The Fiddle is Laughing

Here is a link to a CBC documentary featuring myself and my friend Gilles Losier. Together we play Irish, Scottish as well as Québécois trad music. Many of the tunes you will hear I learned from the playing of Ti-Jean Carignan - my idol. It will be on air on Sunday the 15th of September (tomorrow) on CBC as well as Sirius XM in the US. You can already listen to it online though. There is also a video of us playing that may be released by the CBC soon. I hope you enjoy it, and if you do, please spread the news. Also does anyone know where else I could share this link?
Anyway, here it is:
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/thesundayedition/the-fiddle-is-laughing-how-this-teen-and-83-year-old-keep-ti-jean-carignan-s-music-alive-1.5282342
P.S.: Please let me know, what you think of it.

Yeah, that’s a great doc - thanks for sharing! And congratulations. It’s wonderful that you and Gilles discovered each other.

You can post your link here: https://www.fiddlehangout.com/ - they’d like it.

So, Gilles Losier (I thought it was Lossier?) is an "old Acadian"? I remember when he was a "young" Acadian - what’s that make me?

Btw, don’t know how many would pick up on this: "I said to Ti-Jean, ‘I’m from down home.’ ‘Oh, great. I love the Acadians’, he said." ‘Down home’ is - or at least, was - Maritimers’ code for the Maritimes. Interesting that Gilles would have assumed Carignan would get it, and that Carignan did. I wonder if they were speaking in English or French, and what the French equivalent of ‘down home’ is?

Curious. Part of my family was from Nova Scotia, moving to Maine, where the reference to the Maritimes is ‘Down East’.

"Down East" isn’t quite as much of an in-group thing as ‘down home’ - for instance, if you said to anyone in Ontario that were going ‘down east’, they would know you meant the Maritimes, even if they didn’t use the term themselves - but if you said ‘down home’, they wouldn’t know where you meant, unless they were from ‘down home’ too. Of course, I don’t know how much either term is used anymore; everything is becoming homogenized.

Incidentally, in western Canada, anything east of Manitoba is ‘back east’.

I recommended it and posted the link to my Facebook page.

Great stuff, thanks for sharing that.

« I wonder if they were speaking in English or French, and what the French equivalent of ‘down home’ is? »

Having known Gilles Losier (lo-zee-EH) since shortly after I arrived in Montreal in late 1987 (and to my chagrin having missed meeting Carignan, who was terminally ill at the time), I would say it’s extremely unlikely that they would have spoken English to each other. Gilles would probably have told Carignan that he was an "Acadien" (which the former would have already deduced from his accent!).

Thanks for the link, Maxime - great playing! 🙂

And here’s a short "trailer" video:
https://www.facebook.com/radiocbc/videos/401950854069910/

‘Gilles would probably have told Carignan that he was an "Acadien"’ … but that’s not how he recounts it - again: "I said to Ti-Jean, ‘I’m from down home.’ ‘Oh, great. I love the Acadians’, he said."

Thanks a lot for your feedback, compliments and help. And yes, Gilles and Jean always spoke to each other in French, since this is their first language. It is useless to speculate about what Gilles told Jean, cause I’ve heard the story multiple times and every time Gilles told it to me in a somewhat different way. It doesn’t really matter.
PS.: I made a CD with Gilles, but we need to find a company to distribute it. Any advice?

Okay, I’m going to harp on about this a bit more not because it matters in the least - it doesn’t - but just because I feel like it. No need to read further. Anyway - I would have expected Jean and Gilles to generally speak French to each other - however, it seemed to me well within the realm of possibility that if their initial meeting was in an English-language context, their first few words to each other might have been in English; I have often experienced this phenomenon amongst bilingual persons, whereby they/we initially speak to each other in the common second-language rather than in the common first language, usually in a context in which the second-language is prevalent. However, the fact that Gilles doesn’t relate the dialogue consistently renders the matter moot; his words in the documentary illustrate only his own use of the term ‘down-home’, rather than any understanding Carignan may or may not have had of the term, or its French equivalent, if there is one.