TUNED IN: RADIO, RITUAL AND RESISTANCE Cape Breton s traditional music, By WENDY BERGFELDT-MUNRO. Integrated Studies Project

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1 TUNED IN: RADIO, RITUAL AND RESISTANCE Cape Breton s traditional music, By WENDY BERGFELDT-MUNRO Integrated Studies Project Submitted to Dr. Michael Welton In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Integrated Studies Athabasca, Alberta MAY 2015

2 Support for this project was provided by Athabasca University s Graduate Student Research Fund Special thanks to Dr. Michael Welton for his wisdom and guidance And with deepest gratitude to the broadcasters, fiddlers, pianists, singers, dancers, storytellers, artists, managers and tradition bearers who took the time to share their thoughts. 2

3 ABSTRACT This study explores the role of local radio in the evolution and revitalization of Celtic musical culture in eastern Nova Scotia and Cape Breton Island from 1972 to Drawing on in-person interviews with radio programmers, musicians, dancers, tradition bearers and community organizers, this study focuses on four key producers and program hosts and how, through their radio programming choices, they supported and augmented the Cape Breton fiddle and song tradition. This study will uncover how these personalities were able to spark widespread community conversations at critical, axial moments in the tradition s evolution. It will also show how these programmers established a ritual of radio listening with their audiences, which resulted in the formation of a vital and dynamic "telecommunity." This communal form, a conversational learning space, helped define and redefine Cape Breton traditional music, supported local musicians and ultimately became an assertion of a collective identity against global, neo-liberal homogenizing forces present in broader commercial styles. It provided a buffer against other potentially colonizing effects, such as tartansim. 3

4 Table of Contents ABSTRACT... 2 INTRODUCTION... 5 Methodology... 7 Literature Review... 8 RADIO THE EARLY YEARS: GUS MACKINNON THE PIONEER Critical Conversation #1 A response to the Vanishing Cape Breton Fiddler CJFX RAY MAC MACDONALD THE PROMOTER Community Conversation #2 Why is it important to have traditional music on the air? CBC RADIO CAPE BRETON - BRIAN SUTCLIFFE THE CRAFTSMAN Critical Conversation #3 Will anyone outside Cape Bretoners be interested in this? CJCB SYDNEY DONNIE CAMPBELL - THE COLLECTOR Community Conversation #4 Hey, do you know this one? CRITICAL COMMENTARY Ritual Resistance SOURCES

5 INTRODUCTION I do remember when I was quite young we had a radio. Well, there was a program called "Fun At Five". Well it was on, I'm quite sure, from Monday to Friday at 5 o'clock. We had it in the barn and when we would be milking our cows the radio was always on. I think that's when I started learning to try to step dance in the barn, waiting to take the milking machines from one cow to the next. -Father Eugene Morris In one of the first locally written scholarly examinations of contemporary Cape Breton culture, The Centre of the World at The Edge of a Continent, editor Judith Rolls, who grew up in Sydney, shares a treasured memory at the top of her introductory essay. I was among the fortunate to grow up listening to the strains of fiddle music and Put a Nickel in the Parking Meter on CJCB radio. (Corbin & Rolls, 1996, p. 8) she writes. We are to understand these memories are symbolic of a larger experience that defines her and the place in which she lives. It seems revealing that on an island so rich with authors, musicians, singers, songwriters, playwrights, visual artists, and dancers, it was a radio program that first came to her mind. Cape Breton is rooted in heritage cultures with strong oral traditions. The stories and songs of the Mi'kmaq, the Acadians, and the Scottish Gaels have baptized the Island with unique narratives that shape the peoples view of themselves and their connections with one another. Local radio has its own narratives too, shared an understood by Cape Bretoners. From recollections of CJCB radio host Ann Terry s (MacLellan) eloquent descriptions of her trips to New York or Dominion Beach (Corbin & Smith-Piovesan, 2001, p. 67) to reflections on the humour presented on Clyde Nunn 5

6 and Percy Baker s Fun at Five program on CJFX (MacLean, 2014, p. 265) and are social currency tying the community together with shared experiences and common reference points. Radio, like most news media in a democratic state, offers a trio of services to its citizens; it surveys the environment for change or adaptations, it provides a diversion from the environment, and it supports personal identity.(savage & Spence, 2014, p. 5) In other words, radio is a companion, keeping watch when necessary, entertaining on occasion, and reinforcing the individual and communities impressions of who they are. In Canada however, radio also had one other function. It was an instrument of adult education from the 1940s to the 1960s. Predicated on the notion that citizens would listen to programs together, then meet in smaller groups to discuss what they had heard and possibly craft some kind of community response, this phenomenon found its local expressions in Eastern Nova Scotia s Antigonish Movement and on the national Farm Radio and Citizen s Forums. It informs the significant audience interaction with radio programs in Eastern Nova Scotia and Cape Breton from 1972 to It may also provide clues as to why radio continues to occupy such an elevated role in the community s discourse. The strength of radio lies, in part, in a ritual whereby listeners tune in to a favorite broadcast at roughly the same time at regular intervals, be it daily or weekly. Rituals themselves have a way of tying people together, in helping to create meaning, identity and sometimes community. This story is about how a cohesive community, sharing meanings around local music, were able at various times to form walls of resistance against cultural hegemonic forces, be they ugly stereotypes diminishing the dignity of the people, or broader commercial styles threatening to swallow up more vulnerable tradition. 6

