“August 12 1985,” she started, “went to Tokyo [for the expo]. Spent all day going from one place to the other. It’s some beautiful place to see. It’s different to any of our cities or any other city I have seen. The train runs overhead; all the tracks are overhead ... August 14, 1985: 19,000 people passed by us when we were on stage playing.”
As for the demise of the music festival two years ago, Hoddinott said she would like to see the community rally together once more.
“I think it’s important that he is remembered and I think a music festival in his name should be held here in Hawkes Bay,” she said.
While the musical festival may be no more, his music continues to live on through musicians like Russell Kelly who, as a fellow fiddler, crossed paths with Guincahrd in the late 1970s.
Kelly, who performed with Guinchard for more than a decade, said his legacy was the “wonderful repertoire of unique Newfoundland music.”
“As a man, Rufus was that breed of Newfoundlander that they don’t make any more. He came from a time when Newfoundlanders worked hard, played hard. It was a whole different life back then,” Kelly said.
“As a fiddle player he was completely unique and he was a great source of musical knowledge and heritage being that he was born in 1899 and because he learnt music from his grandfather and great uncles.
“A fiddle tune is not just a fiddle tune, a lot of tunes that Rufus played, you wouldn’t find anywhere else. They were not in the repertoire of Irish musicians, Scottish or Cape Breton. He had tunes that were unique to his local area. And he was one of the last people to play that kind of music, a lot of others had given it up.”
Kelly said Guinchard was a living library — his and many of his ilk’s work was based in an aural tradition, with very little written down.
“I am thankful he lived to when he did because if he had died in his 70s all of that knowledge, that heritage, would have been lost forever,” he said.
“The first tape recording of Rufus was in 1975 or so, prior to that there was no record of it and we should be thankful that he kept playing the fiddle because a lot of people gave it up. He refused to quit.”
“There are hundreds of Cape Breton fiddlers and Irish fiddlers but Rufus wasn’t like any of them, he stood apart, he was different in his style, his repertoire, who he was as a man, his accent, where he was from, his outlook on life.”
Memorial University folklorist Anita Best, who met Guinchard in the ‘70s, said his tunes were unique because of the way he thought about music.
“You have to remember that fiddle music and accordion music in Newfoundland was played for dances, to accompany dancing, so dancing could happen. Instrumental music was not for any other purpose. That’s what defined his music; the dancing was the important thing,” she said.
“His legacy is the fact he showed a whole new generation of Newfoundlanders the tunes he had learned and composed himself.”
Kelly, who learnt those traditional songs from Rufus and eventually wrote them down for posterity, says he still plays Guinchard’s music.
“What Rufus played was pretty much an exact reproduction of the original tunes he learnt but every now and again he would add a few things, quick notes to dress up a tune, but, for the most part because the opportunity to hear music from other places was few and far between in those days, he wasn’t influenced by other styles in the same way modern musicians are,” he said.
“He was very important for Newfoundland music."
jgraney@northernpen.ca
.jpg)
