It was one of those many occasions where a real and hard deadline could totally light a bonfire under my butt.
We pulled it off, in mere weeks, all while sitting at our phones in Dartmouth (everything was expensive long distance in those days - even calls between rural villages) while I inputted everything into a little Macintosh Plus computer via Microsoft Works -254 K of pure power - no bloatware there !
We then printed and bound out the suddenly massive directory ourselves and carted it off to the East Coast Music Awards (ECMA) annual meet - that year in Charlottetown.
I am not a musician, not even an amateur one, and only a would-be songwriter —- but armed with the directory I met anybody & everybody there - including some of my idols, such as Walt and Stan from Canada’s RPM music trade magazine.
(For I had earlier owned a tiny, tiny, recording studio-record company-publishing firm back when I was a kid and they had been supportive.)
The ECMA was hot that year because Celtic Folk was globally hot and Atlantic Canada was all about Celtic Folk.
Or was it ?
For I had got myself involved in the songwriters association and now its directory because (putting on my local historian’s hat here) I knew that the current emphasis on Victorian-Edwardian era folk tunes fiddled-out or accordioned-out in what people imagined were totally cut-off isolated backwoods back hill settlements or rocky outports was a load of codswallop.
I grew up on the Eastern Shore and had visited rural homes all across the region while political canvassing and I knew that all but the humblest of homes had a parlour back then - not a drawing room or salon, no, just a front room-sitting room humble parlour.
But a parlour nevertheless.
And the music played in those parlours was a potpourri, a medley, a Metis mixture : everything from harmonized classical music and opera “modalled-downwards” to modal folk tunes “harmonized upwards”.
Urban printed songsters, ultra cheap collections of about 100 songs for the price of one middle class song sheet, offering a simplified version of urban professionally composed tunes, were peddled door to door even in the most remote parts of the world.
Significantly even to Newfoundland outports and back in the hills of Inverness County Nova Scotia.
The rural musicians, in turn and in time, changed them even further and thirty years later they were recorded (and sold !) as “folk” artists performing “ancient” “orally-transmitted” “folk” tunes...
I could go on and on, parlour music being one of my special interests, but enough to say that, once again, others’ inane actions propelled me into action.
To paraphrase noted historian Ian Mckay, all this “Quest for the imaginary Maritime Celtic Folk” was really getting on my case - so I put myself down in the Directory as a writer of Parlour music - hoping and knowing it would raise laughter and hackles from my fellow songwriters.
I knew the word Parlour would evoke false memories , media-mediated memories, of over stuffed rooms redolent of camphor-scented hankies, tea dollies - anything and everything that was un-cool in the 1990s.
But I meant every word of it - for the only uniquely Canadian musical idiom that has ever emerged from Canada to find success onto the world stage has been an updated version of the Victorian-Edwardian parlour.
In that parlour was always a small square piano, played rhythmically but quietly in lady-like arpeggios, a parlour guitar, a cello perhaps (not a fiddle) , a simple wooden flute (today’s irish flute).
If you are a Curt Sachs sort of musicologist that is music produced by all of the music world’s four main food groups : by plucking, by bowing, by blowing and by percussive hammering (as in the piano, a form of hammered dulcimer, really.)
Vocal skills were much more common than instrumental skills back then - so there was always lots of loose turn-on-turn lead vocals, over simple but always straight forward melodic and rhythmic music.
The Bare Naked Ladies version of “Lovers in a Dangerous Times” is as good an example of a modern version of this ancient idiom as any. Blue Rodeo and many other group suggest it as well.
Its not a style you ever hear outside of Canada - Canadians sense that, foreigners know that.
Now don’t get me wrong : many Canadian artists have become world famous for being adept at playing other people’s musical idioms - listeners all over the globe truly love them but no one ever comes away thinking, ‘that’s so Canadian.”
But that ‘its not exactly folk and its not exactly pop and its not exactly old-timey country but rather a muddle of all of them’ : that, people recognize as typical of Canadian-Canadian groups — in both our official languages.
Now putting on my political science hat, there is a widely accepted theory that all countries culture congeals at a certain point in their history and from then on, all their new cultural doings are refracted through that point of congealment.
In Canada’s case - and so very different from our American neighbours - that point of congealment was probably around the 1890s not the 1780s.
Don’t know why : just was.
And Parlour fits that timeline to a T....
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