7 Methodology This study involves an analysis of the work of four key radio professionals, the late Angus Gus MacKinnon ( ), Ray "Mac" MacDonald, Donnie Campbell, and Brian Sutcliffe all of whom were active from the early 1970s to The narrative begins with the airing of a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation television documentary entitled The Vanishing Cape Breton Fiddler (1972). It is also the same point in time that federal regulations came into effect, which regulated and increased the amount of Canadian content on radio. The study ends around the retirement announcements of two of the study participants in 1998/99. This time period is also significant because it roughly coincides with the launch of the Celtic Colours International Music Festival in the fall of 1997, effectively making Cape Breton one of the global hubs of the Celtic music world. It also marks the beginning of a new media web-based era that allows people to seek out and explore culturally specific musical forms beyond local radio offerings and person-to-person exchanges. Due to the nature of radio there is almost no written documentation of the programs themselves, but there are tapes of shows and there is human memory. Knitted together with threads from these sources this dialogue-based, ethnographic project involved taped audio interviews with each of the informants or, in the case of Mr. MacKinnon, an analysis of letters, articles, and tapes in the CJFX archives. Twenty-one tradition bearers, storytellers, dancers, singers, fiddlers, pianists, composers and recognized community cultural activists were also interviewed, selected on the basis of eras in which they were active, public recognition for their work in the form of recordings, invitations to teach, awards, interviews, and performances, and participation in different practices within the tradition. Most of these disciplines are taught and preserved in the official school of Cape Breton 7

8 Celtic Culture, the provincially funded and mandated St Ann's Gaelic College and, as such, are understood to be key heritage practices within the tradition. The interview technique is informed by critical engagement with oral history and ethnographic interview strategies and the Sawatsky method (Paterno, 2000) honed by more than two decades of practice in community-based public journalism at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. These interviews were transcribed, sorted and coded according to themes and subject areas. Literature Review No discussion of Nova Scotia culture would be complete without acknowledging without Ian McKay s concept of tartanism. In Tartanism Triumphant: The Construction of Scottishness in Nova Scotia, (McKay, 1992) The Quest of the Folk, Antimodernism and Cultural Selection in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia (McKay, 1994), and In the province of History: The making of the public past in twentieth century Nova Scotia (McKay & Bates, 2010) he builds a case that through the efforts of Premier Angus L MacDonald ( ) and middle class cultural producers such as Helen Creighton ( ) and handcraft revivalist Mary Black ( ). Their New Scotland was a coherent visioning of Nova Scotia as a quaint home for fisher-folk and farmers, deliberately anti-modern, anti-union, anti-collectivist, and, in the view of Creighton, anti-communist. Although McKay never explains precisely how the process works, he maintains that tartansim decontextualizes images thereby changing their meaning to suit the needs and interests of powerful agents of society. McKay s analysis is not without critics. An interpretative viewing of the Donna Davies National Film Board presentation A Sigh and a Wish: Helen Creighton s Maritimes (2001) sets McKay as a nitpicky contrarian, indifferent to the nuance and pathos present in some of the feminist and gender 8

9 issues in Creighton s narrative. Daniel MacInnes, a sociologist with a wealth of field experience in eastern Nova Scotia, openly challenges McKay s read of the fabric craft industry, its connection to traditional practices, and the characterization of some of the key players, notably Angus William Rugg (A.W.R.) Mackenzie, declaring McKay s concept of tartansim derivative (MacLeod & MacInnes, 2014) of an earlier work by Hugh Trevor-Roper called The Invention of Tradition: The Highland Tradition of Scotland (1983). Tellingly, when Sheldon MacInnes writes a critique of step dance on Cape Breton Island, he side steps McKay all together, referring directly to Trevor-Roper s essay (Corbin & Rolls, 1996, p. 115). Glenn Graham, a scholar and professional traditional fiddler, while accepting the concept of tartanism as a form of colonization, intimates McKay s analysis of Angus L MacDonald s motives and activity is needlessly harsh. (Graham, 2006). In McKay s analysis it is difficult to see where Nova Scotians themselves entered the discourse. It is not clear how or if they accepted or rejected the stereotypes crafted by government and cultural producers. It is equally difficult to determine whether the commercially constructed images McKay talks about had any real impact on day-to-day lives. It is impossible to determine whether collective opinions of the people themselves had any influence on how those images evolved over time. However, if we apply a model proposed by Jürgen Habermas, an examination of the play within the public sphere in a civil society, it is possible to discern that a local dialogue could effect adjustments in systems of power and influence. The public sphere is a network for communicating information and points of view (and) the streams of communication are, in the process, filtered and synthesized in such as way that they coalesce into bundles of topically specified public opinions.(habermas, 1996, p. 360) Ideas move through communities. They are accepted, rejected or adjusted to form, if not a consensus, at least a common agreement about the subject at issue. In this way, despite commercial, industrial and hegemonic forces, it is possible for citizens to maintain 9

