THE MUSIC OF THE VALLEY BOB KING


The good ol’ days By JIM HURCOMB From an historical perspective, country


music is, at its’ heart, a style of storytelling. Listening to the radio today, those stories might all be about pickup trucks, drinking beer and girls in cut-off jeans, but in simpler times country music spoke about deeper relationships, with people and the land on which you were born. Those basics shape the story of the music of the Ottawa Valley. There are three men who are pivotal to


this story. The first two were musicians, the other, a radio owner who brought the music of the Valley to the big city. The only reason Mac Beattie wasn’t the


first person inducted into the Ottawa Valley Country Music Hall of Fame in 1981 was because he insisted his fiddle player Reg Hill deserved the honour more. So Mac was second. Mac and his band the Ottawa Valley


44 BOUNDER MAGAZINE


Melodiers, with featured vocalist Orval Prophet, started their run in the Valley just


after World War 2. They sang songs about the Valley, its’ history and colourful characters, and would become the area’s first multi- media music stars. More about that later. Joe Brown was nicknamed “Papa”, partly


because of his teddy-bear physique, and partly due to his large family, who on their own would become international stars. Joe was a founding member of a group called The Happy Wanderers, which would morph into The Family Brown in the 70s. Mac and Joe were two of the many


musicians who sang their tunes up and down the Valley in the 50s, but it was their association with a man named Frank Ryan that brought their music to the city. Frank Ryan was born in Arnprior, and


fell in love with radio in the 1920s. He was involved on many levels in the business up until he was granted a license for a new radio in Ottawa in 1945. It was called CFRA, with the “F” and the “R” standing for Frank Ryan.


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