TSIIGEHTCHIC/ARCTIC RED RIVER - Country fiddle songs rush from Noel Andre's radio, flowing through his phone line as background music to his voice. He's talking about his first fiddle, the first one he ever owned, the one he finally bought himself five years after he learned how to play.

Elder Noel Andre is one of only two fiddlers left in Tsiigehtchic. - Katie May/NNSL photo

He's gone through a few of the instruments since then – that was back in the 1940s, when he was about 19 – but now the 80-year-old Tsiigehtchic elder is one of only two fiddlers in the community.

The other is his good friend Victor Modeste, and the two jam together sometimes, but Andre laments that young people don't seem keen on joining in.

"We figure it's up to them to start learning, like us. We tried hard to play fiddle. Trying to fiddle is not like one day you play and learn right away," he said.

In fact, Andre says, it took him "55 years, maybe more" before he really got good – not like picking up guitar, which he started playing at the same time as the fiddle.

He was about 14, had just come out of five years of residential school in Aklavik, and was back in Tsiigehtchic around the fish camps by the river when he heard music. Some people were playing guitars and fiddles in tents around the camp.

"After they left, us young people went in there and try out their guitar and fiddle. That's the way I started," Andre said. "But it took me quite a while before I really knew how to play."

Now that Andre has mastered not only the fiddle but the guitar, piano, accordion and harmonica too, he's used to playing at community events and even recorded with his band, Lonesome Indian, an album that is still in production. His younger sister plays bass guitar in the band.

Andre's love of music blossomed after residential school, when the oldest of 12 children – six boys and six girls – he would help his parents by hauling wood all day.

"After that, there's nothing to do," he said. "You can't watch TV because there's no TV. No phone. Maybe radio, sometimes – the rich ones. But in the meantime, I had lots of time to play fiddle, tried to learn. I just played by ear, listened to music, tried it out and then I'd catch on," Andre added. "All those things were around here, so people tried it out – some of them learned right away."

But the great-grandfather who's become known for saying prayers at community feasts worries sometimes that Tsiigehtchic will lose its rich musicality.

"Nobody else here fiddles now. All the young people, teenagers, they should be trying to learn," he said. "One of these days they'll be the leaders of this community, so they might as well keep up all the traditions – playing the fiddle and guitar and making dry fish in the summer and going trapping in the winter."

Andre knows he won't be around forever, but while he is, he's happy to serve his community – and pull his guitar and fiddle out of the closet to strum and screech for a while.

"I've got all my family buried in the graveyard. I've got my own fish camp down the hill," he said. "I like to serve my community, and whenever they ask me to do something, I always do it."