Megantic Music

They lived on a small farm near the town of Bury in the Eastern Townships of Quebec but the homesteads they had won back from the surrounding forests provided an inadequate living and the Morrisons - like many of the new settlers - were forced into debt .

At the age of 20 Donald went west to get work as a cowboy while his father, Murdo, mortgaged the farm to Lt Col Malcom MacAulay, whose family had been cleared from Uig in 1840. Murdo was illiterate and the terms of his contract were not properly explained. Donald sent money home in order to pay the family debts but his father failed to get receipts and the notary involved claimed that there was money owing; MacAulay began eviction proceedings.

Donald returned and hired a lawyer to fight on the family’s behalf, but the lawyer was in league with MacAulay and the farm was subsequently sold to a French family. Shortly thereafter the house and barn were burnt down and Donald was accused. The bailiff appointed to arrest him proved unable to do so and an American gunslinger named Lucius “Jack” Warren was hired to bring him in dead or alive. They met on the main street of Megantic and in best folklore tradition, Donald drew first and shot Jack Warren dead.

After evading capture for some months, largely through the help of sympathetic Scottish farmers, he was apprehended on 21 April 1889, tried and sentenced to 18 years hard labour. Broken by prison life, he refused food and medication, and died of consumption within 5 years. He became a legendary figure in the Scottish settlements of eastern Québec and his story has inspired novels, poems and songs and television and cinema productions.

Indeed, in 1992, one of the world’s leading pipe bands, the 78th Fraser Highlanders, recorded The Megantic Outlaw, composed entirely by band members and largely considered to be the most adventurous musical work ever attempted by a pipe band.

Fast forward now to present day Lewis where Calum Martin, motivated by a desire to encourage young talented Gaelic-speaking musicians and bards to do as he did over 25 years ago and write, record and perform contemporary songs in their own language, thereby bringing their own styles to a new generation of Gaels, decided not only to re-release his album but to revitalise it.

This is where we enter the hi-tech world of the Internet. Calum explains the process. “These album tracks were recorded by a fantastically talented group of Transatlantic musicians in various studios both in the UK and the USA and transferred by the marvel of Broadband technology, initially to my home studio in Tong …where I added them to my own tracks in Pro-Tools, consolidated them and sent them to Nashville for mixing and mastering.”

There are musicians from Los Angeles, North Carolina and Nashville itself as well as Calum’s long time Scots musical friends such as Malcolm Jones (Runrig), Donald Shaw (Capercaillie), Alasdair White (Battlefield Band), Blair Douglas, Fraser Fifield and Traditional Mod Gold Medallist Isobel Ann Martin.

If you like the music of Runrig, you’ll enjoy this album. The songs are entirely in Gaelic but there are full translations in the sleeve notes and the album is released on Runrig’s own label Ridge Records.