The ole Groundhog is 90!

NED LANDRY CELEBRATES 90TH BIRTHDAY AT KV HIGH SCHOOL

Ned celebrating his 90th with two performing grandchildren

Jack Feeney, who headed RCA Records Of Canada’s country music repertoire for over a quarter century once told me: “In my opinion, Ned Landry is the world’s greatest country fiddler.”

That was 35 years ago in 1976. Ned will be 90 next Wednesday, Feb 2, Groundhog’s Day. That’s the reason he often refers to himself as the Ol’ Groundhog.

Now given that Ned’s Official Public 90^th Birthday Celebration is part of a Valley Jamboree this Saturday, 7:30 p.m. at Kennebecasis Valley High in Quispamsis, Canada’s much honoured Master Of The Fiddle hopefully won’t have to venture out on the actual day and risk seeing his shadow.

Especially with a number of old friends and band mates on stage with him Jan.29 to wish him well musically. Among those will be Art Marr Lily Lake Jamboree and Club XL veterans such as Rick Russell, Randy Vail, Perry Craft, Allison Inch and others he has played with since: Ivan & Vivian Hicks, Mavis O’Donnell, Jack McAffee, Reg Gallant, yodeling singer Sylvia Campbell, Al’s Angels (young students of Allison Inch), the Kilburn Dancers and Jamboree host, emcee and multi-instrumentalist Gary Morris, the event’s organizer .

Also, the show’s multi-talented regular star cast that Ned has often performed with: Cheryl Ellis, Jeannie Clark, Tammy Morris, Dale Butland, Art Boyd, comedian Eunice P. Doolittle, who will all make spotlight appearances along with other members of the great Valley Jamboree band.

I got to know Ned quite well in 1975 during a trip we took to Nashville with Art Marr for the Grand Ol’ Opry 50^th Anniversary. It was a week of shows, celebrations, dinners, breakfasts with the stars (one seated five feet from Dolly Parton),evening meals and barbeques. I found Ned a quiet well-mannered traveling companion. Contrary to reputation, he neither drank nor smoked: he had quit both ‘cold turkey’ some years before. In fact I’ve never seen him drink anything stronger than tea. On that trip and all our later travels I never heard him use even the mildest profanity.

Yet Ned’s childhood was spent in the grimmest poverty of depression era Saint John. There was even two years that he and his brother the late Tony Landry spent at St. Patrick’s Orphanage.

“I didn’t get much of an education,” Ned (his given name is Frederick), told me early in our travels. “Most of us didn’t during the 20′s and 30′s. We had to get out and work to help our families survive.”

Well, Ned might not have gotten much of a school education but for his life as a performer, he was born with all he needed to know musically encoded in his genes. Truly blessed by the muses he knew fame, if never riches, from an early age. He was four when he was given his first harmonica and found he could play by ear, sing and step dance. And there was always an audience, his family, house parties, and playing on street corners for nickels and dimes. Then weekly radio appearances as one of Wasson’s Warblers over CFBO when he was only seven. And soon he was approached by Don Messer to appear with his New Brunswick Lumberjacks to perform live, tour and broadcast over CBC Radio from a studio in Saint John’s Admiral Beatty building. Eventually he learned to play guitar, then fiddle, and was soon standing at Messer’s elbow.

Ned with Charlie Chamberlain and other members of the Lumberjacks…Messer was unable to make the trip…won the Major Bowes Radio Talent Show in1939 while in New York to entertain at an international Sportsman’s Show. They were booked to tour the British Isles (as the U.K. was known then) with Bowes later that year but World War Two intervened. While in the Big Apple, Ned became the first fiddler in North America to perform on commercial TV during an experimental telecast. That year he moved to P.E.I. With the Lumberjacks when the show became Don Messer & The Islanders. But Ned soon returned to Saint John to form his own Lumberjacks which became the Maritime Farmers to broadcast over CHSJ.

Then two years of army life intervened; after that years of playing multiple dances weekly, then an RCA recording contract. He then won three North American Fiddle Championships, 1956, 1957, and 1962, in Shelburne, Ontario. At that time he recorded five prestigious RCA black label 12” long play albums, then a dozen on the RCA/Camden label. After that there were six released on Arc, Afton and other nationally distributed labels. Since 1977 he has had ten high quality sound lp’s and CD’s released locally.

Copies of most of Ned’s recordings are in Nashville’s Hall of Fame Museum Archives. In 1983 he was among the first five inducted into the New Brunswick Country Music Hall of Fame. In 1988 another great honour: he was inducted into the North American Fiddlers Hall of Fame in upper New York state. In 1992 he received an Order of Canada, then in 1996 he played for Prince Charles and received a Grand Masters Lifetime Achievement Award. That same year he performed during Canada Day ceremonies on Parliament Hill in Ottawa. And in 2009 St .Thomas University in Fredericton bestowed him with an Honorary Doctorate of Music.

