s got 13 solo albums to his credit — “Spinoza’s Dream” in 2016 was recorded with many of the band members from Stewart’s “Year of the Cat” album; “Cerulean Sky” in 2019 included many members from the band of the acclaimed British folk singer Richard Thompson. These days, Nachmanoff is based in California but says he still considers himself a Virginian. After a pandemic break that’s been spent doing a lot of production work for other musicians, Nachmanoff is now back on the road (and would welcome invites from any Virginia venues). This week, he’s got gigs with Al Stewart in Chicago and Cincinnati.

With the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence coming up, that makes a good opportunity to play “The Loyalist” — even for an American audience, perhaps especially for an American audience. To Nachmanoff, the song stands out as a good example of how his background in philosophy makes for good songwriting — “being able to look at all the different perspectives. To me, as a songwriter, that’s where things get interesting.”

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