FINAL RESULTS – GREAT CANADIAN SONG CONTEST

Many of our favourite Canadian musicians (Bruce Cockburn, Sarah McLachlan, Marc Jordan, Ian Thomas, Blue Rodeo, Jesse Cook, Guess Who, Amanda Marshall, Alanis Morrisette, and Jann Arden just to name a few) didn’t make the list because their best (in our opinion, anyway) songs don’t refer to Canada.

Of the 20 songs that made the final list, 15 were ranked significantly higher than the remaining 5, so we’re cutting the list off at that point. That’s just the right number for a CD. Here’s the list, in combined rank order, with links to the lyrics where available.

We really tried hard to come up with a representative number of Francophone songs, First Nations songs, traditional Canadian folk songs and songs by women composers. But as you can see, the list is dominated by relatively modern (20th century) English Canadian songs penned by men. Please blame me, not my fellow judges, for this failing. My guess is that the best identifiably Canadian songs by Francophones, Native Canadians, and Canadian women, and the best traditional Canadian songs, have yet to be discovered by most Canadians, and we need to educate ourselves better on these important contributors to Canadian music and culture. We’ll work on it, and recruit some experts in such music to guide us and help with the judging, when we repeat the contest next year.

Meanwhile we will be submitting this list to the CBC, as they requested, and if they aren’t enthused about our idea for a compilation CD, we’ll use our entrepreneurial resources to try to find another publisher. If we’re successful, we’ll promote it on our blogs, the various Canadian blog directories and webrings and through BlogsCanada. These are all wonderful songs — songs of courage, love, loss, tragedy, loneliness and connection with our rugged geography, the land, and, of course, the weather.