Wilf Carter (Montana Slim) crossed the Canadian-U.S. border in 1935 to further his career as a country musician. Hank Snow moved to Nashville in 1945, reaching the stage of the Grand Ole Opry in 1950. Twenty-one years later Neil Young settled into Nashville’s Quadraphonic Sound Studio to record songs that would be featured on the album Harvest. Today, Nashville’s New West Records represents country-inspired Canadian musicians Daniel Romano and Corb Lund. These artists make up part of a notable history of northerners blending North American identities through country music. A significant and overlooked part of this history came to light in 2014 with the release of the Native North America (Vol. 1): Aboriginal Folk, Rock, and Country 1966-1985 compilation from Light In The Attic Records. NNA (Vol. 1) is a collection of limited releases from Indigenous musicians from across Canada and Alaska. It is significant because it makes audible that Indigenous musicians performed—and continue to perform—country, folk, and rock music, challenging the borders and identities forced on them through settler-colonialism. These artists bring together southern sounds and northern voices—often using northern Indigenous languages—to articulate different experiences under North American colonization. This paper begins to explore how artists such as Willie Dunn, John Angaiak, and William Tagoona unsettle North American boundaries and identities through country music. This paper also begins to explore the opportunities and challenges this compilation presents to white settler listeners.
Simone Schmidt is a folk and country musician based in tkaronto (Mohawk word from which Toronto, Ontario, is derived). Schmidt's 2017 album Audible Songs from Rockwood is part of their solo work as Fiver and part of an attempt to write “new life into and around folk, country, and rock songs.” The album is based on their time spent at the Archives of Ontario reading the original case files of the Rockwood Asylum for the Criminally Insane that operated in Kingston, Ontario, from 1856 to 1881. The songs are sung from the imagined perspectives of different women imprisoned at Rockwood. I read and engage with Schmidt's work as a performance of unsettling. Unsettlement comes through on this album in direct ways, such as Schmidt's challenges to ideas of land possession and challenges to the bases of the medical and psychiatric designations. More subtle challenges come through the portrayals of the women, which, though largely imagined, come from a place of self-reflexivity. In this paper I will examine how Schmidt uses the sounds of traditional North American folk and country music as a sonic bed for a performance of unsettling on Audible Songs from Rockwood.
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