CAPE BRETON piper and scholar Barry Shears new book,

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1 Old days of dance and diversity BARRY SHEARS DANCE TO THE PIPER piper and scholar Barry Shears new book, Dance to the Piper: The Highland Bagpipe in Nova Scotia (Cape Breton University Press), gives his three previously published books of collected tunes a more detailed socio-historical context and presents new evidence towards a better understanding of the development of Highland piping over the past two and a half centuries. Barry Shears is a scholar and piper who performs in the distinctive Cape Breton style at concerts and for dances, judges piping competitions, and teaches and lectures on Cape Breton dance music, at home and abroad. Dance to the Piper: The Highland Bagpipe in Nova Scotia is based on his 2005 Masters dissertation for Saint Mary s University in Halifax, Nova Scotia: a well-illustrated drawing together of more than 25 years of research in the scattered communities of his native Cape Breton, and of time spent with the last aging representatives of a unique tradition that originated among the many pipers who, from the late 18th century onwards, left Scotland to settle in Nova Scotia. It complements and extends the work of Dr John Gibson, whose books Traditional Gaelic Bagpiping and Old and New World Highland Bagpiping were published in 1998 and What these players including some distinguished players of their day offered to the musical heritage of Cape Breton never coalesced into a generally prescribed set of performance conventions as in Scotland, but accepted technical diversity as the music took on a vigorous role as the inspiration for step dancers. Barry Shears new book comes with a CD that gives a sampling of this music from 1923 to 2007, and illustrates the shifting and varied performance styles of Nova Scotia pipers. Some of the tracks are from well-worn old 78rpm recordings and in the field tape recordings, and so are of variable quality, and most of the performers were in their 60s, 70s and 80s when the recordings were made, and well past their prime. But the selection achieves the intention of illustrating the old piping styles of northeastern Nova Scotia and Cape Breton. The CD also includes performances by three well-known Cape Breton fiddlers playing bagpipe tunes to highlight the relationship between Cape Breton s bagpipe and fiddle traditions. Players include Pipe Major MacKenzie Baillie, Pipe Major Rod Nicholson, Pipe Major Duncan MacIntyre, Joe Hughie MacIntyre, Jimmy MacArthur, Alex Currie, Rory MacKinnon, Buddy MacMaster, John Willie Campbell and others. If you can get past the standardised competitive modern way of thinking about correctness, it is very interesting to hear some of these pipers, said Barry Shears. A project of this type could only have been conducted here because I know of nowhere else in the world where some of these older archaic forms of piping remained in play for so long. Barry Shears was 12 years old when he began taking piping lessons BARRY SHEARS If we d had someone like an Angus MacKay, a Donald MacDonald or a David Glen collecting in Cape Breton in the 19th century we might have had a written record of a wonderful tradition but we didn t and I feel we have lost so much. PIPING TODAY 27

2 with Angus MacIntyre, a retired coal miner. He went on to gain the Canadian Armed Forces (Reserve) Pipe Major s Certificate at 24, and the Senior and Teacher s Certificates from the Institute of Piping (now the Piping and Drumming Qualifications Board) in Scotland. A successful solo competitor, he was a six times winner of the Champion Supreme trophy for professional piping in Nova Scotia. I work for the local telephone company and, in 1983, I fell off a telephone pole and injured my shoulder. It left me with a nerve impingement in the bottom hand that s kept me out of competitive piping. Piping was such a big part of my life so, inspired by people like Helen Creighton, I began to do research instead. Helen Creighton was a Nova Scotian broadcaster who began collecting folklore in 1928 and, over the next half century compiled 13 books of folk songs, ballads and stories and an extensive collection of photographs, sound recordings, documents and cinematography in English, French, Gaelic, Mi kmaq (the aboriginal language of eastern Canada) and German. She came to Cape Breton to record stories in the 1960s but there was one piper, Rory MacKinnon, who refused to tell her any stories until she recorded him playing the bagpipes. The recording is only a couple of minutes in duration but it s great and reflects an older form of bagpipe performance said Barry Shears. I ve found that, in a lot of these old recordings of the ear players (pipers trained solely by ear and example), each region had its own style of playing. I m not about to say that, because these people were from Skye and Raasay, for example, as was the case with Rory MacKinnon s family, that this is the way they used to play in Skye and Raasay in the 19th century. We can t be sure. But it is interesting that they played the way that they did, given