Cape Breton Island is for Canada’s folk music what the Mississippi Delta is for America’s. During the infamous Highland Clearances, the impoverished Highlanders of Scotland were driven off their land. Many of those who did not die of starvation or exposure (the clearances were often done in the dead of winter), were shipped off to Canada in the “coffin boats”, a crossing that many did not survive. The formalities of immigration were a little less stringent: they were usually dumped on a desolate beach with whatever meager possessions they carried, and scattered into the hills to build some crude shelter in which to live through the winter. If their carefully guarded handfuls of potatoes and oats took hold in the spring, they might live to be successful pioneers in the new land. Cape Breton Island was one of the most convenient places for the coffin ships to dump their human cargo, and it became a transplanted reflection of Highland Scotland. Though they intermarried with the French and native Micmac who were already there, amd with whom they shared the Catholic faith, the Gaelic language and highland folk music survived. Gaelic is now only spoken by handful of elderly Cape Bretoners, today, but the music simply gushes out of the place, like a magical spring. All of Canada’s folk music, from one end of the country to the other, is infused with Celtic elements, but it is in Cape Breton that the influence is most overwhelming. Not surprisingly, the island produces musicians in number far out of proportion to its population.
One of the first recording stars of Cape Breton music was Bill Lamey, whose sessions are captured on reel-to-reel recordings made in the 1950s. Cape Breton fiddlers had a network that recorded and exchanged tapes by mail. The earliest sessions on this cd were intended to be brought to Scotland to give the ancestral homeland a taste of their lost kin’s fiddling. Some later recordings from the 1960’s and 1970’s supplement these. Many of the melodies are directly traceable to known 17th and 16th century originals. The cd’s booklet describes Lamey’s style: “Bill’s playing is characterized by snappy bowing with a strong attack. He had a way of keeping the sound going and building great momentum. The is a slight whip to each stoke of his bow. This contributes much to the extraordinary drive of his reels and the faster strathspeys. He also enlivened both his strahspeys and reels by subtly varying the rhythms of pairs of notes, all the while keeping a steady beat. Bill’s interpretation of airs had a rhythmic freedom which is seldom found in the playing of today’s generation of fiddlers, but is akin to old-style Gaelic singing.”
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