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Last Best West: Stories of the Canadian West
A DVD Video with music written, arranged and
performed by Dale and Laura Budd.
Directed by Dale Budd and produced by Last Best West Heritage Projects Inc.
with the support of the Department of Canadian Heritage through the Alberta-Saskatchewan
Centennial Initiative
Filmed in Saskatchewan with stories written and narrated by Dale Budd
In today's world, how we tell our
stories becomes as important as the stories themselves. In their new DVD Video: 'Stories
of the Canadian West' Dale and Laura Budd have chosen to tell their stories with
a colourful collection of Music Videos that open bright and vibrant windows into
our rich Western Heritage. Time travel becomes a reality as you travel from window
to window, opening up worlds where the prairies blossom to the sounds of Indian Drums,
Old Time Fiddle, Ragtime, Swing and Country Music and where the ghosts of the Canadian
West spring to life to tell you their stories and sing you their songs.
In Medicine Line Blues (filmed at the historic ferry landing at Frenchman Butte)
you meet a young warrior fleeing from the Canadian Militia in 1885. In MacKinnon
Trail you meet a young cowboy (Dale's great-grandfather) on an 1880's cattle drive
to the CPR railhead. In Blackfly Quickstep you meet a group of homesteaders who's
survival in a bug infested wilderness depends mostly on their sense of humour. In
Johnny Dear (filmed in Mortlach and Moose Jaw) you meet a young flapper girl who's
beau leaves her stranded in a little prairie town. Blues Yodel 88 takes you down
the refugee trail that leads away from the Depression and Dust Bowl that 1930's Saskatchewan
has become. On a much lighter note, in Temple Garden Two-Step you meet a young farm
boy heading for Moose Jaw on a Saturday night to go dancing in the city's famous
Dance Hall. The final video: Ghost Train Blues takes you into Dale and Laura Budd's
world of rural Saskatchewan with a Johnny Cash style country blues lament for the
vanishing towns, villages and family farms of the Canadian West.
Dale and Laura Budd both descend from early western homesteaders. Dale's family,
the MacKinnons homesteaded in Manitoba in 1878 and Laura's family, the Bustas, homesteaded
on the long grass prairies of the American Midwest in the 1880's. The cover of their
new DVD Video features a 1905 photograph of Dale's great-grandfather Dougal MacKinnon
pictured with his Team of Moose that made newspaper headlines 100 years ago.
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