Rocking the Main Street strip

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This article was published 13/07/2023 (863 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Jesse Green always knew his father was a musician, but it wasn’t until he turned 18 and started going to concerts at Winnipeg bars that he realized his dad was a bona fide rockstar.

“I swear to God, my name must have been ‘Billy Joe Green’s son,’” says Green, 49, with a laugh. “That’s how people introduced me.”

Beginning in the late 1960s, the elder Green, now 72, was one of the biggest draws on the Main Street strip, playing the blues for rowdy crowds at hotels such as the Brunswick, the Manwin, the Bell and the Occidental.

On the strip, Indigenous musicians like Green, Percy (The Reverend) Tuesday and Errol Ranville — better known as the leader of the C-Weed Band — got their first taste of stardom during an era when the local music industry was all but officially segregated.

By the time Jesse Green started playing professionally in the 1990s, that scene had virtually disappeared. As his dad and his contemporaries started to age out of it, he decided to make sure it wouldn’t be forgotten. So in 2015, he and his wife, Vanda Fleury-Green, collaborated on Brown Town, Muddy Water, streaming via the Hot Docs at Home website, in partnership with Cinematheque, until July 31.

Green, formerly of Juno-nominated Bruthers of Different Muthers and a guitarist for Buffy Sainte-Marie, enlists a who’s who of Manitoba music to tell the story of the strip with a lively blend of talking heads and guitar shreds.

“It’s a history lesson told through entertainment,” he says.

It opens on the neon lights of the Woodbine Hotel, and then travels back to the beginnings of Winnipeg as a nexus of trade and commerce.

“We know there was a lot of trade taking place, and I think with that trading came a lot of music, came a lot of instruments, came a lot of stories,” David McLeod, then of the Manitoba Aboriginal Music Hall of Fame, says in the documentary.

Fiddles and accordions made their way out to the traplines, McLeod says. Eventually, they gave way to acoustic guitars, and later, of course, electric ones, which landed in the hands of artists like Green and Tuesday.

And when it came time to put those instruments to use, Indigenous musicians didn’t have to search far for stories to tell through the blues, the documentary makes clear. Just as in the U.S., where Black artists highlighted historic and ongoing inequality and racism through their music, Indigenous musicians in Manitoba were able to do the same, channelling their experiences, including those in residential schools, into song as an extension of oral storytelling traditions.

Both Green and Tuesday, who died in 2014, were residential school survivors. In the documentary, Tuesday’s partner, Linda Wolch, recounts a time when Tuesday contracted tuberculosis while at the school. While he was recovering, a teacher at the Assiniboine Residential School took his guitar, records and radio, which were subsequently returned.

“That hurt him because that was part of his soul, his music that they took away.”

Tuesday didn’t let that discourage him. In 1967, he moved to Winnipeg, where, with his brother Martin, he formed a band called the Feathermen, a groundbreaking group remembered by many as the first all-Indigenous rock band in the city. Members at various points included the Tuesdays, Green, Chuck Scribe, Brian Ranville, Maurice MacArthur and Roland Lavallee.

In 1968, they played at the Winnipeg Auditorium for Pierre Elliott Trudeau, who reportedly asked for their autographs.

All too briefly, the documentary touches on women who were prominent performers on the Main Street strip, including Lucille Starr, Suzanne Bird and Beryl Bouvette. Still, in under an hour, Brown Town, Muddy Water does the invaluable work of preserving a transformative chapter in Winnipeg music history, introducing to a new crowd several Indigenous artists who carved out careers in entertainment while blazing the trail for future generations.

(For Green and Ranville, those careers are still going, the director says. Billy Joe Green doesn’t have any upcoming gigs, but C-Weed is playing the Victoria Inn on July 15 and the Red River Ex on July 16.)

“Being a career musician myself, as well as a filmmaker, I wanted to honour and tell the story of some of the living legends who paved the way for Indigenous music in Winnipeg and Manitoba,” Green says.

Brown Town, Muddy Water is screening free at winnipegfilmgroup.com until July 31.

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com