| "Northwest Passage" | |
|---|---|
| Song by Stan Rogers | |
| from the album Northwest Passage | |
| Released | 1981 |
| Recorded | 1981 |
| Genre | Folk, Contemporary folk, Sea shanty |
| Length | 4:45 |
| Label | Fogarty's Cove Music |
| Songwriter(s) | Stan Rogers |
"Northwest Passage" is one of the best-known songs by Canadian musician Stan Rogers. The original recording from the 1981 album of the same name is an a cappella song, featuring Rogers alone singing the verses, with Garnet Rogers, David Alan Eadie and Chris Crilly harmonizing with him in the chorus.
While it recalls the history of early explorers who were trying to discover a route across Canada to the Pacific Ocean (especially Sir John Franklin, who lost his life in the quest for the Northwest Passage), the song’s central theme is a comparison between the journeys of these past explorers and the singer's own journey across Canada. The singer ultimately reflects that, just as the quest for a northwest passage might be considered a fruitless one (in that a viable and navigable northwest passage was never found in the days of Franklin and his kind), a modern-day journeyer along similar paths might meet the same end. The song also references the geography of Canada, including the Fraser River ("to race the roaring Fraser to the sea") on the western coast, the Beaufort Sea to the north and the Davis Strait to the east. He is driving across the Prairies, allowing him to view cities behind him fall and cities ahead rise.
When Peter Gzowski of CBC's national radio program Morningside asked Canadians to pick an alternate national anthem, "Northwest Passage" was the overwhelming choice of his listeners. [1] [2]
The narrator states that he is taking "passage overland in the footsteps of brave Kelso" three centuries after. This refers to Henry Kelsey, an English explorer and trader apprenticed to the Hudson's Bay Company in 1684, who was commissioned to explore the prairies in response to the competition posed by French Traders. [3] Rogers confessed in an interview in 1982 that during the writing of the song, he had not been sure of Kelsey's name, and had guessed it was Kelso when recording the song. [3] The lines "To find the hand of Franklin reaching for the Beaufort Sea" and "seeking gold and glory, leaving weathered broken bones/and a long-forgotten lonely cairn of stones" commemorate the Franklin expedition. [4]
The song appears on an album of the same name released by Rogers in 1981, and is considered one of the classic songs in Canadian music history. In the 2005 CBC Radio One series 50 Tracks: The Canadian Version , "Northwest Passage" ranked fourth, behind only Neil Young's "Heart of Gold", Barenaked Ladies' "If I Had $1,000,000" and Ian and Sylvia's "Four Strong Winds". It has been referred to as one of Canada's unofficial anthems by former Prime Minister Stephen Harper, [5] and former Governor General Adrienne Clarkson quoted the song both in her first official address [6] and in her speech at the dedication of the new Canadian embassy in Berlin. [7]
The song also appeared in the final episode of the television series, Due South and has been covered in acoustic form by the British duo Show of Hands on their album Cold Frontier . Show of Hands do not perform the song a capella but use guitar and violin to provide musical backing. It also appeared on the episode "Buried in Ice" of the PBS series NOVA about the discovery of gravesites belonging to members of the Franklin Expedition. The exhumation and study of the bodies revealed that the crew of the Franklin Expedition suffered from lead poisoning, possibly contributing to the catastrophic failure of the men to survive, although a more recent study suggested zinc deficiency as a more likely cause of their deaths. [8]
The song was used on October 9, 2007 by the BBC World Service's World Today programme during a story about the expansion of Canada's efforts to confirm its sovereignty over the arctic region through which the Northwest Passage runs.
Artist Matt James used the lyrics to accompany his illustrations for a children’s book that received a 2013 Governor General’s Literary award. [9]
The Saint Patrick's Regional Secondary Men's Chamber Choir did a cover of the song during a cultural exchange event in 2006 in Vancouver, BC. [10]
The American quintet Bounding Main released a cover of the song on their 2006 album Lost at Sea. [11]
UK's sea shanty band Kimber's Men released a cover of the song on their 2010 album. [12]
Canadian Celtic punk band, The Real McKenzies, released a cover of the song on their 2017 album Two Devils Will Talk.
