Barking Dog: February 12, 2026
This Week’s Theme: Fifteen Decades of Music (1880s–2020s)
To commemorate this year’s CKUW Fundrive, we celebrated Barking Dog’s historical focus and highlighted the wide variety of music and programming you can hear on the station by taking a trip through time, from the very earliest recorded sounds from the 1880s to some recent recordings from the last couple of years.
1885: Alexander Graham Bell - Wax Disc Recording of Voice
Recorded on a wax disc
He says: “This recording has been made by Alexander Graham Bell in the presence of Dr. Chichester A Bell on the fifteenth of April, 1885 at the Volta Laboratory 1221 Connecticut Avenue Washington DC in witness whereof hear my voice. Alexander Graham Bell.”
1888: Alice Shaw - Whistling Improvisation
Recorded August 14, 1888
She was known as the “Beautiful Whistler”
1888: Wesley College opens in Winnipeg
1891: George J. Gaskin - Drill Ye Terriers Drill
An Irish-American tenor who was one of the most popular singers in the US in the late 19th century
This is an American folk song that was first published in 1888, and references the construction of the railroads in the United States
1894: Standard Quartette - Keep Moving
They were from Chicago, and were one of the first African American vocal groups to release commercial recordings
1895: Guglielmo Marconi makes breakthrough discoveries in the transmission of radio signals by raising his antenna higher off the ground
1895: Construction on Wesley Hall finishes in Winnipeg
1906: Harry MacDonough - Just Before the Battle, Mother
A popular ballad tenor from Hamilton, Ontario
Recorded for Victor Records
1906: Canadian-born inventor Reginald A Fessenden becomes the first person to make a public wireless broadcast
1908: Len Spencer - Arkansas Traveler
American vaudeville star and recording artist
The song was composed in the 19th century by Colonel Sanford C Faulkner
It’s based on tales about a rural fellow who, by playing dumb, makes a mockery of the unaware city slicker
1910: Winnipeg is Canada’s third-largest city (the First World War and the opening of the Panama Canal will later weaken the city’s economic position)
1911: Fred Van Eps - Chatterbox Rag
Early American banjo recording artist
1917: JB Roy - Highland Fling
Quebec fiddle player
1920s: Winnipeg struggles with the aftermath of the First World War, the Spanish Flu pandemic, and the General Strike of 1919; radio begins to take hold as a popular form of entertainment
1920: Fisk Jubilee Singers - Study War No More
They are an a capella ensemble consisting of students from the historically Black Fisk University of Nashville, Tennessee, which formed in 1871 as a fundraising effort for the university
This is an American spiritual that dates to before the American Civil War
It has often been used as an anti-war song
1928: Barbecue Bob - Bad Time Blues
Barbecue Bob was a piedmont blues musician from Georgia, who got his name from the job he worked as a cook at a barbecue restaurant
1930s: The Great Depression takes hold
1930: David McCarn - Cotton Mill Colic
He was a musician from North Carolina who often wrote songs about the textile industry, as he began working in cotton mills at the age of 12
1933: Charlie Herald and his Roundup Rangers - Red River Valley
From Winnipeg
This is a traditional folk and cowboy song of uncertain origin, though it very well could have come from Manitoba’s Red River Valley
The earliest written manuscript of the song came from either Iowa or Nebraska, but songs travelled long distances in short amounts of time even back then
The song has been known by a number of names depending on where it was sung, including “Cowboy Love Song,” “Bright Sherman Valley,” and “In the Bright Mohawk Valley”
1938: Manitoba and Wesley Colleges merge to form United College
1940s: United College in Winnipeg sees mass enrollment following the Second World War
1947: Woody Guthrie - Talking Centralia
This song is about the March, 1947 disaster in the Centralia No. 5 coal mine in Centralia, Illinois, which killed 111 people
1947: Smilin’ Billy Blinkhorn - The Wreck of the Old 97
He was a folk and country singer from British Columbia who performed throughout the country live and on the radio before moving to Australia in the 1930s
Ballad about a rail disaster that took place on September 27, 1903 when the Southern Railway mail train derailed due to excessive speed while trying to maintain schedule
It was first recorded by Grayson and Whitter in the early 1920s and has since been recorded by countless well-known folk and country artists
It’s to the tune of Henry C Work’s “The Ship That Never Returned”
1950: Winnipeg experiences a terrible flood; a third of the city is evacuated
1959: Ellen Stekert et al. - High Floods & Low Waters
Stekert is a folklorist, musician, and scholar from New York (now based in Minnesota) who began her career in Greenwich Village in the 1950s
This was recorded for the CBS TV show Camera Three
The song was written by Woody Guthrie in the 1940s about the droughts and water shortages that were occurring in New York City at the time, and the song was unknown and undocumented until the release of this recording
1955: Wade Hemsworth - The Shining Birch Tree
A respected Canadian folksinger from Brantford, Ontario
This was written by Hemsworth, and is also known as “The Land of the Muskeg”
It’s from his 1955 album Folk Songs from the Canadian North Woods
1959: Manitoba and Ashdown Halls are completed at what is now the University of Winnipeg
1960s: The folk revival ramps up to full force
1962: Dave Van Ronk - Hesitation Blues