10 and support of authentic community practice and cultural expression. (Habermas, 1996; van Vuuren, 2006) There are many examples of how local conversations inspired by the programs in broadcast media motivated communities to take control of their destinies. As mentioned earlier, Canadian radio established that it could be a tool of adult education, community development and citizen engagement through the Farm Radio and Citizen s Forum (Welton, 2013) projects from 1941 to the mid 1960s. A partnership amongst the Canadian Association for Adult Education (CAAE), the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), and the Canadian Federation of Agriculture (CFA) these programs (explicitly directed to rural Canadians) were often recorded live at community based forums or debates. Listeners were encouraged to engage with the program through discussions in local study groups the same evening as the broadcast, or later in the week. They were also asked to submit letters and opinion pieces to the programs. Frequently provocative, this project highlighted an intellectually sophisticated population in rural Canada concerned about the well being of their communities and their place in changing nation. It set a pattern for the relationship between the radio producers and listeners in rural Canada. It created an expectation of two-way communication in both parties. From 1967 to 1980 the Challenge for Change/Société Nouvelle (CFC/SN) experimented with community based documentary filmmaking, (Newhook, 2009; Welton, 2013) first in Fogo, Newfoundland and then in several marginalized communities across the nation. It demonstrated how simple stories about and recorded by everyday people take on highly politicized tones, inspiring locally based challenges to governments and bureaucracies. Moving beyond Canadian borders, contemporary radio attracts considerable scholarly attention with a focus on community identity creation and maintenance, interactivity, and the manner and degree to which it reflects and influences public opinion.(ewart, 10

11 2011; McGowan, 2012; Meadows, Forde, Ewart, & Foxwell, 2005; Reader & Hatcher, 2012; Squires, 2000; Watson, 2002) With the advent of the internet, media scholars and analysts vision two distinct communication eras, the First Media Age with television and radio, and the Second Media Age, which is web-based. This separates the broadcast media and network media as fields of enquiry based on the claim that the web is unique by virtue of its interactive nature and, therefore, redemptive and emancipatory. (Holmes, 2005, p. 84) Indeed there are many examples of how Second Aged media has played a critical role in recent social change. An examination of the events surrounding the Arab Spring in 2011 reveals web-based communication systems were a powerful accelerant. (Frangonikolopoulos & Chapsos, 2012, p. 10). Social media, feeding into mainstream media reportage, played a pivotal role in scaling connections between people, achieving density, disseminating courage, awareness and sympathy, and in countering misinformation generated by the oppressive Egyptian regime in many countries around the world (Frangonikolopoulos & Chapsos, 2012, p. 16) A study of Tim Pool, the live streamer who became the face of the citizen journalist in the Occupy Wall Street events of 2011, illuminates how an every day citizen with a cell phone can create a climate for social actions.(lenzner, 2014) However David Holmes analysis opens the conversation beyond Second Age Media. He writes almost all technically constituted forms of communication, from print, to television, to cyberspace, contain elements of broadcast and interactivity; it is just that these are realized differently, at different levels of embodiment in different techno-social relations. (Holmes, 2005, p. 84) If all media forms contain impulses that are redemptive and emancipatory, not just web based expressions, then Second Age research may offer new insights into how ideas move through the public sphere in any media form to engage these impulses. 11

12 Second Age media analysis is inspiring researchers to reassess the impact of older media forms. (Fatkin & Lansdown, 2015; Glen Sean, 2014; Morris, 2014). An example of this sort of enquiry is found in a survey of religious radio broadcasting in the United States. Using Holmes work as the basis of its analysis, it rejects the First Age mass media view of radio as one-way, centrally produced, governmentally regulated, and shaped by mass consciousness in ways that promote dominant interests. (Ward, 2014). Instead it explores the impact of host/audience relationships built on ritual. It concludes that radio programs aimed at evangelical Christian audiences create telecommunities where its members are able to shape a Christian identity distinct from the mainstream of American culture. There is another significant body of work that, through the prism of community development, examines the nature of healthy conversations and how they form an essential building block of democratic societies. (Bird, 1996; Isaacs, 1999) Evidence of how these conversations sound in a Cape Breton cultural context and how they sustain and support the practices, attitudes and values in Cape Breton culture flows through In the Blood, Community Conversations on Culture (Feintuch, 2010) and Talking Cape Breton Music (Caplan, 2006) This MA-IS project will limit its discussion to representations of musical authenticity in what is known as Cape Breton traditional music. This tradition is based in a very specific history which has been outlined in many inquiries including that of MacInnes (MacInnes, 1997, 2007) Feintuch and Sampson (Feintuch, 2010) and Thompson (Thompson, 2006). This narrative sees Scottish Gaels come to Nova Scotia in two waves, from the 1770s to the 1860s. The language, music and dance traditions of these immigrants form a foundation which is referenced and replicated in today s cultural expression. Moreover, Dunlay (Dunlay & Reich, 1986), Doherty (Doherty, 1996) and Graham(Graham, 2006), musicians as well as scholars, capture the stylistic features and local 12

