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Spinner, Artist Feature >>
Eastern Canada's Prince Edward Island is generally known internationally for three things: 1) as the setting for native daughter L.M. Montgomery's enduringly popular 'Anne of Green Gables' books; 2) as the source for some of the tastiest mussels gracing menus all ovr; and 3) and as -- along with neighboring Nova Scotia -- a place that all the French Acadians, the descendents of the original 17th-century colonists, left when the English and Scots booted them out 250 years ago, many migrating to Louisiana where they became known as the Cajuns.
About that last one ... Not all the Acadians left. The two musicians who make up PEI-based folk duo Chuck and Albert know of a couple descendants from the original Acadians who are still there: Chuck & Albert.
It's that lineage that the pair celebrates on their new album, 'Énergie.' Energetic it is -- C&E are known for their upbeat, playful and even comic approach to folk traditions. But with this collection there's a commitment to the cultural roots. One song, 'À la Claire Fontaine,' is traced back 400 years, arriving in North America with the original Acadians:
Chuck and Albert: 'À la Claire Fontaine'
Now, a little background: The Acadian presence on PEI is hardly limited to these two musicians. But even amid the sparse populace -- less than 140,000 spread across the isle, 175 miles from tip to tip -- it can get a bit lost amid the dominant Anglo-Celtic and latter-day French roots, the hordes of 'Anne'-devoted Japanese tourists in their souvenir hats with red braids and the major distraction of lobster suppers held in civic halls and church basements all over the isle. (Yes, we experienced all that on a delightful early-'90s jaunt.) In fact, a 2001 census found just 3,020 Prince Edwardians, 2.26 percent of the population, claiming true Acadian heritage.
An illustration of the compactness of the Acadian presence can be found in the names. Chuck and Albert both have the last name Arsenault, though they don't believe they're related -- or if they are, then only distantly. They learned most of the old songs from the archives of folklorist Georges Arsenault, to whom neither believes he is related, or at least not closely. Albert got into music via his fiddling father, Eddy, to whom, well, he is related. Understandably, we'll be on a first-name basis in this story.
Despite those familial-nominal bonds, though, traditions were being lost.
"There was an amalgamation of schools that happened," says Chuck, as the two spoke from the Toronto airport on their way to Moose Jaw to start a two-week Saskatchewan tour. "There are seven thriving Acadian communities on the island, but through the amalgamation of schools in the bigger centers of some communities, the education wasn't offered in French anymore. So a generation or two started speaking English to their kids. I'm one of those. My dad was a French teacher, but we spoke English at home. It was not out of malice against the French, but we were in an English town."
That's a contrast to what happened with the Cajun cousins in Louisiana, where kids would suffer beatings for speaking French in schools as recently as a couple generations ago. But gentler as it was, a process of assimilation distanced the descendants from their roots.
"All this music is brand-new to me," Chuck says.
Much of it might not have been around at all had it not been for the efforts of Georges Arsenault. In the '70s, he realized the music was in danger of fading out within a generation and set about to preserve it, recording mostly older women just singing ditties that had been part of daily life passed down via an almost entirely oral tradition -- work songs, social songs, song of love and loss, as well as various non-musical stories, jokes and anecdotes. Georges had turned all this over to a library in the provincial capital, Charlottetown, and with the duo's urging a digitization project was done.
In a "be careful what you wish for" situation, Chuck and Albert found themselves faced with no less than 2,000 MP3s. A full 1,200 of them were songs or song fragments -- and they listened to every one, whittling them down to a relative handful from which to shape this album. It's not that they were unaware of the richness of the Acadian music traditions: They'd been drawing on it in their nine years as part of the band Barachois. But this was more than they'd bargained for.
"Eventually, we had a choice of about 100 songs that we thought were interesting to us," Chuck says. "The music survived because it's good and there's something inherently catchy about these melodies. We were always surprised when we listened to them in their bare form, with just [tapping] feet as accompaniment, that they caught our ears."
The very existence of these songs, Chuck and Albert say, is testimony to the strength of the Acadian community.
"It's almost mind-boggling to think all these songs would survive without being written down, mostly sung by women in the kitchen," Albert says. "If I, say, had a repertoire or a hundred songs I never wrote down and just sang them and my children heard them and a hundred years from now someone else would have that same repertoire -- that's amazing."
Chuck attributes it to the nature of the setting.
"It's fortunate," he says. "Since our island is an island, there was more opportunity to have that music sheltered, less influences from the outside. The Scots and Irish that came over would have their own repertoires, as well -- lots of pockets where cultures have survived unscathed. It was great work for Georges to preserve this culture in a real snapshot. Gives us a real opportunity to have a context. People want to be entertained, yes, but they want some meat to their entertainment."
Does the meat fit on the menu of a PEI lobster dinner today?
"That's a really good question," says Chuck, pausing for thought.
"Just throwing this out," Albert interjects, "but maybe one of the reasons these old songs had gone to the wayside is maybe they don't relate to modern society that much anymore."
That jolted Chuck out of his pensiveness.
"I'm going to contradict him and say they do," he says. "In the sense that you're talking about somebody like in 'Le Fiévre,' a song of a lumberjack going to work in the woods and it's Christmastime and he gets sick and is on his deathbed, longing, being away from home, desiring to be with his family in his last days. That's relevant."
Chuck and Albert, 'Le Fiévre'
"And 'À la Claire Fontaine,' though from 400 years ago, talks about a guy who loses his girl. That happens today. The reason I don't think they've been sung as much is because there has been more flashier influences of entertainment that's able to grasp people's attention."
And as such, Chuck & Albert make sure there's a lot of entertainment to the meat. No surprise there. The two have built a reputation in Canada as almost a folk-comedy act, a little wacky in persona and approach, whether using a suitcase, pie plate and popcorn shaker for percussion or tossing in bits of 'Turkey in the Straw' and 'Jarabe Tapatio' (you know, the so-called 'Mexican Hat Dance') into songs, as they do on the album -- the latter showing up in a tune known as 'Paté Chinois' (translated here as the non-ethnic 'Shepherd's Pie').
"We're really excited about the old songs," says Albert. "But the challenge is still for us to get the people, everyday people, singing them again, listen to them again today."
"And," Chuck continues, "to just have some enjoyment. That's what they're there for. The songs were created in hard times. They were there to help people get through things and celebrate things. Both are relevant."
By the way, both Chuck and Albert have followed the paths of many of their Acadian predecessors and made the migration to Louisiana. Chuck spent a year teaching there and Albert worked on some music projects in Cajun country. It was a bit of an alternate universe for them -- familiar but not.
"There's probably less of a bond musically than with the people," says Albert of his impressions. "Really, they have their own repertoire down there and their music is influenced by other cultures than we were influenced by."
Indeed, the Cajuns' music absorbed Creole rhythms, Delta blues, German polkas and ultimately the Western swing and country music that grew in popularity in the American South. But, as on PEI, there has been an oral musical continuation, also documented in concurrent recordings and recently released on 'Women's Home Music' and 'La Musique de la Maison,' two collections drawn from the Archives of Cajun and Creole Folklore at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. And guess what?
Says Chuck, "They sing 'À la Claire Fontaine,' too -- the oldest French song we know." 11/17/09 >> go there
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