Ghost Music

[Ghetta Life]

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20060715.wfiddle15/BNStory/Entertainment/home

INVERNESS, N.S. — Thirty years ago, fiddler John MacDougall thought he was 
going crazy. Onstage at a concert in Broad Cove, N.S., strange music 
suddenly drowned out his own fiddle playing.

Yet no one else was visible onstage, nor could anyone hear the mysterious 
tunes. Frustrated and confused, MacDougall packed up his fiddle and exited 
stage left. Still, the music followed him home. 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.

“They started coming so fast I could hardly write them down,” MacDougall now 
muses as he sits among his collection of eight fiddles that are 
strategically place around the room for easy access. One is on his 
living-room couch, and his favourite, a “sweet” 300-year-old instrument with 
a repaired bullet hole, occupies pride of place on the kitchen table.

All these years later, the white-haired, but still energetic musician 
continues to entertain those ghostly visitations, but the pace has slowed.

Holed up in his trailer in Inverness, Cape Breton, the 81-year-old master 
fiddler pens 10 to 15 tunes a day, often hunched over his kitchen table. By 
his own count — and he keeps a daily tally on small sheets of paper — he has 
produced 33,300 compositions, but he still balks at publishing them, saying 
he hasn't yet reached his personal goal of 35,000.

Yet MacDougall insists he's not creating art; he's simply recording history.

“It's from the people who lived here before ... they could make [songs], but 
they couldn't write them,” he says.

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