Indigenous roots music finally gets its moment — and a party
Box set rescues the likes of Willie Thrasher from obscurity, delivers them to Toronto stage Tuesday
Willie Thrasher’s gain is Nanaimo’s loss.
For close to 15 years, the Inuk singer/songwriter from Aklavik, N.W.T., was a Sunday fixture on that B.C. burg’s waterfront, busking solo or with assistance from his singing partner Linda Saddleback. Now pushing 70, he stopped doing it a couple of years ago, but it’s not so much age that’s keeping the man away from his old waterside “stage” these days as the fact that he’s slowly starting to get a bit busy again. He doesn’t actually need to do it anymore to stay alive as a working musician.
Still, the Nanaimo waterfront won’t take “no” for an answer.
“I used that as my practice and to keep my guitar rhythm good and meeting different people from around the world and passing them my CDs, and they’d take those stories back to Germany or Holland or Japan or Denmark,” says the entirely lovable Thrasher, down the line from a festival date at Sappyfest in Sackville, N.B., last Friday. “Right now, I do it because people are calling me back. I stopped for a while, but people started missing me down there and started calling me up and saying ‘Willie, can you come back and say hello to us?’ ”
This is unsurprising, given how warm and friendly Thrasher comes through just over the phone.
Also, though, he’s kind of awesome, one of Canadian folk-rock’s greatest buried treasures.
Listen to his psychedelicized 1980 collection Spirit Child. It was rescued from the CBC recording archives in 2015 by the terrific reissue label Light in the Attic Records after Thrasher’s inclusion amongst the many overlooked Indigenous, Inuit and Métis artists featured on the imprint’s acclaimed Native North America, Vol. 1 box set in 2014 — and upon hearing it you, too, will have the same reaction most people do: “How the hell have I never heard this before?”
This is why Willie Thrasher is getting busy again. He’s gamely been the travelling face of most of the grassroots Native North America gatherings that have happened sporadically around Canada for the past three years — “None of this would be possible without Willie Thrasher,” affirms curator Kevin Howes — and it’s starting to slowly pay off. He’s hearing from new fans all over the world.
Which is exactly what Vancouverbased DJ and music journalist Howes was kinda hoping would happen to Thrasher and the many overlooked peers, from Willie Dunn and Lloyd Cheechoo to Sugluk and Shingoose, gathered together on Native North America, Vol. 1 as he ushered that labour of love to creation.
“It was really important to preserve them in that way, but also to show people what these artists are up to today,” says Howes from Thrasher’s side in Sackville. “Many of them never stopped playing. I didn’t do this just as an archival/historical document. Native North America, to me, was a living and breathing document, hence all the shows that I’ve been putting on since the album came out. I hope people start booking some of these artists. I’m just trying to raise awareness, that’s all I’m doing.”
Native North America Vol. 1 (subtitled Aboriginal Folk, Rock, and Country 1966-1985) is indeed a treasure trove. Most of the records featured in the collection have been out of print for years and only received limited release in the first place, partly because there wasn’t much of a mechanism to release Indigenous music in this country besides the CBC and partly because the mainstream music industry never really gave a toss about songs chronicling the Indigenous or Métis or Inuit experience. It took Howes, introduced to them by “an old hippie mentor-slash-guru who was active in the ’60s who was also a really, really well-known record dealer,” about 20 years to collect enough that he had a box set waiting in the stacks.
Amazingly, too, Light in the Attic — for whom Howes curated the similarly excellent From Jamaica to Toronto: Soul, Funk & Reggae 1967-1974 compilation back in 2012 — was willing to put it out. A Grammy nomination and huge notices in such places as Rolling Stone and The Guardian ensued.
“It bypassed the Canadian music industry in a way then and it’s still bypassing the Canadian music in- dustry,” says Howes. His passion for the music is evident in the work, and when he says “these artists have changed my life.” They’ve become friends. He’s bringing a good share of those friends to Trinity St. Paul’s church on Tuesday for the largest Native North America gathering yet. Thrasher and Saddleback will be there, of course, but also Duke Redbird, Willy Mitchell, Shingoose, Lawrence Martin and Vern Cheechoo, Lloyd Cheechoo, Eric Landry, Leland Bell, Brian Davey, John Angaiak and Ernest Monias.
Thrasher calls it “a historical moment.”
“I’m really looking forward to meeting friends I haven’t seen in 20 or 30 years in Toronto,” he says. “All of us who were travelling the journey during the late ’60s and ’70s, we’re starting to get big recognition around the world and it really lifts up our hearts and our spirits and we’re willing to put the fire on bigger than before . . . Ever since it came out there have been some magnificent things that have been happening.”
This is late-life vindication for a man whose career in music has often been “a really, really difficult journey,” not least because he chose to play music that faithfully chronicled the Inuit experience after first tasting success with the more universal pop of the Cordells during the 1960s — at least until a conversation with an Inuit elder who asked the residential-school survivor why he was playing the music of his colonizers rather than music drawn from his own heritage. Sticking to his guns might yet pay off.
“I was a flower child, like a ‘hippie Eskimo’ in the late ’60s, and I get half the message from them and the rest of the message from my ancestors and my people and then write songs and go on the road,” he shrugs.
“I’m probably the only one who kept it going for 30 years, year after year and year after year, but I’m the kind of person that I do it for the love of the environment, I love performing for people, I love writing songs and I love living up to the spirits of the people across Canada and the world and bringing a unique understanding of where we came from.”
“All of us who were travelling the journey during the late ’60s and ’70s, we’re starting to get big recognition.” MUSICIAN WILLIE THRASHER