that they were only two and three generations removed from the immigrant pipers and fairly knowledgeable in what they d picked up in their own communities, often from extended family members. IN Scotland, piping developed into a form of art music, said Barry Shears. It s very technical and beautiful to listen to but it doesn t serve a community function in the same way that dance music did in Nova Scotia. What I m trying to say with this book is that we had our own tradition here until comparatively recently. It is very likely that pipers in Scotland in the 1820s were playing very ALEX CURRIE He had over 600 tunes; he never really read music and had learned most of his repertoire from his mother and grandmother singing the tunes. That s a lot of puirt à beul. Alex said that during the Depression he d play the pipes for social dancing sometimes five nights a week. People wanted to dance to the pipes because you could hear them over the sound of the dancers. much like pipers here in the 1820s. Scotland went through a series of changes and so did we. Here though, the big changes like musical literacy and military piping came in at a much later date and a lot of the traditional practices, like bagpipe making and traditional step dance music, lingered here until well into the 20th century. When he was teaching me, Angus Mc- Intyre, a descendant of the MacIntyre pipers to Clanranald from Smerclate in South Uist, would say, this is how they played it, and he d show me variations of the way the old timers fingered certain embellishments. But I never paid much attention to that then because, when I was 15 and went into the Militia, and was taking courses in Ottawa and at summer Army camps, they played pretty much in the standard competition style. For all that, he said, it came as quite a shock to me when, during my pipe major s course in Ottawa in 1980, Archie Cairns, senior piper with the Canadian Armed Forces at the time, told me strathspeys and reels were not meant to be danced to. The only exception was playing for Highland dancers. Barry Shears said that at the workshops he gives around North America, the first question people usually ask is what the difference is between Cape Breton piping and Scottish piping. I tell them Cape Breton piping is largely dance music, he said, whereas in Scotland, it became art music and the playing of strathpeys and reels in the old country is unsuitable for step-dancing. Barry Shears said there was, early in the 20th century, a step dance piper in Cape Breton PIPING TODAY 28

3 RORY MacKINNON Rory MacKinnon played snippets of a variation of Cha Till Mi Tuille (I Will Return No More) for Helen Creighton. called John MacKinnon, known popularly as The Burnt Piper (An Piobaire Loisge). Another player and step dancer from Cape Breton, Hector MacMaster, was in Scotland scouting around for a set of pipes at the time of the First World War. According to local folklore, he went into R. G. Lawrie s shop in Glasgow where the great John MacColl was the business s manager. John McColl was making some final adjustments to a set of pipes and offered to play a few tunes. After he d played, MacMaster told him that, while he was a great march player, his strathspeys and reels didn t compare so well with PIPING TODAY 29 BIG JIM MacINTYRE, whose father, Donald MacIntyre, emigrated from South Uist around , was the grandson or great grandson of Duncan MacIntyre, piper to MacDonald of Clanranald, around Big Jim, a celebrated piper and dancer in Cape Breton, died in His grandson, Angus MacIntyre, was Barry Shears piping teacher. THREE piper-fiddlers at Glendale, Cape Breton around 1930: Black Angus MacDonald, Little Allan MacFarlane and Angus Campbell Beaton. those of The Burnt Piper in Cape Breton. We can judge from this tale that piping in Scotland was well on its way to becoming an art form and losing its social function as music to dance to. You can t really describe the display dances you see performed at Highland games as social dances, said Barry Shears: It s not like you go with your pals for a drink or two some night and a sword dance or sean truibhas breaks out. THE ear players of Cape Breton were not note-trained and few read music. They often had different names and different settings for many of the tunes, said Barry Shears. I sat down with Alex Currie ( ), one of the last ear-trained pipers in Cape Breton, one evening with a copy of William Gunn s Caledonian Repository of Music, first published around In the case of some of the tunes he recognised, he had better settings than those published in Scotland. He had over 600 tunes; he never really read music and had learned most of his repertoire from his mother and grandmother singing the tunes. That s a lot of puirt à beul. Alex said that during the Depression he d play the pipes for social dancing sometimes five nights a week. People wanted to dance to the pipes because you could hear them over the sound of the dancers. On the CD, I have included a few minutes of a recording I made sitting with Alex Currie going over puirt à beul. He was 85 years old at the time. He tells the story of