Cape Breton as it was: keeping traditions alive in the 1990s

Winnipeg Free Press, Thursday, Dec. 27, 1990

By Douglas MacKay

SYDNEY, N.S. — Shortly after 9 p.m., people begin arriving at Father Greg MacLeod's second-storey apartment in a house on Sydney's waterfront. A ship parked at the wharf across the tree-lined street is so well lit that it illuminates the dock area and glitters through the apartment windows.

People have been invited for a "ceilidh" (KAY-lee), an evening of song and dance in MacLeod's living room. The rug is rolled up, chairs rearranged, and by 9:30 the place is swaying to the music of fiddlers, piano players, and singers. They play folk tunes, jigs, and "slow airs." Some wine and whisky are consumed, and some stories told.

By the end of the night, the 30-or-so people there — aged 20 to 70— have gone a long way toward preserving part of Cape Breton's unique, living culture. It is something North American mass media have been powerless to displace — as distinct and colorful as Quebec's or Newfoundland's.

"In Cape Breton, there's been a melding of minority cultures," says MacLeod. "The main pillars are Micmac, Scotch, Acadian …. They're all defeated peoples."

The priest disdains calling the music Scottish, or the fiddling "country." In fact, it is simply Cape Breton music, much of it written by the musicians there. They read and write music, and the best of them are recorded. "If you did a survey on the street, what are the top 10 fiddlers in Cape Breton, you'd find the results pretty consistent," he says. They're as well known as hockey players.

'Thousands of fiddle tunes'

On the Friday night in MacLeod's apartment, the first two fiddlers to play are both Micmac Indians: Wilfred Prosper and Dan Paul. Their technique is distinctive — "especially the bowing," says MacLeod — and the gathering loves it.

"It's very common, this, where people entertain themselves in each other's homes. They gather in homes, and people play the fiddle, and they sing songs. There are songs composed in Gaelic and songs composed in English …. We have the highest per capita composition rate in Canada — thousands of fiddle tunes and hundreds of songs."

The best fiddlers, singers, and piano players, once recorded, become household names. Dougie MacPhee, seated at Greg MacLeod's piano, has recorded several albums and is regarded at one of Cape Breton's top pianists. International star Rita MacNeil came out of this tradition.

Though they seem to form the core of it, there's more to Cape Breton culture than folk music and ceilidhs. It supports its own magazine, fiction to a degree (especially the writing of Alistair MacLeod), and lore. Even people's names come with a story.

One of the men playing guitar at Greg MacLeod's ceilidh is a retired typesetter with the Cape Breton Post, named Tick Butler. Butler's real first name is Trotsky. (His brother's name is Karl.) The names are a legacy from Cape Breton's ultra-strong labor union movement in the coal and steel industries in the 1920s. As if to show the importance of tradition, Trotsky Butler (himself no revolutionary) named his son Lenin. Len Butler. Honest.

Christmas Island

Then there are the accents, which vary subtly from place to place. Greg MacLeod tells a story about meeting a man in Germany with the Canadian Armed Forces. They talked a bit, and learned both were from Cape Breton. The man asked where MacLeod was from, and the priest said, "Sydney Mines."

"No, you're not," said the man, gauging MacLeod's accent. "You're from Christmas Island."

"And in fact," says MacLeod, "some of the people on my mother's side are from Christmas Island."

Greg MacLeod's apartment on the second storey of this waterfront house in Sydney, N.S.

What feeds and protects Cape Breton culture? MacLeod credits the tribal nature of Scottish and Micmac heritage, but also the fact that 85 per cent of Cape Bretoners are fifth or sixth generation.

"Isolation helps. Cape Breton has had adversity, unemployment, and all kinds of problems over the years, and it just seems adversity gets people to stick together. We have tremendous stability."

As well, there is the allure of the culture itself. "I've known fiddlers who have moved away from here, and they stopped playing. They say they just don't feel like playing. You've got to have people around you who know and appreciate the music," MacLeod says.

A beautiful place

Nor is the music and culture of Cape Breton in any evident danger of dying out. Teenagers play the music heard at ceilidhs. Young people read and revel in the short stories of Alistair MacLeod. There are people who still speak Gaelic. Trotsky Butler gives way to Lenin Butler.

For some of this, Greg MacLeod credits the CBC (even as he laments recent cutbacks) for keeping the music on the air and available. As well, the University College of Cape Breton, where MacLeod teaches, helps to legitimize and preserve folk culture.

And of course, there is the land. Cape Breton Island is simply a beautiful place, always drawing its people home. If Nova Scotia on the map is shaped like a lobster, Cape Breton is its claws. The island is separated from the rest of the province by the Strait of Canso, bridged in 1955 by a causeway.

The island has several distinct areas. The Cabot Trail, winding through the northern highlands, takes a traveler past mountain vistas unequaled anywhere east of the Rockies. There is the central Bras d'Or Lake, summer home of Alexander Graham Bell, and the arcadian Margaree Valley to the west of it.

"Industrial Cape Breton," a euphemism for the steel and coal mining areas around Sydney in the north, smudges Cape Breton's magnificent landscape. But it has fueled an economy that enabled Cape Bretoners to stay on the island and support themselves. Seventy per cent of Cape Breton's 170,000 population lives there. In its heyday, the steel and coal business, then run by Dominion Iron and Steel Company, employed thousands of people. Today, employment has fallen to a mere 700 at Sydney Steel Corporation, and a couple of thousand miners.

A rough pride

Still, it continues to foster a rough pride. Lying on a beach in early August, a character in one of author Alistair MacLeod's short stories says, "We are perhaps the best crew of shaft and development miners in the world, and we were due in South Africa on the seventh of July."

The price paid for this in sickness, injury, and human lives has been tremendous. A drive north of Sydney, past the carcinogenic tar ponds where industrial waste was poured for decades, to Whitney Pier is all it takes to see what has been done. The clapboard houses of poor families, some of whom emigrated a generation ago from eastern Europe, exist hard against the blackened hell of abandoned coke oven stacks.

It is a scene recalling a John Steinbeck novel, an impoverished time capsule from the days of company towns, company stores, and brutal union-busting.

Yet seeing it all whole — the culture, the countryside, the social assistance, the sense of community — you can almost forgive Senator Allan J. MacEachen for all the millions of dollars he was able to funnel into Cape Breton during his years as one of its MPs.

As a friend said, leaning across to me at MacLeod's ceilidh, “I don't know about you, but I feel quite privileged to be here."

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