Canada's Music: Two Rising Stars to Discover

Two Canadian musicians in their twenties who draw on Celtic tradition while bringing in their own interests and experiences…

Image by Stephen Cruickshank from Pixabay

Morgan Toney is a fiddler, singer, and songwriter. A member of Wagmatcook First Nation, he grew up singing traditional songs of the Mi’kmaq people, accompany himself on the drum. In his teens, Morgan took up the fiddle. He found two separate audiences for his music performances: one for traditional song, a different one for fiddle music. While he was at Cape Breton University studying music, he thought: what if I put the two together? What is I tried playing fiddle music with traditipnal song? He did that. It worked, for Morgan as a creator and performer, and for those who came to hear him, both First Nations audiences and other.

Morgan’s mother had often had Cape Breton music playing – Buddy MacMaster, Natalie MacMaster, Ashley MacIsaac, and others like those top class players. That’s the kind of fiddle music Morgan drew on when he began playing the fiddle and when he began connecting fiddle playing with Mi'kmaq song.

With his friend Keith Mullins, a multi intrumentalist and producer, he worked on tradtional songs and worked on writing his own as well. They created a music that they call Mi’kmaltic.

Morgan has won two Juno awards so far, and gaiend other recognitions for his ideas in music, and his ideas about connections among communites, Indigenous and beyond.

There's connection to Cape Breton in the life and music of Mary Frances, too. She grew up in Ontarion, though, where she was exposed to and learned Scottish, Irish, Cape Breton, and Ontario fiddle and and folk music.

That came naturally, you could say: her paretns are Natali MacMaster and Donnell Leahy, both award winninf fiddle players who make their livings with their music.

It hasn't been expected for the kids to perform or join their parents on stage while growing up, but they have-- because they wanted to. Donnell has made a sports analogy, saying that as in sports, with music you practice and you practice and then you want to get into the game. Performing on stage, for an audience, finding out what that's like, is getting into the game in music.

It's not expected that Natalie and Donnell's children (Mary Frances is the eldest of seven) will choose music as a profession. It's just part of their family life, and of their education.

Mary Frances, thought, has decided on music as her profession. She comes to that with that performing experience, more than six hundred show, she estimates, with her parents and a spart of the family band with ther sibings, esepecially at their Christmas season cocnerts. She also knows the ups and downs of touring, and has kad a good bit of expereince recording too.

Mary Frances used her time during the pandemic tp focus on writing music, and also learning about recording, as her parents decided to build a recording studio at their home so they could coninute their own work.

Mary Frances is grounded in the Cape Breton and Celtic music styles she knows well. She has also found other influences drawing her in especially Latin and jazz, and at time other strands that have crossed her path as she and her parents and siblings have traveled and met other styles of music.

Mary Frances has released one album thus far, of all original fiddle music.

You may als like to see

A story about Natalie and Donnell's album Canvas, which include two tunes written by Mary Frances and some of her playing as well

Another fiddle player whose work you will wante to know Hanneke Cassel That link take you to a story about an earlier album of Hanneke's, and here's a piece about a more recent one

Thank you for being here

To support my work, here's a way to chip in at Paypal

I invite you to check out and subscribe to my newsletter at SubStack, Along the Music Road. Related but different stories about music the people who make it, and the places which inspire it.