DELMER & CECIL DELMER AND CECIL Musical memories from The Valley
Music, music, music! Cecil here. Seeing as this is the big
Bounder music issue, I decided to jump in feet first. I come from a musical family. My
mother, father and grandmother were all great singers, and singing was always present in our house. My earliest recollections are of my
mother singing to me at night as I lay in my bed. She sang the old songs that had been passed down through the years, and I thought no-one could sing any finer. My father was another kettle of fish. He had been orphaned when he
was very young and was passed around from family member to family member (nobody wanted another mouth to feed back then), so he took off and rode the rails when he was 14. During this time he learned all the songs of the road, such as: “Can I Sleep In Your Barn Tonight, Mister?” and “Hobo
Bill’s Last Ride”. When I was small, we
were very poor, but we entertained ourselves by singing and listening to an old wind-up Victrola
record player . We had a stack of
78 rpm records with artists like “Roy Acuff”, Hank Williams” “Hank Snow” and “Jimmy Rogers” (the
granddaddy of them all). Then we moved from the
country to the city. One evening at my first school dance, my life changed completely. The dance was held in the school gym, and when I walked in, there they
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were: a rock and roll band made up of black guys from a US base nearby. They had baggy suits and they played guitar, sax, doghouse bass, piano and drums. Just as I walked in, they blasted
into “Jenny, Jenny Jenny”, the Little Richard classic. They did the moves and everything. I was gobsmacked. This was the
first time I’d ever heard live music, and I was hooked. The love affair with music continues to this day. In the early 60s we went through what
I call “The Great Folk Scare”. Groups like “The Kingston Trio” and “Peter Paul and Mary” were all the rage. This ignited an urge in me to find out what the real music of the country was, so I did a little digging. There is no doubt that the national
instrument of the Ottawa Valley − in fact, the whole country of Canada − is the fiddle. (I’m often asked the difference between a fiddle and violin. The answer is: Nothing. It’s just the way they’re played.) Every farmhouse in the country
usually has a fiddle somewhere, and many were brought over from the old country. About 80 per cent of them say “Stradivarius”, but they’re not. Not even close. Most are poor-quality bottom-rung fiddles. Let’s face it. Most of the Irish and Scots were desperately poor and couldn’t afford much. There are many alive today who will
remember parties at farmhouses up the line where the rugs were rolled back and the fiddler would start up and everyone would dance for hours. Then the music would stop and sandwiches and tea were served. (Some of the lads would nip outside for something stronger.) At the end of the night, people would
bundle out to the sleigh or car (or shank’s mare) and head home. Some of the boys
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