Former premier collaborates with songwriter to pen historic song

A bit of Saskatchewan history is being told in a new song put together by Brad Wall, former premier of Saskatchewan and Dan Cugnet, Weyburn area singer/songwriter, business leader and farmer. Terri Harris-Strunk is also featured on the song.

Using historical letters, Wall wrote the lyrics to a song that Cugnet helped him shape into a piece that he will now include on his next record. 

The song is about Constable Marmaduke Graburn, who was the only North West Mounted Police officer stationed at Fort Walsh to die in the line of duty.

Wall and Cugnet joined guest host Brent Loucks on The Evan Bray Show to talk about the new song.

Read more: 

• Regina Christmas lovers spread gingerbread joy with delicious decorations
• Sask. Wildlife Federation ‘concerned’ following illegal outfitting scheme
• Where memory rests: A visit to Saskatoon’s oldest cemetery

Listen to the full interview here:

The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Brent Loucks: Now we’ve got the three of you here because Brad Wall has decided that there’s an interesting bit of Saskatchewan history that should have been put to music, and that’s what we’ve done. So, Brad Wall, tell us about your writing of this incredible song that you’ve put together here, The Granburn Letters?

Wall: First of all, thanks for having us all on and credit Dan. This song’s part of his seventh album. And Dan co-wrote this one with me. As you know, Brent, we’ve moved to the Cypress Hills area some time ago, and I was vaguely aware of this story, or his story, but became more aware of it here we’ve got a good friend who ranches near a place that’s known as Graburn Gap, just in that he is just just over the border in Alberta. But of course, the west block of Cypress is shared across the borders, and this is a story that happened on the Saskatchewan side, near Fort Walsh in November of 1879, while on patrol, his name was Cst. Marmaduke Graburn. He was on patrol and near Fort Walsh, just sort of routine duty, and he was shot in the back and subsequently died. And a similar fate befell his horse.

The whole matter remains an unsolved mystery. The Mounties did charge. They went across the medicine line and captured a person by the name of Starchild who had been heard bragging about killing a Mountie near the fort. Brought him back. I think he was tried at Fort McLeod, but was not convicted. So it’s an unsolved mystery. Brent, what’s interesting is that given all, notwithstanding all the tension that was around the fort in those years, you had obviously desperate, impoverished First Nations up, many of them encamped right around the fort you had prior to this event, though, you had whiskey traders and wolfers and the Cypress Hills Massacre that precipitated the Northwest Mounted Police stationing there and establishing a fort. But significantly, you had roughly 5,000 Sioux Nation and in Sitting Bull, just over in Wood Mountain, where they had fled there after, after defeating the Seventh Cavalry, at the Little Bighorn. Lots of tension and Cst. Graburn was the only Northwest Mountie to be killed in the line of duty.

I just had this idea to imagine letters between the constant young constable and his mom back home in Ontario, and then one from her and then a sad subsequent letter from his commanding officer to Mrs. Graburn, letting her know that her son had been killed, and sent it off to Dan. Dan and I, we exchange every now and then on songs that he’s written. He fixed it up, changed some of the lyrics, probably edited a bit. Mine was a little long, but I think Dan helped edit this thing and also built a better melody for. He surprised me by saying he wanted to put it on his latest album, which was released last Friday. It’s called ‘Mostly true stories,’ and there’s some other great songs on that record too. So that’s the history of it.

We have our history in Saskatchewan is replete with very compelling moments like this and personalities and events. I think we should take every chance we can to tell them. I’m just so grateful to Dan for doing this. I reached out to Terry and asked if she could maybe sing the part of the letter from Mrs. Graburn back to Marmaduke, her son. And she just does an amazing job of it. That’s a bit of a summary of the history of the song, the Graburn letters and the history itself.

Okay, well, let’s take a little bit of a listen here. Now, you being an old radio guy, Brad, I was a little surprised this song was six and a half minutes, and I thought, AM radio music stations would never touch us. So I’ll give you a snippet or two here.

Wall: But hang on, Brent, you’d have to admit this, that songs like the ‘Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,’ which is very long. These songs are very important for those of us who did late, late night shifts. When you needed a bit of a break, you had to go in and tear the news of the newsroom. Maybe you had to take another break. Yeah. Need long songs. You need In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida. You need these. These are essential for the comfort of the disc jockey.

Okay, well, let’s take a listen in this segment, you’ll hear Dan Cugnet and you’ll hear Terry Harris-Strunk.

(Excerpt of song plays)

The lovely sound of Terry Harris-Strunk there and Dan Cugnet reading the first two letters in this particular song that Brad Wall helped put together, The Graburn Letters.  Brad, you and I were texting in the summertime, (when) we were down Cypress Hills for a holiday, and there’s just something about that area. You can feel the history. It’s almost haunting when you’re around Fort Walsh, down in the valley there, and then travelling through the hills. It really is a magical place. And it’s, it’s great that you’ve been able to tell the story about the history there.

