Kevin Howes shares five songs you might have missed

This story is part of a web series called Music that Matters with CBC Yukon's Airplay host Dave White. Dave sits down with musicians and artists to talk about five pieces of music that inspire them. 

Kevin Howes has devoted much of his life to trying to bring attention to musicians that time seems to have forgotten.

For years, he's dug through record bins to come up with compilations that feature Indigenous musicians who never got their due, and a record devoted to musicians from the West Indies who brought their sounds to Toronto in the late sixties.

But his latest work may be his best yet. Creation Never Sleeps, Creation Never Dies: The Willie Dunn Anthology is an overview of the career of Willie Dunn, a pioneering Indigenous Canadian in music.

"I'm happy that the music is getting out there," said Howes. "That was my goal in the first place."

Howe's first selection for this edition of CBC's Music That Matters is Dunn's song, Charlie. It was written in the late 1960s about Chanie Wenjack, a young boy who died tried to walk home from residential school.

"In all of the songs I've heard in my time, and rest assured, I've heard a great number, this is right up there with the most devastating I've ever heard."

Howes second selection is a track by Jennifer Castle called I'll Never Walk Alone.

"This song is very personal and very emotional," he said. "It's a song about never walking alone in life; we're here, there's family, there's community."

"This [next choice] is African Wake by Wayne McGie in partnership with Johnny Osborne," Howes said of his third pick.

"It's an old seven inch that was recorded in 1974 on the Tropical Records label out of Toronto. I put it on the Jamaica To Toronto compilation that we one day hope to get back in print. It's also a sly nod to Jennifer Castle, whose father was from Jamaica."

N.W.T. folk singer Willie Thrasher enjoyed a career renaissance when Howes included some of his music on the Grammy Award nominated compilation Native North America in 2014.  Howe chose Thrasher's song Wolves Don't Live By The Rules as his fourth choice.

"I still can't reconcile the fact that Willie's not held up as an Inuvialuit Stompin' Tom Connors."

For his final choice, Howes went back to his own Francophone roots.

"Le Chat Bruinne by Contraction, with the ethereal vocals of Christiane Robichaud … this is one of my favourite Quebecois progressive psychedelic songs."