Wiikwemkoong’s Crystal Shawanda receives inaugural Indigenous Artist/Group of the Year award
By Rick Garrick
TORONTO — Wiikwemkoong’s Crystal Shawanda was recently presented with the Inaugural Indigenous Artist/Group of the Year award at the Toronto Blues Society’s Maple Blues Awards on Feb. 12 in Toronto.
“We actually performed and closed out the awards and it was so much fun,” Shawanda says. “They had the Maple house band but also my husband (Dwayne Strobel) sat in on the guitar and our daughter Zhaawande sat in on backgrounds, so she danced up a storm with her tambourine and had the crowd singing along with her and she absolutely stole the show, so I was one proud mama.”
Shawanda says it was amazing to be recognized with the Inaugural Indigenous Artist/Group of the Year award, which was created after being proposed by the Toronto Blues Society board during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Toronto Blues Society has been encouraging the emergence of Indigenous blues talent since 1993, when they produced the first all-Indigenous blues show, Rez Bluez.
“I’m hoping this new award will serve as a stepping stone for other emerging Indigenous blues artists who are out there working at it every day,” Shawanda says. “It’s exciting to see what will happen next.”
Shawanda says she was very familiar with blues music as she was growing up in Wiikwemkoong.
“In the Indigenous music scene, there was always a lot of blues artists and blues bands and definitely they had an influence on me and they inspired me,” Shawanda says. “So even though I started out my career in country music, those seeds were planted pretty early on from a lot of other Indigenous musicians who influenced me.”
Shawanda, who originally had success in country music with three albums, including Just Like You, which won a 2013 Juno Award for Best Aboriginal Album, switched to the blues in 2014 with her fourth album, The Whole World’s Got The Blues. Her seventh album, Church House Blues, won the 2021 Juno Award for Best Blues album, and she released her eight album, Midnight Blues, in 2022.
“I decided to do a blues album to see what would happen and for me, it felt like I was letting a bird out of the cage,” Shawanda says. “I could finally sing the way I wanted to sing and I didn’t have to hold back any more, so I just found myself feeling at home in blues music.”
Shawanda says she had a quiet start with her first blues album but by the time she released Church House Blues, she felt she had finally made her mark in blues music.
“The latest album, Midnight Blues, I love the album, I feel like it’s very comfortable,” Shawanda says, noting that Midnight Blues went to #8 on the Billboard Blues chart. “I’m comfortable in my own skin now, I’m not trying to prove how blues I am any more, now I’m just recording music about things that I’m going through currently.”
Shawanda says Midnight Blues was recorded in the studio in her home in Nashville during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“It was a family affair, my husband played all the guitars and he was the engineer, he mixed the album,” Shawanda says. “And even our daughter Zhaawande, she was at the time we were recording five-years-old, she sang some of the backgrounds on a couple of songs and she also co-wrote one of the songs. We went to #8 on the American Billboard Blues chart, and I’m the first Indigenous artist to do that so it was really exciting to reach that level internationally.”
Shawanda was selected for the award by a committee of seven Indigenous people, including Elaine Bomberry, chair, and Diane Kohoko, Amos Key Jr., Mell Kirkland, Ted Whitecalf, Lance Delisle, and Dennis Joseph, who had compiled an overall list for the award.