The Ottawa Valley reveals its musical treasures

WATCH ABOVE: A preview for 16×9’s “The Land Where Music Lives.”

As dusk set in, the deer hunters gathered in a parking lot on the side of a highway, their trucks packed with guns, gear and their favourite musical instrument. Once everyone had arrived, the men drove deep into the woods of the Ottawa Valley, a rugged and wild land stretching between Eastern Ontario and Quebec, to a hunt camp where they share in a unique country music tradition.

Once he got the power generator going and the beer flowing, Guy Jamieson, a musician and owner of the century-old Black Donald Hunt Camp, pulled out his fiddle. His fellow hunters warmed up their instruments too, and soon the cool night air echoed with the lilting, folksy sound, as integral and old as some of the Valley’s frontier towns.

Early settlers to the Ottawa Valley found work in the logging industry, many spending months away from their families in isolated work camps. These early immigrants brought their musical traditions from Ireland and France. Their songs were diaries of the time, sung and traded a cappella at the end of a long work day.

While most of those songs have faded into obscurity, never recorded and long forgotten, there is one that has slipped from ear-to-mouth for generations. It’s a 13 verse epic called “Chapeau Boys”, written by Pat Gregg in 1893.

Click on the icons on the map to reveal the history of country music in the Ottawa Valley.

In the song Gregg tells about going off to log in the woods, life in the camp and his hope to survive all the disease and perils there, so he can return home to Chapeau to share some songs:

“When our drive it is over
I hope ’twill be soon
We expect to get done
By the last week of June.
If the Lord spares our lives
To go home in the spring
We will make the new hall
At the Chapeau to ring.”

Tweet This Click to share quote on Twitter: "When our drive it is over<br />I hope 'twill be soon<br />We expect to get done<br />By the last week of June.<br />If the Lord spares our lives<br />To go home in the spring<br />We will make the new hall<br />At the Chapeau to ring."

“The lumber camps were the great clearinghouse of songs,” says Sheldon Posen, a folklorist and historian at the Canadian Museum of History. In the 1970s Posen lived in the Ottawa Valley while he worked on a PhD thesis about the local music. Posen spent a year and a half in Chapeau, Quebec, which he described as, “One the last places in North America where the old time singing existed.”

One man, Brian Adam, grew up in Chapeau and has made it his mission to learn every word, note and breath of the “Chapeau Boys”. He says learning and keeping this music alive is “vital”. Adam, now in his late 60s, says his goal is to record some of the old songs so they don’t fade into history.

Brian Adam and hunter, Guy Jamieson are two of a passionate group of Ottawa Valley musicians, and music-lovers, who are doing everything they can to keep the tradition of the valley’s regional music alive. While there are regular jams at local legions, country jamborees and fiddle festivals drawing crowds from all over the valley, the musicians playing traditional valley music are getting on in years. Adams hopes the younger generation will take up his mission of keeping the music alive, telling 16×9, “I think I was pretty young when I realized that the song could die too if someone was not committed enough to preserve it and to make sure that it stayed alive even after the original singer passed on.”

16×9’s “The Land Where Music Lives” airs this Saturday at 7pm.