Mongrel Music

Winter has finally come to Cape Breton. For weeks I've bundled myself up in anticipation of the cold, only to step out into warm ocean breezes that have effectively kept the frost off my windshield and my boots in the closet. Sunday evening we had our first flurries of snow. I watched them fall to the ground and into the outstretched arms of the pine trees near Goose Cove and St. Ann's bay. By this time it was already almost ten, and my friends and I are just pulling up into the dirt driveway of Otis Tomas' home in the mountains.

I've met many Cape Bretoner's whose families came over during the Highland clearances and never left. Their children grew up listening to the music of the old country, their voices still carry a Gaelic inflection, and their "people" can be traced through the father's line back to the original settlers who came from Barra and Lewis to the shores of Iona. There are many ways to be of the island, and although these Scottish chain migrants often receive the most attention, people like Otis, and many of the other artists and musicians from "away," embody to me, what is most captivating about Cape Breton as effectively as the Beatons and the Rankins.

There's a small, but thriving artist's community in the village of St. Anne's. A haven for luthier's, potters, tune-writer's, and various other social derelicts. No one seems to know when exactly Otis came to Cape Breton or why. I do know that he is originally from Rhode Island. Shortly after graduating from high school, he spent a year in the Blue Ridge mountains and picked up the fiddle. Watching him play tonight, I can see the old-time swing in this bowing arm, the bounce that he more than likely acquired during that first impressionable year of learning. To me, it's as familiar and refreshing as a glass of lemonade on a hot day, it conjures up memories of summer, of old-time tunes on the porch, and my own first year of learning.

Otis and his wife Deena live in a house they built themselves. He has a long grey beard, a mane of silver hair, and an easy smile. In the workshop out back, his fiddles gleam softly in a smeared glass cupboard near the front entrance. He brings the grain of the wood to life in a way I've never seen before, knot-work lovely decorates the scrolls and ink carvings grace the back wood pieces. I realize that I've never before thought of instruments as pieces of artwork in themselves, and that there's more to this whole process than strictly the art of music-making. Art has come to settle here. A dusty old piano leans against the back wall with photographs of long-dead local musicians atop its cabinet. There's a wood stove with the image of two men collecting firewood carved into its door, and a chain of quarters hanging from the magnetic surface of its pipe like some kind of avant-garde Christmas tinsel.

Otis shows us the fiddle he's working on now for a Japanese man who has fallen in love with Cape Breton music, and wants his instrument to be comprised strictly of trees native to the island. Perhaps, in a few years, he too will make his way to the island and build a home amidst the people that inherited this music and the woods that give it voice.

Eventually we pass around the wine in some of Deena's goblets and take out our instruments. Otis has become one of Cape Breton's most popular composers. Ask him what kind of music he plays and he'll tell you, it's a "mongrel" mix, he prefers not to rigidly adhere to a tradition, but to move fluidly between them, picking up the best from each and melding it into a sound as unique and carefully crafted as his instruments. His most well known session tune, is in fact, called, "The Mongrel," a swigin' G minor reel that moves about the neck as erratically as its namesake might. The names of his tunes, more often than not, are just as interesting and as unorthodox as their sound. He plays us, "Harem Skarem, The Silver Finger," and finally, "The New Land," named after the plot of ground that would later become his Cape Breton home.

I marvel at home lucky I am to be hearing the composer of these tunes tell us the story behind their names, in his shop in the mountains of St. Ann's while the snow falls silently outside the windows. I've heard that Otis has a long waiting list for his instruments, but I've been dreaming of owning one of his guitars ever since I saw Paul MacDonald's own, with its open rose carved into the head. Otis has a guitar that he built for a customer a few years ago who never returned to claim it. Now, it gathers dust in a satin-line case at the back of his shop. It's small, easy to play, and shockingly beautiful. I'm sure that it was carved specifically to rest on my lap. Curly maple circles the sound hole, up the neck, squares of rosewood adorn the fingerboard in an extended checkerboard pattern, and the pick guard is unpolished, retaining the texture of its grainy ash.

When we finally leave after midnight, I beg Otis not to advertise the guitar and he agrees. On the way home I think of all the song and stories that lie must waiting in its hollow body for someone's voice to give them a name, waiting for someone to give them a life that, in the end, will prove to be more enduring than that of their creator's.