the tune, sings a bit and plays on the practice chanter and you can hear his mother s singing in it. He was also a good step dancer and would actually simulate dancing when he was playing, and you can hear his intricate rhythmic structure, the footwork, as he s playing the pipes while sitting in a chair. Alex Currie had such a different way of fingering, said Barry Shears. And he played with the pipes on his right shoulder, right hand on top. When he joined the Army during the Second World War, they told him that playing with the bag under the right shoulder would throw the band s counter-marches off and they succeeded in teaching him to hold the bag under his left shoulder. But he couldn t learn the different fingering. By this time he d already played for 20 years in the way that he did, and he always played right hand uppermost on the chanter. That s what I found in rural Cape Breton: there was no standard way of playing the bagpipe. I can sometimes tell who taught a player from a certain area by seeing the way they hold their chanter and shoulder the instrument and the way they play. There s something special about that. Depending on where they lived and the degree of isolation in which they lived, they reflected regional tastes and techniques in pipe music. Photographs of the early ear-learned pipers of Cape Breton show bags under left arms and under right arms, and left and right hands PIPING TODAY 29

4 variously uppermost on the chanter, said Barry Shears. It s very clear that there was no one, prescribed way even of holding or shouldering the instrument. Barry Shears has identified what appear to be archaic elements of style in the playing of some of his informants. In recordings I have of the ear-learned players, you can hear embellishments you find in David Glen s Highland Bagpipe Tutor of 1878, which described a lot more ways to embellish particular doublings on C and D than you d play now; it s almost as if we ve seen the playing pared down from a wide variety of technique to a more standard format. People who knew Joe Hughie MacIntyre, one of the performers on the CD, said he could double up on just about every note on the chanter. He played two D grace notes on his doublings of C and B instead of the modern G and D grace note configuration. Moreover, some of the earlearned pipers didn t play grips or toarluaths or any of that kind of heavy embellishment. Also on the CD is a great recording sent to me by Margaret Bennett, a well-known Scottish folklorist who has researched the Gaels of Western Newfoundland, said Barry Shears. It s a short recording of Jimmy MacArthur, an ear-trained piper from Newfoundland. Jimmy MacArthur s ancestors came from Moidart and Canna to Cape Breton in the mid 19th century and left Cape Breton for the west coast of Newfoundland in the 1860s. Jimmy plays the strathspey and reel, Tulloch Gorum and the Reel o Tulloch, and there are no heavy low-g based embellishments, just plenty of grace notes. And he tunes his pipes to an E. I met Jimmy s nephew a few summers ago and asked him to tune his pipes up and play a few tunes while I video-taped him, said Barry Shears. After he finished playing I asked him, Leonard, why did you tune your pipes to an E? He looked at me and asked, What s an E? He doesn t read music and that was just the way he d learned to tune his pipes. He plays both bagpipe and violin by ear. I found that very interesting because James Logan in his book, The Scottish Gael which was published in 1831, wrote about pipers in parts of the Highlands who tuned their pipes to E instead of to the tonic A. Dr. William Donaldson, writing in his book The Highland Pipe and Scottish Society, was somewhat skeptical of that practice, but a few of the old pipers over here were tuning their pipes to E. PIPING TODAY 30 So there were some archaic piping techniques and ways of playing and no two ear trained pipers I have on the CD play the same way which highlights what a diverse and varied tradition piping once was. WHILE piobaireachd had died out from the repertoire of the Cape Breton pipers recorded in the 20th century, there is evidence that piobaireachd was played by pipers in the emigrant and early descendant generations. I came across a song from Donald MacLellan, a blacksmith and bard who composed a lot of poems and songs in Cape Breton. The song, entitled Òran a Ghìogain (The Thistle Song), was published by his son, multiinstrumentalist and poet Vincent MacLellan, in Failte Cheap Breatuinn around The song describes a raid on a garden of overgrown thistles and the attack was led by the sweet fingering of the piper playing Failte Phrionnsa (the Prince s Salute), a tune that s often attributed to John McIntyre. So here s an oral description of a MacIntyre tune being played in Inverness County in the 1830s-40s, close to where Robert MacIntyre and his family settled around (See The fate of Clanrannald piper Robert MacIntyre by Barry Shears in Piping Today No. 11, p ) Piobaireachd was certainly something people recognised because, in this instance, it was being played to lead a group of local people to attack this overgrown