It was an acclaim earned not only by word of mouth, but by the man’s own performances. They toured international stages and few fiddlers if any failed to mention the mentorship of Buddy MacMaster, a name earning international acclaim. As did the Barra MacNeils, Natalie MacMaster, Ashley MacIsaac, and a great wave of island musicians and songwriter/singers. Something wonderful happened to Cape Breton music in the late 1980s, with The Rankin Family drawing international attention to themselves and the place they called home.
So perhaps, one may have thought, here is someone who can now rest, maybe play a few tunes, play with his grandchildren, and simply reap the rewards of a well-lived life.įortunately for Cape Breton and the world at large, Buddy MacMaster’s career was not winding down with retirement. He served with the Judique Volunteer Fire Department and was a member of the Knights of Columbus. As a resident of his community of Judique he served as a Councillor and Warden of Inverness County, was chair of the regional vocational school, the municipal school board, and served on various boards. He was a person whose generosity wasn’t restricted to his music.
NATALIE MACMASTER AND FRIENDS FULL
It had been, by all accounts, a full life, one filled with family, music, employment, and respect both as a musician and a man of profound Christian modesty. Throughout the years of playing and travelling, Buddy’s first commitment remained his family, his wife Marie, son Allan and daughter Mary Elizabeth and his position with the CNR, one he kept for 46 years before retiring. Never a man in a hurry, Buddy avoided recording his own music although several tape recordings in radio stations and private collections attest to the quality of Buddy’s playing through those decades a playing that contained what his niece, Natalie MacMaster, defines as a “sweetness.” Whether the modest musician was aware of it or not, these diverse invitations provided a hint of the coming demands for his music. There were opportunities to visit Scotland, West Virginia. He made national appearances on CBC’s Ceilidh and The John Allan Cameron Show. I played every night, every Saturday night in the Labour Temple Hall in Inverness,” he once explained in an interview.ĭuring the 1950s, there were opportunities to be invited to play in North American cities colonized by Cape Bretoners whose long roots still reached all the way home. Although he played his first dance in Troy in 1939 at age 15, it was a decade later, in 1949, “I really began playing a lot. When he was transferred from Antigonish to the station in Mabou, Buddy’s playing at square dances grew more frequent. He also found that working nights, the station was frequently quiet, opening opportunities for him to practice his fiddle, playing for himself or train-waiting passengers.
Fellow workers along the line recall Buddy playing them an end-of-shift set of tunes before they would go home. and ‘60s when a fiddler’s reward was more often applause and appreciation than cash.īuddy became a station master for CNR, a job he enjoyed and which allowed him to raise a family, but the fiddle was never far from the lunch can. It also flourished during a time through the 1930s, ‘40s, ‘50s. MacDonald, Hughie MacEachern, Bill Lamey, Angus Chisholm, Angus Allan Gillis, Sandy MacLean, Dan J. Out of that discovery, a willingness to listen, and to learn emerged one of Cape Breton’s great masters of the music that has, for centuries, helped feed the identity of who we are when we think of ourselves as Cape Bretoners.īuddy’s was a talent that flourished under the influences of Dan R.
It was during one of those absences when the boy was eleven that Buddy discovered his father’s fiddle. His father, John Duncan, was a miner who eventually moved his family back to the island while he continued to travel for work. Among his first words was an infusion of tunes from hearing his mother, Sarah Agnes, jigging.īorn in Timmons, Ontario, Buddy was christened Hugh Allan MacMaster, the child of Cape Breton parents living and working in that north Ontario town. Long before dancers and audiences discovered the gift among us who was Buddy MacMaster, it was Buddy’s gift to discover within himself. With his passing, Cape Breton Island had lost a much loved musical voice, a gentle man whose fiddle had brought dancers to their feet in parish and community halls for several decades, and whose talent was as at home at Carnegie Hall as in the Glencoe Station Hall. A silence, sadder that the slowest slow air, followed last Wednesday’s news that Buddy MacMaster has died.
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