By Mike Levin

During the next 30 days there are 42 Celtic-arts events in and around Ottawa, ranging from Celtic Thunder to a dozen musical jam sessions at pubs and cultural centres. There’s a Celtic dance version of Shakespeare called a MacSummer Night’s Dream, and for nostalgia fans, the Irish Rovers’ 40th anniversary special is here in December.

I know we’re all Celtic at heart, but no other cultural sector comes close to these numbers. It seems to have a lot to do with the 260, by my count, Celtic organizations in the Ottawa Valley and Outaouais regions, but there’s probably as many churches, and you don’t see many priests and reverends pull out a fiddle and make their parishioners cry.

There’s something bigger here, and I wanted to understand it. This led me to Kevin Dooley, which led to a history of the Celtic diaspora and a tale about Ashley MacIsaac that is too rude to recount here.

Kevin Dooley. Photo by Mike Levin.

His stories did start in the Iron Age, but like any born raconteur, he soon led me through the uniquely North American wonders of immigrant tribalism and interbreeding that has made this continent mix and match its cultures. As with most sources of creativity, it kicks off with poetry and music as oral history.

Dooley is an Ottawa author and musician (flute, tin whistle) who grew up poor, the eldest of 12 children in Mullingar, listening to the old women in his family tell stories in the way that traditional cultures have of maintaining living history. He wants you to understand that having the eye and the ear for artistic expression in Ireland wasn’t about elitism, the old pushing the young to use their talents to excel. It was about being responsible to tradition because you didn’t have much else.

Like classical music, Celtic music is one of those species that embraces dozens, perhaps hundreds, of styles – so many that it can be dangerous mistaking one genre for another, especially if you’re on your fourth pint at Daniel O’Connell’s Pub during a Ceili (party). The whole mishmash started back when the Celts and the Romans were trying to out-brutalize each other and grew into the traditional music of Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Brittany and the Galicia region of Spain.

Like any good dance music, it travelled well and has mutated into the familiar repertoire we know in Newfoundland, Cape Breton and the Ottawa Valley, among other spots: all fiddles, flutes and squeezeboxes. Apparently we can’t get enough of it around here, and not just those of us who can trace ancestors back to the Celtic diaspora.

In the United States it was the soundtrack for the factory slums of 19th Century New York, Philadelphia, Boston and Chicago, but in Canada it stayed rural because the jobs were outside the cities – fishing, mining, logging and farming – and the men who travelled to employment found families wherever they could. Mixing music came as naturally as mixing languages.

One of Celtic music’s most endearing traits is the effect it had on Quebecois repertoire, mostly in Acadia and in the Boston factories where, Dooley tells me, French Canadians in their thousands found work in the late 19th Century. And then they came home, a little richer and a lot lighter in their step. “ (Celtic music) is reflexive, it strikes the emotions, and it makes life vibrant when you’re taking a shit-kicking. It appeals on a very plebeian level, ” he says.

2,500 years later, this man could have fronted Great Big Sea. Photo by Donna Bergamina.

It’s also trans-generational, often three generations of one family dancing and singing on the same stage. And a meritocracy, where the musically gifted are looked at as mentors rather than cash machines, and there’s a very strong respect, and acceptance, for the elderly. Try and find that in any other major cultural niche.

But it is also fun and went well with whatever resources were at hand, such as itinerant male dance troops in logging camps (think Monty Python). Perhaps that’s why Celtic is, arguably, the most popular musical fusion in our part of Canada today. “It’s always gregarious, with a high energy level, and it’s become mainstream, a big part of country, pop, folk, bluegrass, even punk rock,” Dooley says, and then tells me the story about MacIsaac.

His points are easy to grasp because you’ll never find a scowl on audience faces in video footage of Don Messer or Great Big Sea concerts. Poetic tradition, immigration, poverty, hope, inter-breeding and respect; that’s a potent algorithm.

Yet there has to be a final piece to the puzzle. Maybe there is something to the theory of genetic memory, where certain sounds, like language or music, are present in us even before we have their sensory experiences. And all it takes is is a 2/4-time fiddle version of something from the Book of Kells to jog our lizard brain into tapping our toes.

One of the best ways to keep up on upcoming Celtic events in the region is the Irish Music blog.