Rez
Bluez
Elaine Bomberry was selected as Blues Booster of 2003 for her tireless efforts promoting Aboriginal blues artists.
Southern Ontario's Aboriginal community has proved to be fertile ground for blues musicians and has produced a bumper harvest of talented players and singers.
Some half-dozen bands and individual performers, including The Pappy Johns Band featuring Murray Porter, The Ronnie Douglas Blues Band, The Wolfpack (who won the award for best blues album at the recent Canadian Aboriginal Music Awards), The Soul Kings and Jani Lauzon, have come to the forefront of the Aboriginal blues scene.
Southern Ontario's Aboriginal music scene, with its concentration of blues, is unlike any other in North America. "This particular blues pocket is very unique to North America," says Elaine Bomberry, winner of the MapleBlues Blues Booster award for 2003 and a tireless Aboriginal arts activist, promoter and producer.
Bomberry says the Native affinity for blues, together with late-night blues radio shows, broadcasted from the United States in the 1950s and '60s and heard by budding musicians living on the Six Nations reserve in Brantford, Ontario, are thought to be major influences in the development of today's flourishing Aborginal blues scene in Southern Ontario.
Bomberry, a 42-year-old dynamo of Ojibwa/Cayuga descent, is the producer of Rez Bluez (formerly Rez Blues), a Native blues series that celebrated its 10th anniversary last July with a high-energy show that wowed audiences and created a buzz at Toronto Harbourfront's Labatt Blues Festival.
The Rez Bluez showcase began as a Toronto Blues Society-sponsored event in 1993, on which Bomberry worked. After the second TBS show, the series fell into her lap. Once she took over, Rez Bluez grew; now, it's featured four times a year at Toronto's Silver Dollar. "I knew that our musicians needed a venue in the city at a blues club," she says, adding that Toronto's Aboriginal community of about 75,000 has a need to hear their own blues and their own musicians.
Last year, Rez Bluez Productions got the attention of Year of the Blues organizers and became a partner. The radio series The Blues, made in conjunction with the PBS special The Blues, is a Year of the Blues program that includes a segment on Rez Bluez.
Performers Sadie Buck, Murray Porter, Jason Martin of The Wolfpack and Josh Miller of The Soul Kings, along with Bomberry and Diane Keye and Amos Key, the hosts of The Blues Hour on Six Nations radio CKRZ, were interviewed for the final hour of the 14-part radio series, which aired on CBC Radio Two last month.
"We're hoping that the radio series airs in Europe, that there is someone listening from the festivals there," Bomberry says. "Our guys still haven't done anything on the European festival circuit."
The Pappy Johns Band with Murray Porter were invited to last summer's Chicago Blues Festival by its artistic director, Barry Dolins, after he saw them at a January 2003 Blues Summit showcase in Toronto. "The boys blew them away at the Crossroads stage," Bomberry says.
In Chicago, Bomberry gave a workshop called "Whose Blues Is It Anyway?" delving into the theory of a Native influence on the formation of the blues, a subject that's covered in her award-winning three-hour radio documentary, The Aboriginal Music Experience.
In Part Two of the documentary, Rez Bluez, Bomberry explores the cultural connection between African Americans and Aboriginal people and the Native influence on the blues through interviews she conducted with performers, a Zulu musicologist and the author of a Native-music encyclopedia, among others.
It's not well-known but African Americans and Aboriginal people have had contact with each other since the days of slavery in the U.S. Native people were captured after the so-called "Indian wars" of the late-17th century, instigated by operators of commercial slavery enterprises, and sold into slavery. In 1708, the number of Aboriginal slaves in the Carolinas was nearly half that of African slaves.
Contact between African Americans and Aboriginals continued up until Emancipation in 1863. Runaway slaves came through the Six Nations Reserve and some stayed, Bomberry says, while others were led to the end of the Underground Railroad, in the Cambridge, Ontario, area, on the Tuscarora tribe's trails.
As this hidden history comes to light, "truth is gaining momentum as part of the healing that is going on with the African American community accepting the fact that they have Native blood," she says. "We were very much part of the South."
Given the frequency of contact between the two peoples, and the circumstances, the theory of a Native contribution in the formation of the blues seems plausible. But most of the history is undocumented and has been passed down orally. Bomberry says that African American musicians and radio hosts she spoke to in Chicago are aware of the connection between the two cultures and their music. "The thing is, because we don't have it written down, when I speak to musicologists, they don't know what I'm talking about."
Bomberry is packaging her radio documentary series, The Aboriginal Music Experience, in a three-CD set, which will be available through rezbluez@hotmail.com.
She's also at work on a Rez Bluez television documentary, a Rez Blues TV series and a CD, Full Circle, the next release for The Pappy Johns Band with Murray Porter.
Now at mid-career, Bomberry has accomplished much. Among her achievements, she's helped to establish the best music of Aboriginal Canada category for the Juno Awards and was instrumental in the awarding of a licence for Toronto's Aboriginal Voices Radio, 106.5 FM.
A woman who lives and breathes her work, she says, for her, it's all about building up the Aboriginal community. "It's been wonderful opening doors for people."
- Ruth Schweitzer