A member of the Greenwich Village folk scene in New York City, known as the “Mayor of MacDougal Street”, MacDougal Street being where practically every coffeehouse was located in New York in the 60s
The song is a popular blues song that was adapted from a traditional song
The verses tend to vary widely between versions, though the refrain is pretty consistent
1963: David Shilliday and physics professor Ron Riddell start CJUC at United College in Winnipeg
1967: United College becomes the University of Winnipeg, and the station’s call letters are changed to CKUW in 1968
1967: The Travellers - Song for the Estevan Miners
A Canadian folk group from Toronto that formed in the early 1950s
This song is about a riot that occurred in September of 1931 when the RCMP attacked striking coal miners in Estevan, Saskatchewan, killing four and injuring many others
The next morning, the RCMP raided homes and arrested miners on riot charges, while no RCMP officers were charged for murder
Several days later, the mining company agreed to the miners’ key demands
1970s: Winnipeg becomes an amalgamated city
1970: Fraser & DeBolt - Fraser and DeBolt Theme
They were a Canadian folk duo that met at a workshop at the 1968 Mariposa Folk Festival
They were signed to Columbia Records at one point but never experienced commercial success, though their music has gained a cult following in recent decades
The duo played the first Winnipeg Folk Festival in 1974
1971: John Angaiak - I’ll Rock You to the Rhythm of the Ocean
A Yup’ik singer-songwriter born in Nightmute, Alaska in 1941
After serving in Vietnam in the US Armed Forces, he enrolled in the University of Alaska and became active in the school’s indigenous language workshop
This song comes from his album I’m Lost in the City, which was inspired by his work preserving his native language, with the first side entirely in the previously exclusively oral Yup’ik language, and the second in English
1974: The first Winnipeg Folk Festival is held under the name Winnipeg Centennial Folksong Festival
1980s: Stylus Magazine is launched
1980: Willy Mitchell - Call of the Moose
Indigenous musician born in New York in the 50s after his Algonquin and Mohawk parents were refused admittance to a hospital in Cornwall, Ontario
In January 1969 a police officer shot him in the head during a situation involving stolen Christmas lights
He used the money from the resulting settlement to buy a guitar, and formed the Desert River Band, with whom he recorded and toured during the 1970s
This song is included on the 2014 compilation album Native North America
1981: Utah Phillips - Where the Fraser River Flows
Phillips was an anarchist folksinger, storyteller, and labour organiser from Ohio
This is a song by Joe Hill, first published in 1912 in the IWW’s Little Red Songbook
Hill wrote it for striking construction workers on the Canadian Northern Railroad Company in British Columbia
1992: Bob Dylan - Canadee-i-o
This is a traditional English folk song, likely written in the early 19th century
1997: Another major flood occurs in Winnipeg
1999: Yoshihiro Hachima - That’s Entertainment
CKUW launches its FM broadcasting with a short speech by station manager Rob Schmidt, and the original recording of this song, by The Jam
2004: Wailin’ Jennys - Old Man
Folk group formed in Winnipeg in 2002
This is from their album 40 Days and it’s a song by Neil Young, from his 1972 album Harvest
2006: A Critical Mass Choir - Will You Step on My Head?
It’s a recording from reflecting on police violence that occurred at a Winnipeg Critical Mass rally in May of 2006
Critical Mass is a celebration of human-powered transportation that began in San Francisco in 1992, and has since spread to other cities worldwide
On May 3, 2006, about 50 Winnipeggers biked out to the Pioneer Arena to protest urban warfare training exercises that were taking place there
Seven people were arrested that night, one for simply photographing an arrest
23 days later, the police violently arrested 9 more people during the monthly Critical Mass ride, tackling them, holding them down with their knees, and even punching one person in the face
One of the people arrested was also beaten while in custody
Patrick Krawec, Ian La Rue, and Tara Norberg recorded this one in their kitchen in June of 2006
2008: Station founder David Shilliday visits the station for the first time in years, and is surprised to learn that CKUW has become a full-fledged FM station
2013: CKUW celebrates 50 years!
2015: Uncle Sinner - Old Reuben
From Winnipeg
Off his album Let the Devil In
It was a popular tune among banjo players, fiddlers, and harmonica players in the southern US
Uncle Sinner specifically got his version from Banjo Bill Cornett
2015: Jake Xerxes Fussell - Man at the Mill
Seems there are many different versions of this song, sometimes called “Jolly is the Miller” or “Same Old Man”
The Dillards popularized this version in 1963
Fussell is from North Carolina, and this is off his 2015 self-titled album
2018: Barking Dog comes on the air!
2023: Réalta, Myles McCormack - Thing of the Earth
Réalta are a Belfast-based group that play traditional Irish music
This the title track from their 2023 album
2024: CKUW celebrated 25 years on FM radio!
2025: Willi Carlisle - We Have Fed You All for 1000 Years
He’s a musician from Kansas, now based in Arkansas, who was raised in a musical family, and he’s been performing professionally for nearly a decade
This is from his latest album Winged Victory
This song comes from the IWW’s Little Red Songbook, first published in 1909
The lyrics are an anonymous poem, with music by Rudolf von Liebich