field. And there are other records of people playing piobaireachd in the 19th century, so the tradition was brought to Nova Scotia but died out by the early part of the 20th century. After you ve finished putting the hay in, or at a wedding in the winter time, you want to get up and dance and that s why dance music was so integral to the lives of the rural people here. But one only has to hear the recordings of the light music from Scotland to realise how much it has changed during the 20th century, and to think that piobaireachd was a sacred cow that was somehow kept intact while other forms of pipe music changed around it, that s a view I just can t believe. I doubt very much that piobaireachd, as it is performed today, is the same as it was played in the Highlands over 200 years ago. Rory MacKinnon played snippets of a variation of Cha Till Mi Tuille (I Will Return No More) for Helen Creighton, and my mother-inlaw s family used a variation of the same tune as a lullaby to rock children to sleep, said Barry Shears. My mother-in-law, Mary Jane Kelly, is from Beauly, Antigonish County, a descendant of several families cleared from Strathglas in the early 1800s, mostly Chisholms and a few Camerons. A SECOND wave of migration of pipers from Scotland to Nova Scotia took place in the 20th century, bringing with it the influences of the modern competitive style of playing. Some were very good pipers, said Barry Shears. George Dey, who eventually settled in Halifax, had come third in the gold medal competition at the Argyllshire Gathering in 1902 and second in 1903, said Barry Shears. He d been a student of John MacDougall Gillies when he managed the bagpipe firm of Peter Henderson, Glasgow. Gillies gave him a nice letter of reference when he came here looking for work. Dey wandered around North America, spending time in the United States and British Columbia where he was official piper for a time to the BC Pipers Society in Vancouver. He returned to Halifax in 1912 and set up shop teaching modern style piping and Highland dancing. According to one of his students, he could set up a whole pipe band in 10 minutes he was quite a sound expert. We had parallel piping cultures here for some time into the 20th century with the new influence coming in from Scotland but the older style still healthily continuing, and I ve tried to illustrate that on the CD. Someone from the turn-of-the-century era who became a pillar of piping in Nova Scotia was Kenneth MacKenzie Baillie, a Nova Scotian from Pictou who joined the Royal Marine Artillery in Britain, said Barry Shears. He had a brilliant military career, and played the uilleann pipes and the violin as well as the Highland pipes. He d learned his piping from Pipe Major Sandy MacLennan, a former gold medalist, and Sandy s daughter, Catherine, who he later married. Catherine MacLennan was a cousin of Lieutenant John MacLennan, G. S. MacLennan s father, and she was a piper who did a lot of teaching in Nova Scotia as well. So, on the CD, I have some literate pipers, such as MacKenzie Baillie, and a few of his pupils, who play in the competitive style and the rounder marches that were so typical of the late 19th century, said Barry Shears. And I have

5 four or five tracks of ear-trained pipers. He believes that amplification technology played a role in the final demise of the ear-learned piping tradition: electronic amplification gave the fiddlers volume, along with the natural dynamics and musical range of the violin. Pipers are restricted in that we can t play a note louder or softer on the pipes and we only have nine notes. An interestingly vivid description of a local dance scene was published in 1929 in the Toronto Star: Early though it was in the afternoon the big barn already shook with the ardor of the main body of the dancers. The harrows and rakes and other implements piled upstairs out of the way for this occasion, shook and rattled noisily. Sleighs, jingled merrily in fitful starts at each thump of the dancing feet below. The big room down there was dark and the floor was jammed with young dancers. Two fiddlers sawed valiantly away in lively tunes as the dancers circled and swung with Scotch determination to lusty shouts of Swing er round, All the Way, Grand right and left. Four sets were going at a time with moving figures barely discernible through clouds of rising dust which no one heeded. Scorning such fancy new-tangled things as these square dances and the effeminate Sassenach music of the fiddles, in a smaller building, the older people danced with great vigor and more joy than the younger ones. Scotch fours, reels and solo dances to the tune of the pipes; and at times the smaller children joined them. One of the Campbell girls, Dolena [?], a dainty little ten-year old girl, danced with precision, grace and dignity an old Scotch solo which brought from her elders Wild highland cries of proud acclaim. Amid these older people each dance was a ceremony unto itself, and one set only occupied the floor while all others watched with faces only less grave than those of the dancers. They stepped the intricate measures of dances as old as their race, and no shouts of direction marred the beat of their feet no[r] the poetry of their movement. 