By the late 1970′s a rumour that Ned had died circulated nationally, I think, because it had been a while since his last nationally distributed recording. The depth of this rumour struck home to me one day in August 1981, talking to Gordon Stobbe in Brookes Diamond’s Atlantic Folk Festival performer’s tent His Ladies Choice Bluegrass Band had been in Saint John earlier in the year to perform a Saint John Folk Club concert.

“Saint John,” Gordon said reflectively, “how I wish I could have made it there when Ned Landry was still alive!” Although he’s lived on Nova Scotia’s south shore for 35 years now, Gordon was born in Saskatchewan and came here after several years of living in Toronto.

“Oh, is Ned dead?” I exclaimed, tongue in cheek. “It must have been sudden. He was in and had lunch with me at the newspaper a couple of times last week”

The look of amazement that came over Gordon’s face was amazing in itself, soon replaced by one of sheer joy and excitement. So, after being given the Up Home Tonight Show by ATV a year later, one of the first things he did was phone to ask if I’d bring Ned down to Halifax for their first season’s filming. That added two more road trips to our itinerary annually for the eight years the show was on air .

Now a resident of the Ridgewood Veteran’s Wing, South Bay, Saint John, Ned has shown his remarkable resilience by surviving several strokes. A few have been very severe, but Ned has emerged from each, although confused for a time, but has regained his memory of tunes and his music faculties each time. In fact, at a Saint John Exhibition performance last August he brought an audience of several hundred to their feet several times in wild applause.

So don’t miss his 90^th birthday performance at the Valley Jamboree Saturday, 7:30 p.m. at (please note) the Kennebecasis Valley High School. Tickets are now on sale at: Hampton Pharmasave, Kennebecasis Drugs (Rothesay), Saint John Sewing Center, Grand Bay Pharmacy, The Country Market, St. George and Morris Music stores, Sussex and Saint John.

NED LANDRY AMONG DISTINQUISHED THREE HONOURED BY ST. THOMAS

…a little historic note from May 2009

Some of the most exciting events in New Brunswick’s long romance with the fiddle are taking place this summer!

And this past weekend folks who flocked to Harvey saw the kick off of it… the 100^th Anniversary of Don Messer’s birth in the village of Tweedside near there on May 9, 1909. That event was the first of several to take place celebrating Messer’s life and the integral part he played in popularizing the Down East style of fiddle music through his network radio and television shows, Canada-wide summer tours and performing forays into the US as early as the 1930′s.

And last Sunday at St. Thomas University in Fredericton three time North American fiddle champion Ned Landry, who began his long career with Don Messer’s New Brunswick Lumberjacks in 1934, was bestowed with an honorary doctorate by St. Thomas University at their 99^th Convocation. Ned, born Frederick Lawrence Landry on February 2, 1921 in Saint John is a recipient of the Order of Canada and has also been honored with lifetime achievement awards by the Canadian Grand Masters Fiddling Championships which named a trophy after him and the East Coast Music Awards. He is an inductee of the North American Fiddling Hall of Fame (in their New York State Shrine), the New Brunswick Country Music Hall of Fame and the Nova Scotia Country Music Hall Of Fame.. He has had a biography Master Of The Fiddle published of his life as well as many magazine and newspaper articles. Last year tunes he composed were a subject of a study at fiddle camps throughout Maine.

Ned credits his wife Mildred, who recently suffered a critical heart attack for providing the spark that led to the bestowal of his St. Thomas University doctorate. At a Miramichi concert last summer Mildred seated in the audience beside Professor Shanahan told him of Ned’s many accomplishments and his significant contributions to the world of music, noting that Ned’s cousin Tom Connors…Stompin’ Tom… had received two honorary doctorates, the first one from St. Thomas in 1993. That was the stimulus that led to this honor being bestowed on him. As Ned said at the impressive reception and banquet, at the University’s spacious Conference Centre the previous night that although he, an 88 year old veteran of the Second World War, had only a grade five education, he was now a doctor…at least, an honorary one. That statement and his performance of a tune he recently composed, the STU (St. Thomas University) Special, both drew applause from the distinguished audience which included the faculty and the two others receiving honorary degrees at this year’s Convocation: First Nation’s writer, educator and actor Lee Maracle and the president of the Oblate School Of Theology in San Antonio, Texas, Rev. Ron Rolheiser, the author of 15 books of religious insight.