Canadian power metal band, Unleash the Archers, has released a cover of the song on their 2019 EP Explorers.
Canadian folk punk band, The Dreadnoughts, has released a cover of the song on their 2019 album Into The North.
American singer Judy Collins and Norwegian musician Jonas Fjeld (backed by American bluegrass group Chatham County Line) also released a cover of the song on their 2019 album Winter Stories.
The Wellermen and Seth Staton Watkins released a bass singer close harmony version of this song 2022. It was published on their YouTube channel. [13]
The Longest Johns and El Pony Pisador released a recording of The Northwest Passage as part of their collab album The Longest Pony in March 2023. [14]
The Northwest Passage (NWP) is the sea lane between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans through the Arctic Ocean, along the northern coast of North America via waterways through the Arctic Archipelago of Canada. The eastern route along the Arctic coasts of Norway and Siberia is accordingly called the Northeast Passage (NEP). The various islands of the archipelago are separated from one another and from Mainland Canada by a series of Arctic waterways collectively known as the Northwest Passages, Northwestern Passages or the Canadian Internal Waters.
Stanley Allison Rogers was a Canadian folk musician and songwriter who sang traditional-sounding songs frequently inspired by Canadian history and the working people's daily lives, especially from the fishing villages of the Maritime provinces and, later, the farms of the Canadian prairies and Great Lakes. He died in a fire aboard Air Canada Flight 797, grounded at the Greater Cincinnati Airport, at the age of 33.
Peter John Gzowski, known colloquially as "Mr. Canada", or "Captain Canada", was a Canadian broadcaster, writer and reporter, most famous for his work on the CBC radio shows This Country in the Morning and Morningside. His first biographer argued that Gzowski's contribution to Canadian media must be considered in the context of efforts by a generation of Canadian nationalists to understand and express Canada's cultural identity. Gzowski wrote books, hosted television shows, and worked at a number of newspapers and at Maclean's magazine. Gzowski was known for a friendly, warm, interviewing style.
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HMS Terror was a specialised warship and a newly developed bomb vessel constructed for the Royal Navy in 1813. She participated in several battles of the War of 1812, including the Battle of Baltimore with the bombardment of Fort McHenry. She was converted into a polar exploration ship two decades later, and participated in George Back's Arctic expedition of 1836–1837, the successful Ross expedition to the Antarctic of 1839 to 1843, and Sir John Franklin's ill-fated attempt to force the Northwest Passage in 1845, during which she was lost with all hands along with HMS Erebus.
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The Northwest Passage is a historical sea route between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, through the Arctic waters of Canada, Alaska, and Greenland.
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"Lady Franklin's Lament" is a traditional folk ballad indexed by George Malcolm Laws and Steve Roud. The song recounts the story of a sailor who dreams about Lady Franklin speaking of the loss of her husband, Sir John Franklin, who disappeared in Baffin Bay during his 1845 expedition through the Arctic Ocean in search of the Northwest Passage sea route to the Pacific Ocean. The song first appeared as a Broadside ballad around 1850 and has since been recorded with the melody of the Irish traditional air "Cailín Óg a Stór" by numerous artists. It has been found in Ireland, in Scotland, and in some regions of Canada.
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Franklin's lost expedition was a failed British voyage of Arctic exploration led by Captain Sir John Franklin that departed England in 1845 aboard two ships, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, and was assigned to traverse the last unnavigated sections of the Northwest Passage in the Canadian Arctic and to record magnetic data to help determine whether a better understanding could aid navigation. The expedition met with disaster after both ships and their crews, a total of 129 officers and men, became icebound in Victoria Strait near King William Island in what is today the Canadian territory of Nunavut. After being icebound for more than a year, Erebus and Terror were abandoned in April 1848, by which point two dozen men, including Franklin, had died. The survivors, now led by Franklin's second-in-command, Francis Crozier, and Erebus's captain, James Fitzjames, set out for the Canadian mainland and disappeared, presumably having perished.
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