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33,000 tunes ‘from the Other Side’
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NOVA SCOTIA, CANADA. However you look at the achievement of John MacDougall, an 81-year-old fiddler on Cape Breton island, you have to be impressed.
Either he’s a musical genius or a musical medium, and both explanations set him apart from his fellow fiddlers on one of the most beautiful islands on the planet. Fiddle music was brought to North America by Scottish immigrants, mainly from Gaelic-speaking regions, who were displaced by the “Highland Clearances” of the 18th century.
Since then, fiddling in Scotland has changed considerably. But it is widely held that the tradition of fiddle music has been better preserved in Cape Breton.
 That may be so, but modern influences were inevitably beginning to overshadow the centuries-old music – until one eventful night 30 years ago when John MacDougall was on stage at a concert in Broad Cove.
Suddenly, strange music began to drown out his own fiddle playing, despite the fact that he was alone on stage and no one else could hear it. Confused, he put away his fiddle and left the stage – but the music followed him home.
The remarkable story of what happened next was recently told by Karen Mazurkewich in Toronto’s “Globe and Mail” (15 July 2006):
“He couldn’t see those musical apparitions, but he could clearly hear the notes wafting from the ceiling of his cramped trailer that night. Perched on the edge of his bed, he resolved to document them for all time. That feverish night, he scored 65 tunes before finally collapsing.”
MacDougall recalls that they came so fast he could hardly write them down. To this day he has continued recording the tunes he hears, at a rate of between 10 and 15 a day, and his daily tally shows that so far he has produced 33,300 compositions. None has been published yet – not until he achieves his goal of 35,000.
But the well-known fiddler, who is a regular performer on the Cape Breton music scene and whose playing can be heard on some of the compilation CDs made by the island’s entertainers, insists that he is not creating new music ... but recording history.
“It’s from the people who lived here before,” he explains. “They could make tunes, but they couldn’t write them…. These are the lost tunes. The dead want to get the music back.”
The “Globe and Mail” writer observes: “Whether you believe he is reproducing the tunes of his ancestors, or merely inspired by their memory, MacDougall’s growing catalogue of traditional Cape Breton fiddle music is a historic treasure.”
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Posted on Sunday, September 10, 2006
Category: Mediumship
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