PG musicians treat Valemount to a powerful evening of protest folk
Melissa Walker(L), Amy Blanding, and Genevieve Jaide perform a pop-up folk music concert May 16th at the Valemount Community theatre. /Rachel Fraser
By Rachel Fraser
Prince George-based musicians Amy Blanding, Melissa Walker and Genevieve Jaide delivered a powerful folk music performance Friday night in a pop-up concert presented by the Valemount Arts and Culture Society, outside of the Society’s regular season of cultural offerings. The evening featured Walker on banjo, stand up bass, and guitar, as well as some lead and back up vocals, Blanding on mandolin and vocals, and Jaide on guitar and vocals.
The three women had previously played together as part of a five-piece band called Reckless Burning, currently on a hiatus, that locals may be familiar with from an appearance at the 2024 Robson Valley Music Festival. Each of the artists is a songwriter in his/her own right, however, and the evening was a mix of solo offerings with the trio offering each other backing support.
The first set featured material by Walker and Jaide: songs from Jaide’s solo albums, as well as songs that are included in an upcoming album release by Checkdown Charlie, a musical project fronted by Walker.
The headline act was Amy Blanding and her gut-wrenching protest folk. An activist who identifies herself as queer and disabled, Blanding said she was “later to the game” in starting her music career. Though she grew up playing music, it wasn’t until she moved to Prince George 12 years ago that she started pursuing it more seriously, playing with a band called Black Spruce Bog. She started writing her own songs in 2017.
“I decided for myself that, as a songwriter and as a performer, what mattered to me was highlighting injustice and using my music as a vehicle for social change.”
Amy Blanding, Prince George musician
After her debut album, Down the Line, was released in 2019, Covid-19 hit and then her son was born, which meant she wasn’t able to tour her album and forced a freeze on her previous musical activities. That space, along with the cultural landscape of the time, such as the racial reckoning of 2020, COVID-19 and the rise of the opioid crisis offered an opportunity to re-evaluate.
“I decided for myself that, as a songwriter and as a performer, what mattered to me was highlighting injustice and using my music as a vehicle for social change.”
Her commitment to her principles and conviction that her music should reflect her political landscape ultimately cost Blanding her job.
After performing her song Sunbirds in a community concert in Prince George in April of 2024, and posting a video of the performance to her personal social media with a caption condemning the measures employed by the Israeli government against the Palestinian people, a letter of complaint was sent to her employer, Northern Health, that ultimately resulted in her removal from a senior management position for inclusivity, diversity, equity and accessibility.
Though Sunbirds was written as a response to what she was seeing on the news, she says if she hadn’t told people that it was about the genocide in Gaza, people likely would not have realized. She has brought a lawsuit against Northern Health for wrongful dismissal and a breach of her charter rights, and another against the writers of the letter for defamation.
We’re at a real tipping point right now, socially and culturally, and I firmly believe that the revolution is in community. It’s in working together, it’s in mutual aid, it’s in collective liberation, so I have to model that.”
Amy Blanding
When asked how she reconciles taking a hardline stance on her principles with her role as a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion professional, and its inherent responsibility particularly to the Jewish community, which also a history of marginalization, Blanding acknowledges the reality of antisemitism, and the complexity of the history of middle east.
“The Israeli state and the Zionist movement have done a very, very, very good job over the past number of decades getting folks to conflate Zionism with Judaism, and to force folks to think that calling out the state of Israel and the policies of the state are antisemitic, because those are not the same thing. We have the right to allege, or to call out, these catastrophes and these horrors inflicted on people by a state, and that has nothing to do with hatred… that is not hatred for Jews,” Blanding said. “It’s tragic, because antisemitism is real, and it’s the role of DEI professionals to eliminate and call out systems of oppression, including antisemitism.”
At the beginning of this year, Blanding decided that rather than returning to full-time permanent work in health equity, she would continue to do consulting in the same field and focus on her music.
“I’ve got a four-year-old. I’ve got to live a life that I’m proud of, so that he sees what’s possible… We’re at a real tipping point right now, socially and culturally, and I firmly believe that the revolution is in community. It’s in working together, it’s in mutual aid, it’s in collective liberation, so I have to model that.”
She will be recording a second album this summer, produced by John Raham. She performed some of the new material at Friday evening’s concert. Sunbirds, of course, and the haunting The Drums Belong to Us, evoking the Highway of Tears and the women it has taken.
She ended the night with Lullaby to My Tender Comrades, a moving love song to her fellows in the struggle for social justice.