13 musical standards present Cape Breton s fiddle tradition. They point to acceptable bowing techniques, use of ornamentation, grace notes, and the nature of the cuts and drones as the critical elements that define the style. In the song tradition Chris MacDonald identifies dissemination the homespun music, bearing traditions learned directly from relatives (C. MacDonald, 2011, p. 1) as the mode of identifying which songs belong in the canon. While not explicitly stated, these scholars hover around a definition articulated by Philip Bohlman. Authenticity is identified by a consistent representation of the origin of the style (Bohlman, 1988, p. 10) In other words, authenticity is contained within the practice itself. RADIO I once went to the house (of an old neighbor couple) when Gus was on... They were both in the barn and both milking. They had two milk cows. And there they were listening to the barn radio, to the sound of the squirts of milk into the pail. And after the show was over they sang to each other in Gaelic. I was so privileged to observe. I didn't speak until after they stopped singing. They were great neighbours, very dear to us. -Respondent It is tempting to begin this enquiry with blanket observations about cultural colonization and perhaps even a statement or two about the Americanization of Canadian culture, but the story of the way radio wove in and out of the lives of working people in Canada and the United States is much more interesting and nuanced. Henry Shapiro s seminal Appalachia on our mind: the Southern mountains and mountaineers in the American consciousness, , though published in 1978, is 13

14 still regarded as a the central text for understanding the history of the region (Reid, 2005) In it he explores how Appalachia became seen as one of the problem regions in the United States that somehow fell behind the rest of the nation (Shapiro, 1978, p. 118) After the Civil War, when the region began its sharp decline relative to the rest of the country, people from both the Northern and Southern States began to take an interest in helping the mountain people. Shapiro demonstrates that some of key figures involved in the rejuvenation of cultural practices in the region (crafts and song chief among them) were well intentioned outsiders who arguably damaged the very communities they sought to help by undermining their sense of worth and agency. The story ends an ever-accelerating outmigration from the region to the growing industrial cities of America. Echoes from Ian McKay s tartanism thesis are hard to miss. The technology of radio restored a sense of worth to the region. Programs such as The Grand Ole Opry on WSM Radio in Nashville, Tennessee and The Wheeling Jamboree from WWVA from Wheeling, West Virginia allowed Appalachian working-class Americans, whether they were rural or urban dwellers, to share a common experience. (Malone, 2006; Peterson, 1997) Through these broadcasts Appalachians were able to differentiate themselves from mainstream American modernity, thereby recovering lost dignity and a sense of the worth of the mountain culture. That others outside their tradition also enjoyed their music was a further compliment, telegraphing back to them that they did have something special. No one on the stage of the Jamboree, or the Opry in the early years could have reasonably been regarded as privileged. In fact, it was their working class identity tied them together.(malone, 2006, p. 41) Radio stations outside of the major American markets were often poorly financed and owned by local small business people or in the case of WSM, a group of insurance salesmen, hardly the media barons of American s gilded age. It should not be a surprise that Appalachians and rural 14

15 Nova Scotians, with their related histories, common musical roots (Ritchie, 2014) and similar socio-economic realities, would be attracted to one another s cultural expressions. The relative strength of the WVVA and WSM transmissions to the others available to listeners in Atlantic Canada is important. Those American signals were remarkably powerful, orienting north/south, picking up listeners in the Appalachian diaspora who were migrating to the employment rich industrial cities of the northern United States. By virtue of geography these signals then spilled into large swaths of rural Canada. In fact Wheeling s signal was probably the clearest one people could hear on the south shore of Nova Scotia because it travelled across the water with nothing to inhibit it at all until reached landfall. CJFX in Antigonish and CJCB in Sydney also boasted extraordinarily strong signals but theirs oriented east/west, effectively creating an audio reef which broke, scattered and weakened the American signals. CKFX reached just over the Nova Scotia/New Brunswick border overlapping with the CJCB signal in Eastern Nova Scotia. Both signals were strong and clear in Cape Breton with CJCB s continuing all the way to Port aux Basques, Newfoundland. These are important details when trying to understand the emancipatory and culturally redemptive qualities of the following Canadian radio programs. One only need compare the experiences of the more southern zones in the region to witness how exposure to the powerful American signals altered local musical expressions. McKay identifies tartansim and the work of cultural producers such as Helen Creighton as being a corrosive element playing against the traditions and dignity of the poorer rural communities in Nova Scotia. It is an incomplete picture at best. The speed at which Nova Scotia s sea-shanties and folk songs were consumed by Appalachian styles is well documented in Helen Creighton s collection. A good example of that is in the Henneberry family from Devil s Island, says Clary Croft, the curator of the Creighton catalogue. Ben Henneberry, the patriarch of a small fishing 15

16 community in Halifax harbor, was the ballad singer that furnished much of Creighton s first book. He is one of the key individuals upon whom McKay focuses much of his cultural appropriation argument.(mckay, 1994, p. 71) But Croft says there another force at play. He says there was a noticeable change in the local singing style, which is often described as clear, to a nasal mountain variety that begins at roughly the same time Creighton starts collecting in 1929 and accelerates through the 1930s and 40s. Henneberry suffered from a condition that was robbing him of his singing voice but Creighton captured some of his songs before he lost his voice all together a few months after those early recordings. Creighton returned to Devil s Island some years later. It then fell to his son Edmond to sing the songs, but within that window there were already noticeable changes in stylistic and presentation conventions. The practice of speaking the last line of the song had given way to a more contemporary practice of singing the last line. Then there was the influence of the radio shows from Virginia. Some of the early recordings of Edmond singing are very much in his father s style, but when Helen re-recorded Edmund in the late 40s you could really hear the country and western influence in the twang that he put in his voice. It is actually quite noticeable. The Americanization of the singing style is further in evidenced as Croft points to a recording of The Wexford Girl by a little girl from New Brunswick. She is clearly influenced by the American version of the song, The Knoxville Girl which she would have heard on the radio. People like Hank Snow ( ) were stars, very often they were doing country and western version of traditional songs but not the local versions. They wouldn t take the traditional style from the Maritimes; they would look to the more Appalachian style they were hearing on the radio. People were craving it. That brand of mountain music, sometimes called hillbilly (later referred to as 16

