Terry Halifax
Northern News Services
Fort Resolution (Feb 19/01) - If you've been to a fiddling contest in the North, you likely know Angus Beaulieu.
He's been a fixture in dance halls throughout the North for most of his life.
Self-taught at the fiddle and most things in life, Beaulieu grew up in the bush working with his grandfather as a hunter and trapper.
He remembers travelling with his grandfather across the big lake to Yellowknife by dog team. The trip would take them nearly three days.
Once he had his own team, Beaulieu would take his dogs out to Hay River and, depending on the weather, it sometimes took him two days to get there.
"On one good day it took me about 11 hours and I thought that was great -- that was fast," he laughed.
"Now it takes me an hour-and-a-half and I complain about it."
Beaulieu was 13 when he first picked up a fiddle. He loved music, but they didn't always have money for batteries to power the family's old radio.
Getting started
He recalled how one day Sam Norn was walking by and Beaulieu asked him in to see if he could tune an old fiddle his grandfather had.
"He tuned it and told me not to touch the keys," he said.
He played away at the old fiddle and got together with neighbour Joe King, to play the first song he learned -- Rubber Dolly -- a tune he'd heard on the radio.
"I don't think the guitar had all six strings and I was squeaking along, because at first I only played with one finger," he recalled of the racket the two made.
After only a year of practice, the 14-year-old fiddler had learned 10 songs and played for his first audience.
"There was a square dance going on near where I lived," he said, describing the dance floor lit by a gas lamp and a fiddler and guitar player at centre stage.
"The fiddler went to cool off and put his fiddle down and I was so tempted, I grabbed the fiddle and started playing," he said. "I felt so proud of myself, I just started playing."
Not far into the second change, the tempo slowed a bit.
"My arms got too tired," he laughed.
"I was slowing down and slowing down and they were yelling 'Not yet, not yet!'"
"I put the fiddle down and I ran home -- I was so embarrassed," Beaulieu smiled with a 50-year-old blush
Family band
The next day, he played with an alarm clock and timed how long he could play. Each day he would play longer and longer.
"I did that over and over until I could go for 15 or 20 minutes and then I went back to the dance," he said.
While music was his passion, he couldn't make a living with it, so in 1960, Beaulieu went to work as caretaker at the school in Fort Res, built and ran the motel.
Beaulieu and his band the Native Cousins played up and down the Mackenzie Valley for decades and 22 consecutive Caribou Carnivals in the Caribou Room at the Yellowknife Inn.
He's sold hundreds of copies of his recordings on tapes and now, Beaulieu has his first CD for sale and the second is on the way.
The instrument he plays is a 100-year-old copy of a Stradivarius violin that used to belong to King Beaulieu.
Angus set about restoring the old fiddle about 20 years ago. He stripped the old varnish and made a few repairs to the body.
He nearly gave up, when the fiddle got knocked off a shelf in his shop, shattering into nine pieces.
After sitting for years in a box, he eventually sent the pieces to Alfie Myhre's in Edmonton to see if the broken old fiddle was worth saving. Myhre thought it to be of very good quality, but said restoration would cost $700.
As a gift, his wife Dorothy paid to fix the fiddle and Beaulieu has been playing it ever since.
