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Cape Breton mourns the loss of fiddle great Buddy MacMaster

by Frank Macdonald

A silence, sadder that the slowest slow air, followed last Wednesday’s news that Buddy MacMaster has died. 

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.

Long before dancers and audiences discovered the gift among us who was Buddy MacMaster, it was Buddy’s gift to discover within himself. Among his first words was an infusion of tunes from hearing his mother, Sarah Agnes, jigging.

Born in Timmons, Ontario, Buddy was christened Hugh Allan MacMaster, the child of Cape Breton parents living and working in that north Ontario town.  His father, John Duncan, was a miner who eventually moved his family back to the island while he continued to travel for work. 

It was during one of those absences when the boy was eleven that Buddy discovered his father’s fiddle. 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. 

Buddy’s was a talent that flourished under the influences of Dan R. MacDonald, Hughie MacEachern, Bill Lamey, Angus Chisholm, Angus Allan Gillis, Sandy MacLean, Dan J. Campbell. and other great island musicians. It also flourished during a time through the 1930s, ‘40s, ‘50s. and ‘60s when a fiddler’s reward was more often applause and appreciation than cash. 

Buddy 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. Fellow workers along the line recall Buddy playing them an end-of-shift set of tunes before they would go home. 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.

When he was transferred from Antigonish to the station in Mabou, Buddy’s playing at square dances grew more frequent. 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. I played every night, every Saturday night in the Labour Temple Hall in Inverness,” he once explained in an interview.

During 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. He made national appearances on CBC’s Ceilidh and The John Allan Cameron Show. There were opportunities to visit Scotland, West Virginia. and California. Whether the modest musician was aware of it or not, these diverse invitations provided a hint of the coming demands for his music.

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.” 

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. 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.

He was a person whose generosity wasn’t restricted to his music. 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 served with the Judique Volunteer Fire Department and was a member of the Knights of Columbus. 

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.

Fortunately for Cape Breton and the world at large, Buddy MacMaster’s career was not winding down with retirement.

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. As did the Barra MacNeils, Natalie MacMaster, Ashley MacIsaac, and a great wave of island musicians and songwriter/singers. They toured international stages and few fiddlers if any failed to mention the mentorship of Buddy MacMaster, a name earning international acclaim. 

It was an acclaim earned not only by word of mouth, but by the man’s own performances.

In 1989, a year after retiring, Buddy MacMaster finally agreed to make his first recording, Judique on the Floor, followed two years later by Glencoe Hall. He became the subject of a documentary by Peter Murphy, The Master of the Cape Breton Fiddle, Buddy MacMaster. He was also granted an honouary degree from St.  Francis Xavier University “in recognition not only of a superior musician, but also a style of music with very ancient origins.”

Other stages beckoned, including a number of appearances at New York’s Carnegie Hall as a guest of celebrated New York/St. Rose composer, Phillip Glass.

More acknowledgments would come. He was awarded the Order of Canada in 2000, and the Order of Nova Scotia. The music industry acknowledged his musical brilliance when he was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award by East Coast Music Association.

During funeral services for Buddy MacMaster, St. Andrew’s Church in Judique was overflowing, with the mass being carried to those gathered in the Judique Community Hall. Fr. Allan MacMillan, parish priest, officiated, with a dozen priests present, all friends and/or fans of the musician. It was a service that focused on Beatitudes, a passage Fr. MacMillan read as one “that consolidates everything Jesus was teaching all those years.”

The priest equated Buddy MacMaster’s gentleness to those Biblical teachings: “When we think of Buddy we think of gentle.”

Fr. MacMillan’s homily pointed out that although Buddy was publically known for his gentleness and generosity, “very few people are aware of all whom he (quietly) comforted, the suffering, the ignored, the shunned. They would be comforted by him,” the priest said, giving a glimpse into the Christian spirit that governed Buddy MacMaster’s life.

To a fiddle selection of tunes played by Kinnon and Betty Beaton, Andrea Beaton, Natalie MacMaster, and Dave MacIsaac, Buddy MacMaster’s coffin was carried from the church by five nephews and a son-in-law, the hearse then led by pipers (several from the Gaelic College) to the nearby grave in St. Andrew’s Cemetery where Buddy MacMaster was laid to rest.

Hugh Allan “Buddy” MacMaster is survived by his wife Marie (Beaton); children Mary Elizabeth (Trevor MacInnis) and Allan Gerard; and grandchildren, Sarah, Elizabeth, Annie, and Mary Catherine. He was predeceased by his sister Kathleen (Cyril) Beaton and his brother Jerome (Irene Kolenic); survived by siblings Jeanie (Bruz Brennan), Genevieve (Joe Whelan), Lorraine (Jackie MacDonnell), Alex (Minnie Beaton), and Betty Lou (Kinnon Beaton).

 


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