17 country and western) would arguably becoming the de-facto folk music of large swaths of Atlantic Canada, notably New Brunswick and Nova Scotia s south shore.(marquis, 2009) (Marquis, 2012) By the 1970s, when this study begins, the challenge for local music, traditional or not, whether it would be able to withstand the influences of an increasingly centralized mass media. Even though Canadian content regulations supported nationally produced music those quotas did not necessarily support regional production. Live programming, increasingly expensive and complex because of electronic instrumentation was in decline. Some informants suggested that private station owners were opposed to working with the musicians union and that, as much as anything, bore responsibility for the decline in live musical programming on local radio stations in Cape Breton. Besides, there were pressures on local program directors to highlight the international offerings. This was the era of the rock and roll superstar - Elton John, Madonna, and U2 - complete with lavish worldwide promotional budgets supported by whole armies of people dedicated to capturing the public imagination. Some radio managers thought listeners and advertising revenue were more likely to follow the international trends than the homegrown tunes and songs. They were wrong. 17

18 THE EARLY YEARS: GUS MACKINNON THE PIONEER We used to tune into 6:30 to 6:45 during the evenings. So my father had a little canteen, my grandmother's house, there'd be a little cottage down by the shore, across from the Troy Trailer Court. So if we couldn't get the radio, if someone was hogging the radio, I'd go out to the car and listen to Gus MacKinnon - Howie MacDonald In January of 1961 Angus MacKinnon ( ) sent an audition tape to J. Clyde Nunn, the manager of CJFX radio in Antigonish. In the letter that accompanied, MacKinnon highlighted his education (a Bachelor of Arts from St Michael s in Toronto), his extensive on-air work experience (CFRN and CKUA in Edmonton) and, above all else, his desire to work at CJFX for reasons that need not be discussed here right now. Then he wrote this. Age 32. Single. Born near Antigonish. Highly partial to Scottie Fitzgerald and Joe MacLean. (A. G. MacKinnon, 1961) It would seem that his favorite fiddlers were as fundamental to his sense of identity as his age, marital status, and birthplace. The station manager J. Clyde Nunn must have taken note of MacKinnon s enthusiasm because by the fall of 1962 MacKinnon reported for his first day of work at a station where he would spend 18

19 the next thirty years and five days.(machattie, 1993) He is best remembered today for one of the most popular radio programs in the history of the station, a fifteen-minute presentation in the early evening called Scottish Strings. ( ) CJFX Radio had been on the air for almost twenty years by the time Gus MacKinnon joined the staff. CJFX won its license on the strength of the argument that CJCB, which also had a powerful signal based in Sydney (but was owned by a Jewish family) did not provide adequate religious education to its listeners (McGowan, 2012) Born of the Antigonish Movement, CJFX was also intended to be a significant asset to the adult education component of the social experiment. So in the early 1940s, the Extension Department at St Francis Xavier University engaged the pedagogical potential of the service with lectures, interviews, and over-the-air study groups. There were templates for this exercise. A decade earlier, CKUA Radio at the University of Alberta experimented with delivering educational talks and lectures to listeners. In 1936 the Farm Citizen s Forums began regular Monday night broadcasts that were built explicitly on a number of Canadian organizations had already focused on rural and farming issues, including the Antigonish Movement, the St. Francis Xavier Movement, the New Canada Movement, The Folk Schools Community Life Conferences (Sandwell, 2012, p. 175) This was the model the community owners of CJFX had in mind the station switched on its 1000-watt transmitter in One of the first broadcasts came from economist and professor Reverend Joe A MacDonald. The Labour School of the Air (M. R. Welton, 2001) could be heard more than two hundred and fifty kilometers away from the Antigonish studio by the unionized coal miners and steelworkers in Sydney, Glace Bay, and Reserve Mines. 19

20 As a condition of license, CJFX also had the mandate to reflect and promote the local culture.(mcgowan, 2012) In Cape Breton, the community reflection meant presenting traditional Scottish fiddle music. Strong though these mostly rural communities were there were, some weeks of intensive labour, either in the fishery or on the farm or both, that would prevent people from leaving their homes to socialize. In the winter and spring severe weather could cut neighbors off from other neighbors for weeks at a time. The radio was the connection to the outside world, to the community to which they belonged, and a break from hard work and isolation. Among the most welcome broadcasts were ones that featured local musicians. As one informant from Inverness County noted, Especially in the early days, way back 60 and 70 years ago we didn't have much, there was not much else we would hear. There might be a dance or two in the summer time when you heard a fiddler, but the radio did more to help people learn the tunes and share them (more) than anything else we had Gus MacKinnon was a very good broadcaster, in any era, by any standard, as adept in news and current affairs as he was in cultural programming. In fact, when he retired the article in the local newspaper The Casket made more of his contribution to the civic discourse through his interviews with politicians and community leaders on his talk show than it did of his passion for he fiddle tunes. There can be no doubt though that for him Scottish Strings was a labour of love. Critical Conversation #1 A response to the Vanishing Cape Breton Fiddler MacKinnon was well aware of the importance of traditional Cape Breton/Scottish music to the people in his listening audience. He could play the piano. His father was a fiddler. He would often 20

