A young man from Red Deer, Alta., is heading north this weekend to a massive competition now in its 40th year, and it’s not his first rodeo.
“I was six years old and I went to a show in Red Deer. It was Scott Woods. My grandparents had been dancing to his music for years out in Ontario,” Samuel Corry told the Calgary Eyeopener.
“Got home and I said, ‘Mom, I would like to play one of those.’ We got lessons after that, and we’ve been playing ever since.”
‘Really unique style’
Corry is a fiddler, and more specifically, an old-time fiddler.
“We kind of had a big influx from Ireland, Scotland, and that type of music came over to Canada, and then kind of mixed together with some of the French music, and then country music influenced it as well,” the 23-year-old said.
“We had this really unique style come out in our fiddle playing that I would say resulted in the old-time fiddle style.”
The director of the Grand North American Old Time Fiddle Championship in Fort Saskatchewan, Alta., says there’s a real easy way to tell if you’re striking the right chord.
“It’s dance music: waltzes, polkas, two-step and square dancing. It’s old-time, family get-together, party music,” Frank Grell told CBC News in a Friday phone interview.
“A true test of a really good fiddler is that people just want to get up and dance.”
For fiddler Corry, meanwhile, the competition is also about coming together.
“Usually there’s a little bit of a jam at the start. Everyone gets on stage and plays some tunes together. Then each person will play a waltz, a jig and a reel, and sometimes a tune of choice, depending on what category you are in,” he said.
“There’s a panel of judges marking you on things such as your cleanliness, your skill, your feel, if you are playing it well for dancing, your variations, tune choice, all that.”
Inspired by Scott Woods, Leahy family
Corry said his inspirations — Scott Woods, among others — have taken fiddling to the next level.
“I think he’s called the flipping fiddler because he has a trick where he does a somersault on stage while playing his fiddle and it is quite impressive,” Corry said.
“Then we’ve got the Leahy family, just an amazing fiddling family from out east. Erin Leahy has a trick-fiddling set and it just blows your mind. They do something called Ottawa Valley step dancing, and she will step dance while she plays her fiddle. If you think about the intricacies of how the fiddle works, to be moving up and down so much while dancing and to keep your bow still on the string, is quite impressive, for sure.”