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SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE - Yellowknife's trio of musical storytellers, The Gumboots, take the stage at Northern Arts and Cultural Centre Feb. 20 and 21 for their 19th annual concert.

Bill Gilday, Ray Bethke and Steve Lacey will be joined by backup minstrel Steve Goff on mandolin and bouzouki and Ontario guitarist and songwriter Terry Tufts.

The Gumboots' fourth album, Roads Less Traveled, will be released for the band's Feb. 20 and 21 concerts at the Northern Arts and Cultural Centre. - photo courtesy of Ray Bethke

The Gumboots formed 25 years ago after Gilday returned to Yellowknife filled with inspiration from a folk workshop he attended in Edmonton. Members have come and gone, but the music has endured through innumerable live performances on Canadian stages and broadcast across national airwaves on radio shows like CBC Morningside, Definitely Not the Opera and Sounds Like Canada.

Tonight's concert celebrates the band's silver anniversary with the launch of a fourth album, Road Less Travelled.

"It's one of those things we thought would be a two-year project when we started six years ago," Bethke said of the new disc. "We wanted to make sure we had an album we were happy with and we've got that now."

Four of the tracks were written by past Gumboot Bob Macquarrie, who left in 2001, but the remaining members all contributed their own songs, harmonies or arrangements, as well. True to The Gumboots' reputation as oral historians, the songs explore Northern stories and characters.

"The songs all seem to involve people who take roads less travelled," Bethke said. "They are stories about people who have gone a different route, took risks and set out to achieve something different from people around them."

The album's title, a homage to Robert Frost's famous poem, was lifted from a line in one of Bethke's songs, When Once Upon A Time Is Over. Arranged simply with piano and guitar, Bethke crafted the song as a kind of lullaby for his children. Another of Bethke's songs, John Torrington, recalls the first victim of the ill-fated Franklin Expedition.

The disc opens with The Trail Trilogy, three songs written by Macquarrie memorializing the RCMP in the North. The songs are titled On Patrol at 50

Below, an upbeat tune about a day in the life of cops on dogsleds, Fitzgerald's Last Post, about an expedition that perished in Fort Macpherson early last century and Lure of the North, a meditation on why officers serve in the North.

Tufts, a veteran recording artist and storyteller who lives off the grid in rural Ontario, is The Gumboots' featured guest this weekend. Tufts has performed plenty of times in the North, having backed up Susan Aglukark throughout the 1990s before she signed with Sony Records.

"I'm really looking forward to getting back to Yellowknife," Tufts said as he packed for his trip. "It's been a long time since I've been up there and I do miss it."

The concert begins at 8 p.m. Friday night and again on Saturday.