Wall: It is a magical place, I completely agree. I think haunting is apt as well. There’s parks, including right around Graburn there, right near Battle Creek, where the cairn and the obelisks, you can still see it marking his his murder is also a pretty haunting place. And we’re lucky to have that part so many other parts of the province, I know, in the rest of Dan’s record, he’s got mostly true stories. There’s a song called ‘Five Busted Ribs,’ which is about a bit of a rodeo wreck. And I think that he’s managed to work in the way the Weyburn Hospital in there.

Dan, how did you feel about this project when Brad Wall first approached you?

Cugnet: Well, as soon as he sent me what he wrote, it immediately grabbed me. I’m drawn to the stories I think of the province and story songs kind of like that, and even the notion of letters, which seems so foreign to us now, there’s such a loneliness in that. Sending something at that time, waiting for days and weeks or months for a response. The story was lonely, the notion of these Mounties at that time being out was so lonely. And to me, just the letters themselves just represent, like these lonely stretches in between them.

We live in such an instantaneous world now that. The good ones (songs) kind of write themselves so like music and everything else, as Brad mentioned, just moving some stuff around. It didn’t take a lot to kind of make it what it became. And then, envisioning those different parts. Having Terry sing, I just couldn’t imagine it any other way. I always think that the sum of the parts is always just kind of greater than the parts. We’re so fortunate to have Bart McKay who’s Saskatchewan producer, and incredibly accomplished with so many different artists over the years. He’s the real magic man that makes it all come together. He really just kind of always takes, with all due respect to Brad and myself, a lump of coal, and turns it into a diamond. So hopefully everybody really enjoys it. And this is our history. And I think we always forget how much of it we have around us in these stories, whether it’s something that happened just down the road five months before, or 50 years before, 100 years before, it’s all around us.

It adds to it when it’s a real story. As you know, Brad was talking earlier about the ‘Wreck of Edmund Fitzgerald,’ those kind of stories, put the music, and you do such a fabulous job with your voice. And as you say, the engineering that went into that that song, it’s very, very nice. Here we’ve got former Premier, Brad Wall, we’ve got, how do I describe you? Dan, I know you’re a businessman. You’re well known, certainly in the Weyburn area.

Cugnet: The farm kid, just a farm kid.

Now, Terry, we were talking earlier as you provided the vocals in the song The Graburn letters, speaking as Graburn’s mother, how did that feel? That experience for you, knowing this actually happened. These were real people.

Harris-Strunk: Well, thanks, Brent. Actually, it wasn’t hard to feel what she might have been feeling as a mother worried about your child. I just imagined myself in her shoes, standing there looking out the window or sitting at a table, likely by candlelight, back in the 1800s and imagining what her son was going through, being afraid for him and missing him like crazy. So it wasn’t hard for me to channel that, having been in a similar situation myself. It took me a while to practice and get my vocal cords back in shape, because it’s been a long time since I was in the studio. But it was a wonderful opportunity. I loved. It gave me a chance to catch up with Bart McKay, because he and I were playing the country music scene at the same time, and I’ve always loved recording in the studio, so I got in there and closed my eyes and just put myself in Lady Graburn’s shoes, and out came the track. I think it’s just a beautiful song.

It really is, you did a great part in it. Brad, the final letter, tell us the story on it.

Wall: All of these letters are imagined. There’s actually not a lot of documentation about all of this. In fact, I tried to find when Dan released his album last Friday, I tried to find a photo of Cst. Graburn online. Found one. Checked with our local historian in the area, a rancher historian who’s brilliant in these things, and he just said, ‘No, that’s not him. In fact, that we can’t find a we can’t find a photo of him.’ So the letters themselves are imagined in this last one.

Okay, well, let’s take a listen to that right now. The third letter from The Graburn Letters.

(Excerpt from song plays)

Brad, did you run this by your son (Colter) before he decided to get into the world of writing songs?

Wall: Well, I did. I sent it to him, and he was encouraging. I’ve been trying. I, like Dan, and I think maybe like Terry, have been writing poems and lyrics, and I’m just not very good. Add much of a melody to these things. For over the years, I enjoy it. It’s good therapy for me, and it’s a good way to dig in and learn a little bit about some subjects that are histories that I’m not too familiar with, at least at the start. So I’ve been dabbling for a while, but I’m just grateful Dan saw some merit in this and then Terry’s involvement. And here we here it is, out in the out in the world. Now on Dan’s record, we look and get on you can stream on Spotify and Apple Music. You can stream all of Dan’s albums there.