Could Willie Dunn have been a contender? A Maclean’s magazine profile in 1970 depicted the Canadian singer-songwriter as a hard-living itinerant involved in radical Native American activism. A Cree woman from Alberta was quoted saying he was “a star and a hero” to her children. A talent scout from Columbia Records had apparently been trying to track him down for three years. But he was too rough-edged for the mainstream. For all their qualities, his songs did not belong in the entertainment industry.
Dunn, who died in 2013, would have been 70 this weekend. He was born in 1941 to a mother from the Mi’kmaq, a First Nations people based in eastern Canada. His father was a British immigrant who arrived in the 1920s to become a hobo riding the railroads in search of work. Dunn adopted the same footloose habits as a guitar-slinging troubadour. Raised in a mixed household in which his mother hid her children’s indigenous identity from them, he learnt to use 1960s folk-rock to recount tales of Native American suffering and struggle, the fight to survive in the “white man’s” world.
The Maclean’s profile encountered him at a moment when any chance of mainstream renown was passing by, a renunciation of sorts in keeping with notions of Native American self-determination, and also his vagabond sensibility. But lack of recognition became onerous to him. “You know, I’m a good fisherman, but there are no fish,” he said of his diminished opportunities to perform in the late 1970s.
Creation Never Sleeps, Creation Never Dies: The Willie Dunn Anthology was released earlier this year. Compiled by Toronto historian Kevin Howes, who produced 2014’s Native North America (Vol. 1): Aboriginal Folk, Rock and Country 1966-1985, it aims to redress the neglect into which Dunn’s music fell. The 22 songs drawn from an interrupted recording career provide an unanswerable case in his favour.
It opens with “The Ballad of Crowfoot”, a near 10-minute tour de force about a 19th-century First Nations leader who tried to coexist with Canadian settlers, with disastrous results for his people. It is one of Dunn’s better-known songs, for which he made an innovative film in 1968, winner of several awards. “I Pity the Country” is another signature song, an acerbic denunciation of a racist society delivered in a calm, ruminative fashion, as much in sorrow as anger.
Dunn was inspired to take up music by a childhood love of Hank Williams. But he sounds more like another country great, Johnny Cash, a centred singer with a deep, resonant voice. The style anchors the complex intermingling of pre-Columbian religion and conquistador Christianity in “Peruvian Dream (Part 1)”, and dignifies the real-life tale of a boy, recounted in “Charlie”, who froze to death in 1966 after fleeing one of the residential schools to which First Nations children were forcibly removed.
Songs from later in Dunn’s career are no less impressive. “The Pacific” is a highlight, setting a chapter from Moby-Dick to a loose country-rock groove, through which a flute solo blows with exhilarating freedom. In “The Dreamer”, Dunn depicts himself as “a dreamer, dreaming my life away, and I dream of a better day”. Creation Never Sleeps, Creation Never Dies brings that better day to life, for his music at least — a handsome tribute to an extinguished talent whose songs deserve the hearing they failed to receive in his lifetime.
★★★★★
‘Creation Never Sleeps, Creation Never Dies: The Willie Dunn Anthology’
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Willie Dunn is no longer neglected on Creation Never Sleeps, Creation Never Dies - Financial Times
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