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SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE - Toronto's Elliott Brood blended with The Dawgwoods on Saturday night. The two roots and rock-influenced bands shared the stage for the Folk on the Rocks (FOTR) Ice Jam at the Explorer Hotel.

The Dawgwoods opened the evening with a long set filled with original material, some of which will be included on their upcoming debut album.

Lilly Mae Dawgwood is backed by Elliott Brood's Mark Stasso during the Folk on the Rocks Ice Jam. - Daron Letts/NNSL photos

The bands jammed the night before and carried their chemistry into Saturday's concert. The two bands collaborated last summer, as well, during the Grave Diggers and Cotton Pickers musicians' workshop at the 2008 festival.

The Dawgwoods drew dancers onto the floor early in their set with plucky Old Town anthems like Hardworkin' Man Blues and Hate You Oh So Much. Their anti-love song Shotgun Wedding inspired a chorus of audience participation.

Lilly Mae Dawgwood and Otis Dawgwood traded lead vocal parts throughout the night, matching one another's ebullience while the rest of the band mixed and matched a revolving selection of instruments, including mandolin, ukulele, harmonica and banjo.

Between bands, FOTR organizers announced this summer's festival headliner, Canadian recording artist Sam Roberts. The announcement was met with a cheer of approval.

Drummer Frank Dawgwood returned to the stage for Elliott Brood's performance, backing up Mark Stasso and Casey Laforet. The band's drummer, Stephen Pitkin, couldn't make the trip North at the last minute due to a family emergency.

The trio kept the dance floor packed. The energy reached a crescendo in the third act as The Dawgwoods joined the musicians back on stage for a string of shared songs. They closed with a spirited cover of Johnny Cash's Ring of Fire.

History set to music

Elliott Brood is to country what The Pogues were to Celtic music. Using traditional roots instruments and hard-luck historical narratives, they warp country twang into a howling, hard-edged waltz of punk and rock.

Stasso and Laforet mine North American history for their lyrics, such as in the title track on their latest Juno-nominated album, Mountain Meadows, which relates the tragic tale of a n 1857 massacre of pioneers by rampaging Mormons on the Utah plains. Laforet stumbled across the story in a book he picked up in a pawnshop called 31 Years on the Plains and in the Mountains.

"That idea of the people travelling out West and having those adventures has always been interesting to me," Laforet said. "A lot of people fail at it and some people make it."

The songwriters are drawing new ideas from the books they brought on tour. Stasso is reading All Quiet on the Western Front and a biography of Southern civil war general T.J. Jackson this month. Laforet is reading a piece of historical nonfiction titled Let Us Build us a City.

"It's about towns in Arkansas that had the dream of becoming cities but never did," he said. "They ended up as ghost towns. It's a really interesting book."

In addition to the stories they read, the musicians absorb the stories they hear on tour.

Songwriting "is an amalgamation of everything you've experienced, reading a book or reading history or just living your life," Stasso said. "Ultimately, storytelling is ingrained in cultures. Before people could write things down that's how it was passed along – oral history. Storytelling on any level is integral to every culture. That's what we're drawn to. Stories are pretty amazing things. You hear stories from your parents. You hear stories from your grandparents or from other people. If it's a good enough story you remember it and you pass it along."

The musicians said they enjoyed memorable Northern stories from fellow musicians around town and from broadcaster William Greenland and the Snowking.