Just me and the legend
A line as thin as a guitar string separated country singer Crystal Shawanda from the despairing friends she grew up with on the Wikwemikong reserve on Ontario’s Manitoulin Island.
Shawanda, who is best known for the hit You Can Let Go, wrote her first song at the age of nine, unaware that songwriting would become her way of coping with the hopelessness she saw around her.
“Growing up, I watched too many people leave this earth . . . including cousins and many friends of mine. I watched as my brothers lost almost every childhood friend before they were 16,” the Ojibwe singer recalled on her website. “But music was my hope. It saved me, and it became a doorway for me to find freedom.”
Shawanda considered Loretta Lynn and Reba McEntire her childhood heroes. In fact, it was McEntire’s hits that helped her win many a karaoke contest and talent show, she admitted.
Now Shawanda is about to have a surreal moment as she opens for McEntire when the country music legend performs on Monday, March 22 at Red Deer’s Centrium in a fundraiser for the Alberta Cancer Foundation.
“It’s definitely a dream come true,” said Shawanda in a recent interview.
The Nashville-based singer is at a point in life where “I definitely feel very blessed, very contented, with where things are” — so it’s no surprise that Shawanda’s newest single, Beautiful Day, co-written with her guitarist husband Dewayne Strobel, is about feeling so good that an occasional bad day doesn’t matter.
Shawanda can’t explain why she was so sure of her musical destiny that it helped divert her from any wrong paths she took in life.
She suggests it has something to do with the self confidence instilled in her by her truck-driving father, her mother, who worked with special needs kids, and her two older brothers, who let her tag along with them.
While Shawanda’s brothers taught her Ozzy Osborne songs at the age of four, she said country music was the real background music of her childhood. “My dad would play it on the guitar, my mom would sing it while she was cleaning up around the house. . . .”
The fledgling singer began accompanying her dad on truck runs to Nashville at age 11.
Shawanda recalled, “We stood on the sidewalk in front of Nashville’s famed Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge and watched through the window. I was scared I would be told I wasn’t good enough.”
A year later, she had recorded her first short demo album to sell, which paid for more trips down south.
Shawanda moved to Nashville in 1996 and often worked exhaustive hours at the same club that drew her attention as an 11-year-old. What started out as four to five singing shifts a week, gradually grew into three three-hour shifts a day, with an occasional extra evening shift upstairs, where she’d collect a $20 honourarium from the band.
“It was a lot of patience and hard work,” said Shawanda, before her music created enough of a buzz to draw agents, publishers and producers.
She was signed by RCA Records for her first album, 2008’s Dawn of a New Day, which debuted at No. 2 on the Canadian Country Charts and No. 16 on Billboard Charts. It was the top-charting album by any full-blooded native Canadian or American and spawned several hits, including What Do I Have to Do and My Roots are Showing.
Shawanda was nominated for several Juno Awards, chosen as the 2009 Female Artist of the Year by the Canadian Country Music Association, and has numerous aboriginal music and people’s choice awards.
To ensure that her next album, due out in May, is available in smaller markets, Shawanda said she left RCA and recently formed her own record company, New Sun Records. Through a distribution deal with EMI, she plans to get her albums to more remote areas, where a lot of fans were previously unable to find them.
Shawanda, who has as many non-native fans as aboriginal ones, wants to use her celebrity status to help disadvantaged youths find the kind of hope that she discovered in her vocation. The singer does charitable work for the Dreamcatcher Fund, Nike’s N7 Fund, and has started her own Dawn of a New Day Foundation to help young people follow their own dreams.
Since the combination of boredom and no future prospects leads young people to despair, Shawanda believes that giving them sports equipment, for instance, is a good first step.
Whenever the problems “seem so great, I wish I could do more,” Shawanda tries to remind herself of the latest positive letter she received from a fan. “My fan mail is just incredible. It makes me excited to be alive these days.”
Who: Crystal Shawanda opens for country singing legend Reba McEntire
When: 7:30 p.m. Monday, March 22
Where: Centrium, Red Deer
Tickets: $75, $125, or $175 (it’s a fundraiser for the Alberta Cancer Foundation and $25 to $50 receipts are available for the more expensive tickets) at Ticketmaster
lmichelin@reddeeradvocate.com
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