21 tape music from dances and house parties he attended. Still, finding enough material for that daily program a challenge. There were commercial recordings of Cape Breton fiddlers dating back to the 1920 s but not very many. A thorough count published in 1989, revealed there were only about three hundred discs (I. MacKinnon, 1989) of Cape Breton fiddle music in total. For fifty years of recording history that is not a big number. Even then, not all of those recordings would have been available in the CJFX record library. To augment the playlist, and to present more interesting radio, MacKinnon would invite fiddlers into the studio to play live on the air. In the evening, after work, he would travel to halls and homes where the music was playing to make his own recordings. Many respondents remembered that people would tape Scottish Strings episodes at home, hoping to capture some of these rare, fine recordings for their own collections. MacKinnon also took the unprecedented step of adding international fiddlers recordings to his daily playlist, although his reasons did not appear to be entirely driven by the need to fill airtime. Sheldon MacInnes, formerly with the musical group The Sons of Skye and son of the celebrated violin tradition bearer Dan Joe MacInnis, remembers MacKinnon used the recordings to foster a little competition among the musicians. He'd wink and say, Sheldon I'm going to play The Banks Hornpipe again by (Irish Fiddler) Sean McGuire" and I'd say Gus, that just doesn t fit. Ahh, he says, It fits. Hornpipes just don t hit it with a lot of people but this Sean McGuire was so dynamic with his fiddling, with his bowing, so creative. He was a genius and Gus knew that if put that over the airwaves in Inverness County that this was going to get a few people rowed up and think I'll show Gus next time he invites me up to play. I'll show him how I can play." In fact, Gus MacKinnon was at the center of one of the greatest rows of all in the Cape Breton fiddler s narrative. That community conversation, which engaged people from every corner of the Island, would not only force people who loved the fiddle music to ask some serious questions of 21

22 themselves and their communities about how or if they should support a valued piece of intangible culture, it would also forever alter the position of radio in the Cape Breton s music tradition from of a place of ritual to a space for cultural awakening. In 1971, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation freelancer Ron MacInnis and his pugnacious producer Charlie Reynolds adapted a radio documentary into a television program about what MacInnis perceived to be a precipitous decline in the Cape Breton Fiddle tradition. He became obsessed with the notion that there were really only two younger fiddlers left on the Island. He and his producer set out with a camera and a soundman to prove their claim. Marie Thompson, in speaking with the interview subjects some years later, found that some of the people they interviewed for the program were uncomfortable with the direction of the questions and made it known that they were not in agreement with the premise at the time. (Thompson, 2003) There were also reports of some kind an altercation between Father John Angus Rankin and one of the producers (probably Reynolds) at the Broad Cove concert during the filming of the piece, which left traces of ill will with those who saw the episode or heard about it, but the program itself did not create a widespread protest. The program aired twice, once between Christmas and New Years in 1971, and again, a few days later as the main feature in the national mid-afternoon network program, Take 30. In the 1970s there might have been only or two television channels in Cape Breton homes, but even then most people were not sitting in front of their televisions in the middle of the day. There is a lingering question as to how many people actually saw the program for themselves. Thompson reports there was no immediate response to the piece, no public outcry directed at the CBC, no letters to the editor, no news stories highlighting contrary opinions. That would change. Gus MacKinnon and Frank MacInnis (co-host of Scottish Strings in the first few years of the 22

23 program)(thompson, 2003) talked about their response to the documentary on the air for weeks after. Both strenuously disagreed with the program s premise. Frank MacInnis recalls the on-air conversations being quite passionate but well within the measured, gracious professional tone expected of on-air presenters at the time. Both us, I think were very single minded, in our love for the music. We were doing what we could to promote it and preserve it; it was a regular conversation with us. We talked about it on the air. By June, MacKinnon and MacInnis were on the air talking about the possibility of a concert highlighting as many Cape Breton fiddlers as would agree to play. An organizing committee determined they would visit the homes of the people they heard were playing the violin to persuade them to joins other fiddlers from across the Island on stage the following summer. They were hoping to find one hundred who would support them in their cause. They had no trouble finding that number. When fiddlers saw Frank MacInnis car pull up the driveway, they already knew what he was going to ask them to do. They had already heard it on the radio. MacInnis recalls those visits being very pleasant and the conversations thoughtful, neighborly and warm. Small awakenings occur in episodic encounters, Welton writes, they can braid into something larger, more sustained (M. Welton, 2001, p. 10) In this case, the awakening inspired by the conversations on Scottish Strings evolved into several months of smaller committee meetings, many of which were announced on Scottish Strings. In July 1973 there were one hundred thirty fiddlers onstage at the Glendale concert. This is a critical moment in the Island s musical history. The local organizational/conversational efforts also spawned the formation of the Cape Breton Fiddlers Association (CBFA), which is still an important island wide adult education group. It is open to anyone, irrespective of religious affiliation and ethnic background, and committed to sharing the traditions with a new generation of fiddlers. This group continues to hold workshops 23