1 WHEN I went around in the early 1980s trying to find step dancers who d actually danced to pipe music, I found only one or two, said Barry Shears. But then people would say, that old guy over there, he used to play for step dancing. So I d go and see him, and hear about these pipers in the 1920s who went around the communities and played some of the more popular pipers, such as The Burnt Piper, would play all Sunday afternoon and well into the evening for group and solo step dancing. So it was quite a tradition, he said. I do believe that the pipes were more popular than the fiddle in some areas of the Nova Scotia. But it was starting to wane by the late 1930s. And some guy sitting down playing for square dances in a pair of pants didn t fit into the province s post-war tourism strategy which set out to portray Nova Scotia as a little Scotland in North America. American tourists would be persuaded to come up and to see us, we re a lot closer than Scotland, a lot easier to get to, and we can wear kilts and, for two or three generations, the Victorian interpretation of Scottish culture was promoted heavily here to the detriment of the local Gaelic culture. But as recently as the late 1950s and into the early 1960s, people were still dancing to pipe music in rural areas like Grand Mira and Ingonish. The old ear-learned pipers were by then coming in for increasing criticism from modern Scottish-style players, said Barry Shears. What upset me the most was when Seumas MacNeill, principal of the College of Piping, came over to teach at the Gaelic College, beginning around According to local sources, he dismissed everybody who played in the old Cape Breton way. He told them they didn t know how to play and went to the extent of telling people to put their pipes away until he could teach them properly. After he was here, the old ways of playing were branded as worthless and that was a part of the reason it finally died out. It is unfortunate that he didn t do less teaching and more research during those brief summer visits. If we d had someone like an Angus MacKay, a Donald MacDonald or a David Glen collecting in Cape Breton in the 19th century we might have had a written record of a wonderful tradition but we didn t and I feel we have lost so much. BARRY Shears appendices to Dance to the Piper: The Highland Bagpipe in Nova Scotia list the more than 80 immigrant pipers who settled in Nova Scotia and neighbouring areas, , and more than 300 of their first and second generation piping descendants; Scottish pipers from the Lowlands who came to Nova Scotia in the post-immigration period, ; references to local bagpipe makers; and tips on playing Cape Breton style music and the differences between competition music and dance music. The importance of detailing descendant pipers was to show how popular piping was among the New World Gaels, said Barry Shears. There were so many pipers here that it sparked a cottage industry in bagpipe manufacture and we have the names of half a dozen bagpipe makers in Nova Scotia in the 19th century. As well, of course, immigrant pipers took instruments with them to the New World. I have a picture of the pipes Robert McIntyre brought to Nova Scotia, said to have belonged to his great grandfather, John MacIntyre of Rannoch, said Barry Shears. This was taken by a friend of mine at the home of one of MacIntyre s descendants in Seattle, Washington. And there are a few examples here in Nova Scotia of two drone bagpipes to which a third drone (bass) has been added at a much later date. We know when some of these instruments were made, or at least when they came to Nova Scotia, so we know what they were doing in Scotland at that time in relation to things like combing and beading, what the mounts and bells were like and so on in the late 18th century. There are about a dozen known sets of immigrant bagpipes here in Nova Scotia that date from the late-18th and early-19th centuries and there might be more. They are mainly in the hands of descendants of the people who brought them here. I ve collected a few sets, but others are in people s basements and attics. Some have been thrown out. Some sets are known to have been lost: the instrument MacDonald of Glenaladale bought for his piper and bard, John MacGillivray was destroyed in a house fire in the 1880s, and a well-worn, two-drone Waterloo set was lost in a house fire in Some of this material is still around but a lot has been discarded or otherwise destroyed. These are wonderful artifacts and they should really be in a museum here in Nova Scotia, as should the Iain Dall chanter, currently in private hands, which I think is the oldest surviving bagpipe artifact in North America. These are priceless relics. l FOOTNOTE: 1. Pearson, George (1929): At the White Millers a visit to Glencoe Mills In 1929 (Toronto Star Weekly, Saturday January 12, 1929; reprinted in The Clansman, June/ July 1991, pp 9, 43-44). Thanks to Kate Dunlay for supplying this reference. PIPING TODAY 31