Made in Manitoba: A Musical Legacy

Desmond Maley is the music librarian at the J.W. Tate Library,
Huntington College, Laurentian University, and editor of the CAML
Review.

Pride of place shines throughout this coffee-table tribute to
Manitoba’s popular musicians. Winnipeg writer and teacher John
Einarson attributes the flowering to the relative isolation of Central
Canada and lack of proximity to larger centres. In addition,
Winnipeg’s thriving network of community clubs and multicultural
organizations acted as an incubator for young musical talent.

Altogether 60 musicians or bands are profiled from several generations
beginning in the 1960s. The roll call includes such luminaries as Ray
St. Germain, The Guess Who (including individual members), Neil Young,
Bachman-Turner Overdrive, Lenny Breau, Tom Cochrane, Loreena McKennitt,
Daniel Lavoie, Steve Bell, The Duhks, and Alana Levandoski. The chatty
bios mostly run at four pages, including snippets from interviews with
the musicians or from people who are (or were) close to them.
(Curiously, however, Einarson fails to give the musicians’ birthdates
as basic information, mentioning only a few in passing.) Publicity
photographs of the artists are interspersed throughout, but the quality
of the reproductions suffers because they are not on glossy paper.

At times, one wishes that more of the profiles had been in-depth; the
two- or four-page formula of the vignettes becomes numbing after a
while. As a result, the book rates as only a mildly interesting survey
of Manitoba’s distinguished contribution.