24 and concerts, the biggest one being at St Ann s Gaelic College in mid-august. It is here that musicians of all ages exchange tunes, technique, and ideas about what fits in the tradition and what does not. This is done in a very informal way and, in the past, occurred to a great degree in a little shack behind the stage called the tuning room. Some recent renovations to the backstage area have changed the physical space, but the conversations and exchanges continue. It would be fair to say that virtually every Cape Breton fiddler on the Island has some connection to the Fiddlers Association. In 1998, on the twenty-fifth anniversary celebration of the first concert, there were two hundred and two fiddlers on the stage. There could have been more but many of the professional fiddlers were on tour and others, who attended the CBFA festival in the early afternoon, hurried away before the main group performance because they had committed playing in the finale at another fiddle concert in Judique. One wonders how many fiddlers, pianists and dancers there would have been that Sunday in 1998 had Gus MacKinnon not stirred his audience s passions about their traditions after the Vanishing Cape Breton Fiddler television broadcast a quarter century earlier. 24

25 CJFX RAY MAC MACDONALD THE PROMOTER The greatest thing that ever happened to CJFX radio was the day Ray Mac came to that station. Ray s ability to to draw the best from the players whether they used hockey sticks, bats, or fiddles and bows - is legendary. -Joey Beaton, pianist and local musical historian. Ray MacDonald was a son of the coal miner, growing up in Sydney Mines Cape Breton in the shadow of the Princess Colliery. When he was eight years old his mother asked him what he planned to do for a living. I m going to be a radio announcer, he remembers I m going to make a lot of money, and I m going to buy you a white apron. When he was still in high school he was invited to be a student correspondent on CBC Sydney s (CBI) youth program High News. Bill McNeill - who would rise to national prominence with two highly acclaimed national programs (CBC s Assignment and Voice of the Pioneer) - mentored the young man. This led to summer replacement work. In 1951 MacDonald was among the eighty or so students that formed the first class to attend St. Francis Xavier University s Sydney Campus (Xavier Junior College). Ann Terry MacLellan, one of CJCB s most celebrated radio hosts, was also a gifted educator and the public speaking tutor at the university. He credits her for giving him the confidence to consider radio as a career. She was certainly the spark. She was really interested in us, he recalls, She believed in us, gave us a little extra. We were just ordinary guys with no money and she propped us up. By 1953 her reference helped get him a full time job at the radio station where she made her career, CJCB in Sydney. His job was to support host Lloyd Tex Taylor and The Cape Breton Round Up, a 25

26 variety program that featured local fiddlers, song-writers, country music bands, and dance combos of all musical genres. MacDonald was a natural and within a few weeks he was the announcer and engineer on the show featuring arguably the most commercially successful fiddler of his day Winston Scotty Fitzgerald. There were two side musicians with the fiddler but MacDonald remembers the technical set up was very spare. Estwood Davidson was a left-handed guitar player and Winston was right handed so they could stand on either side of the microphone. Beattie (Wallace) was off to the side, maybe ten feet or so, on piano. They only used one mike and somehow they got a good balance. Photographs of Fitzgerald in the 1950 s show a dapper fellow, always in a fashionable, well-cut suit, with a pencil moustache and a twinkle in his eye. His music reflected his personal charm. Fitzgerald was a star. He was a wonderful guy. He was like an idol. He was good looking, everybody knew him. He was not, however, good with tune titles or scriptwriting. He would scratch out the show set list on the back of a cigarette package and hand it over to MacDonald to work some magic with language around the introductions. This task was made more difficult because the fiddler was not very good at remembering tune titles either. I was supposed to introduce Winston, the tunes and so on. He d say First will be a medley of fay-vor-rite jigs and the second would be a medley of fay-vor-rite reels (laughs) but it was always fay-vor-rite. In that year and a half with Fitzgerald, MacDonald would learn a great deal about presenting traditional Cape Breton music, live, on the radio to a general audience in a way that was popular and above all, entertaining. MacDonald s tenure at CJCB would be short lived. Having grown up in Sydney Mines, with his father a union man, he had connection to the United Mine Workers and was involved in trying to 26

27 unionize the workers at CJCB. He was fired in He went to Bathurst, New Brunswick as the radio morning man and developed outstanding skills as play-by-play hockey announcer. In 1965 when he came back to Nova Scotia he was hired by CJFX radio as a staff announcer, having a special interest in developing the sports department. For the first sixteen years Ray Mac was an enthusiastic promoter of local athletes. He was also one of the founders of the Antigonish Guysborough Rural Softball League and mentor and coach to a women s team that produced some fine athletes and at least one solid sports journalist. Softball is a comparatively inexpensive sport, which means it is accessible to a wide swath of the population and there were diamond and ballparks all over the region. MacDonald built up a formidable network with the people he met at those games which, as an on air host, helped him keep abreast of the happenings in each community. Community Conversation #2 Why is it important to have traditional music on the air? After the ruckus surrounding CBC s airing of the Vanishing Cape Breton Fiddler it is difficult to imagine why any broadcaster would engage the Island s traditional musical community in a debate over the value of the music but in the spring and summer of 1981 there was perception that CJFX was edging away from its commitment to traditional music by cancelling Scottish Strings. There are as many stories as to what transpired as there are people telling them, but all agree that a small community group, The Committee of Concern, formed to either to resist the change and/or to persuade CJFX to retain its Scottish music offerings. By this time Gus MacKinnon s health was such that he could no longer sustain the rigors of a daily program, but Ray Mac had an abiding passion for the music and the experience with Winston Scotty Fitzgerald s show on CJCB. 27

