I’ve been listening to some of the nominees in CBC Radio 2’s “49 songs from north of the 49th parallel” contest, and there have been some good ones, including a couple of Neil Young songs.
However I hadn’t heard any mention of that very Canadian song “Northwest Passage” by the late great folksinger Stan Rogers. I saw him perform it at the Edmonton Folk Music Festival sometime in the early 1980s, probably a year or two before he died. The song gave me goose bumps then and it still does.
I checked out the “Obama’s Playlist” website, and yes Northwest Passage by Stan Rogers has been nominated, so I don’t need to do that. However I’ll be sure to vote for it.
I wish I could offer up a YouTube clip of the full song, but all I could find that actually had Stan Rogers singing (instead of covers by other singers), was this short clip that only includes the chorus.
Youtube does have a somewhat longer version, albeit not including all the song’s verses, as background to a montage of icebreaker shots on a CBC documentary that ran on “The National”, that can be viewed here.
UPDATE: I belatedly realized that just because a song had already been nominated didn’t mean that it would make the shortlist (duh), so I emailed in my nomination.