Creation rebel
Rediscovered: the Native American Leonard Cohen. By John Mulvey.
★★★★
Creation Never Sleeps, Creation Never Dies: The Willie Dunn Anthology LIGHT IN THE ATTIC. CD/LP
IN 1968, around the same time Neil Young bestowed the name Crazy Horse on his new backing band, another Canadian musician was embarking on a much deeper study of Native American history. Willie Dunn, Mi’gmaq on his mother’s side, had lived for a while on the Listuguj reserve in Quebec as a child before joining up with the Canadian Armed Forces. By the late ’60s, however, he had also spent time on the Greenwich Village folk scene and had supplemented his music-making with a tentative career in film.
Dunn’s first movie, an award-winning 10-minute short, combined a weight of historic photographs with an instantly memorable song. The Ballad Of Crowfoot was a solemn and unstinting narrative that connected colonial injustices of the 19th century with their enduring legacy in the 1960s: “It’s always the Indian,” he noted, “who gets the blame.” The message was powerful, but so was the performance. Dunn, it transpired, was a baritone craftsman akin to Fred Neil, a troubadour capable of evoking the majesty of the North American wilderness without ignoring the political realities that also existed there.
The Ballad Of Crowfoot appeared on Dunn’s selftitled debut in 1971, and again on a re-recorded version of the album in 1972. Neither record was much of a success, and
Dunn’s subsequent musical career, until his death in 2013, quietly co-existed with filmmaking, writing and, most prominently, political activism. Creation
Never Sleeps, Creation Never Dies, though, makes a persuasive case for Dunn as a significant songwriter; one whose serious engagement with his First Nations identity was sadly not as lucrative as appropriating Native American imagery proved to be for some of his contemporaries.
Initially, Leonard Cohen seems to be Dunn’s key role model. A clutch of lovely tracks from his debut are heavy on the poetic gravitas and flamenco-tinged guitar: Peruvian Dream (Part 1) feels like a mildly psychedelic first cousin of Suzanne and is no worse for that. The superb I Pity The Country, meanwhile, is a prescient survey of a country choked by pollution, exploited by big business and undermined by incompetent governance, at the mercy of “bigoted newspress, fascist town criers”. As the years go on, Dunn artfully expands his remit to include a kind of baroque folk in the vein of David Ackles (The Carver), recitations of Shakespeare set to chants by the Akwesasne Singers of Mohawk heritage, and his own invocation of Crazy Horse, that in part recalls a Celtic hoedown convened by Johnny Cash. Odd, but effective.
What provides a constant is his love, respect and ability to read the history in the contours of the landscape. Songs from a pair of rare 1980s long-players find Dunn contemplating the ocean as well as the inland expanses of Canada. Nova Scotia, in particular, is a rugged and gorgeous song of longing for both the sea and the valleys; a sense of total connection with the whole spectrum of unforgiving environments. This land was Willie Dunn’s land, and his ways of honouring it remain just as poignant now as ever.