28 The result of the community campaign was a new program, Ceilidh, expanded from fifteen minutes to an hour in length which meant the host could delve deeper into the music and include a wider variety of styles, including some vocal tracks. Ceilidh proved to be as important to a new generation of Cape Breton musicians as Scottish Strings had been to those who fought to preserve the tradition in the early 1970s. MacDonald s interpretation of local radio was broader than Gus MacKinnon s had been. In addition to the immediate listening areas in Inverness, Antigonish and Guysborough counties, MacDonald included musicians from the whole of Cape Breton Island - Victoria, Richmond and Cape Breton Counties. Sheldon MacInnes heard the change almost at once. In Ray's music he took as much interest in this side as they say as Gus did in the other side. He reached out. He would talk about the fiddlers from this side, Dan Joe MacInnis and Paddy Scotty LeBlanc and so on and so forth. He talked about these fiddlers as much as he would about fiddlers from the other side. Ray Mac maintained his connection with musicians and his audience through an extensive network of contacts and associates all across the Island. By the 80s and certainly into the 90s there was so much going on musically on the Island it was impossible for one person to have first hand information about everything. He remembers deliberately seeking out conversations with fiddlers, pianists or respected teachers of the dance style who were always ready to share information about new musicians on the horizon or recording projects that were underway. He would also take his cue from listeners about where the music was being played, at general community gatherings, or special occasions such as anniversaries and birthdays. These events would warrant a mention on the show which was a way of tying the community together with 28

29 conversation about public and personal celebrations. He would always respond to letters from listeners with thoughtful, typewritten responses on station letterhead. Like Gus MacKinnon before him, MacDonald made ample use of homemade recordings of traditional music played at house parties, dances and concerts. These tapes, although not professionally recorded, were usually quite clear and perfectly acceptable for AM radio use. What was special about them was the unmistakable live energy in the music. Fiddlers who were rarely if ever professionally recorded were featured through these house recordings just as they were on MacKinnon s program. Again, people in the audience would tape these radio broadcast every night so they could enjoy the unique performance again. Some of the younger respondents in this study used these tapes to discern specific fiddler s techniques and to build their own repertoire. Ray Mac would often ask his on air guests about the unique characteristics they brought to the Cape Breton style. This created a depth to his interviewing style profoundly appreciated by a new generation of musicians who were gaining traction as professional recording artists in the 1980s and 90s. Howie MacDonald, a fiddler, producer and international touring musician, released several albums while Ray Mac was hosting Ceilidh. He was talking about the process of the album. Now some of these tunes, now where did this one come from? This reminds me of this fiddler, was he one of your influences? Now why did you go with guitar on this cut? And he always had these segues, waiting in the wings/ and stuff like that, He had these great little sayings when he was on the air and while he was interviewing. He was very supportive, says Cookie Rankin, a member of the Rankin Family. Even though the band experienced extraordinary success nationally - they sold half a million copies of Fare Thee Well Love - Rankin still felt the excitement of hearing her music on local radio. The first time I heard our music on CJFX I thought, my gosh, we ve made it. Because if the locals accept and promote 29

30 you, you know you ve done something right. It s their music. We are reflecting what they are and what we are, and they are accepting it. From the Fare Thee Well Love recording in 1990 to until he retired in 1998, Ray Mac would be the first to invite The Rankin Family into the studio to share their latest work. When he did, he offered himself as a proxy for the listeners as home. The interviews were very structured. He would go through each and every tune. Leave it up to you to explain its meaning or the inspiration behind it. But it was like the conversation you would have with an everyday person. The subtext of all the interviews with musicians about their recordings was that the musical tradition of the region was important to the community at large. The individual musician s contribution, in the form of a recording, was a public event, worthy of a thorough, serious discussion. Ray Mac MacDonald retired from CJFX Radio on his 65 th birthday, January 17, Ceilidh is still on the air and online for audiences outside the broadcast area, and there are still hundreds of homemade cassette tapes in circulation of his radio show on CJFX. CJFX Radio was born of the aspirations of the Antigonish Movement and the people who worked there saw themselves as part of a broader mission. Gus MacKinnon took his very first onair job in Edmonton at the station that pioneered radio as a tool of adult education. He came to CJFX understanding how radio could illuminate issues and spark action. If we look his work on both Scottish Strings and in the news and current affairs talk shows that he hosted, it is clear he was prepared to use that power for the benefit of the community. The Antigonish Movement s spiritual commitment to of the fundamental dignity and worth of the individual are evident even now in conversations with Ray Mac MacDonald. He believed in those ideals and telegraphed those values to his on-air guests and to the audience every day. One can argue that while the Antigonish Movement did not deliver on its promise of economic emancipation for the vast 30