The Fiddler Is a Good Woman. Geoff Berner

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      Cover

      

      All music is what

      awakes within us when we

      are reminded by the instruments;

      It is not the violins or the clarinets —

      It is not the beating of the drums —

      Nor the score of the baritone singing

      his sweet romanza; nor that of the men’s chorus,

      Nor that of the women’s chorus —

It is nearer and farther than they.*

      Lovingly,

      Eunice Waymon

      Age 12

      (later named Nina Simone)

* The poem is written by Walt Whitman; Simone included it on the back of her album Here Comes the Sun.

      Important Introductory Note

      Dear Reader,

      This book is a document of my failure. I will explain:

      The song “You Are Home to Me,” by the Low Johannahs, was a hit in eleven countries. The official video has been viewed on YouTube over eight million times. Numerous acts, large and small, have recorded their own version, notably the pop star Spe$ha.

      This has led to a great deal of interest in the song’s author and composer, a woman known as DD.

      What is DD’s “real” name? I suppose “real” journalists would delve into that, but I’m not a journalist, or even a reporter, and I make a policy of calling people what they would have me call them and leaving it at that.

      Fan interest in DD has been fed by the circumstance that nobody seems to know where she is.

      A missing persons case was filed in Winnipeg in July 2012, the day after she walked away from her band’s tour bus at two in the afternoon, saying she was going to get a pack of cigarettes. The Winnipeg Police were unable to find any leads. Members of her band voiced frustration at what they saw as a lackadaisical tenor to the official search efforts, and speculated publicly that the officers’ zeal might have been dampened by the fact that she is a woman, a musician, and of Indigenous heritage. Those kinds of people disappear all the time, after all.

      In a twist of corporate kismet, my publisher, Dundurn Press, picked up the rights to the publishing and recording revenues from “You Are Home to Me” when they were able to buy most of the assets of Moevment Music at a fire-sale price, after that once-legendary recording, publishing, and management company went bankrupt. I understand that Dundurn mostly bought it for the sheet-music rights.

      I had been struggling to write a follow-up to my first book, Festival Man. Dundurn asked me to write a “quickie bio-book” about DD, since she appears in Festival Man, and I have, in fact, played with her on many occasions.

      They also suggested that I make some inquiries to see if I couldn’t actually locate DD, since it would certainly be a coup to score the first interview with her in years. Also, Kirk Howard of Dundurn is that rare animal in business, an ethically punctilious man, and it troubled him to be holding almost half a million dollars’ revenue from “You Are Home to Me” in a trust account.

      So I set out to do all that, to write the bio-book, to find the fiddler. And this book is the record of my giving up. I failed to write the book, and I failed to find DD. Well, after I failed to find her, I sort of found her, briefly, in a manner of speaking, but not really, and in a way that did not diminish my failure, in my opinion.

      I take full responsibility for my failure, which consists of a combination of a lack of daily discipline, as well as what I hypothesize to be a lack of insight into truths that might have been revealed to a more observant and deductive mind.

      Over the course of a few years, in my travels as a touring accordion player/singer-songwriter on the independent folk- and world-music circuit in North America and Europe, I interviewed many people connected with DD, and collected a great deal of material. I was not able to make a coherent, digestible biography out of it.

      Instead, what I offer here is a boiled-down version of that maddening mess of material, organized by me and my trusted editor, Shannon Whibbs. We did our best to throw out the boring bits, and keep the stuff that might be of interest to fans, or to anyone with more adept powers of detection, who might glean a clue as to DD’s whereabouts.

      I miss her very much. That is all.

      Yours,

      Geoff Berner

      Campbell Ouiniette

      Beginning of Rejected Forty-Page Article, Submitted to BC Musician Magazine, 2015 (Postmarked Macedonia)

      Of course I’m not dead. Reports of my demise have been horseshit. As was that whole book, Festival Man, that Berner wrote, claiming that he was “deciphering” my handwriting from my report on the Calgary Folk Festival. Pretty fucking creative deciphering. There’s tons of shit in there that I never wrote in a million years. Now I hear he’s out there trying to write something about that little ­gap-toothed fiddler, the one they call “DD.” Well, I wish her luck, because he sure did a hatchet job on me.

      Well I don’t know where to begin. For example, he’s got me calling him a “lying Jew bastard,” as if I would be stupid enough, in this day and age, knowing what I know about how this world actually runs, to write something like that for public consumption. Although in essence, when it comes to the reality of what he did to my ­reputation with that book, what can you say? If the little black dress shoe fits …

      Among the many lies the book tells that I want to go on record about are:

       I never said that the Artistic Director of the Calgary Folk Festival, Leslie Stark, was “semi-autistic” in her ­insensitivity. She is a rugged individualist, much like Yours Truly. She pulls no punches. As per same. That’s not autism, that’s Albertanism.

       I did not know for sure that Athena Amarok was not going to fulfill the contracts we had made with the festivals in the summer of ’03. When I spent the advance for Calgary and the other advances (on perfectly legitimate expenses, I might add), it was in full expectation that she would be holding up her end of the bargain.

       There’s no way I would have run from a conflict with Big Dave McLean in 2003. Because by 2003, Big Dave had quit drinking. Sure, when he was in full liquor mode, in the old days, I once saw him jump on the roof of a Winnipeg cop cruiser outside the Royal Albert Hotel and rip the sirens off it with his bare hands. But by 2001 he was sober. A non-violent, Gandhian pussycat. So that proves I would not have been intimidated by him.

      Also I did not spit on Stan Rogers’s widow at the Stan Rogers Festival. Although I do despise the song “Amazing Grace,” which she had chosen as the Grand Finale number for the festival, where everybody gets onstage and sings Kumbaya-style together. I truly despise “Amazing Grace.” People say Christianity is a Slave Religion, but I’d say it’s more like an Overseer’s Religion, and that nasty little ditty is like a manual for the whole Christian Empire — do a ton of horrible shit, grab the goodies, keep ’em, ask God for Forgiveness, and then, you know, just call it even and no hard feelings all around, right? So in a way, it’s a perfect song to sing as the Grand Finale on the mainstage at the end of the Stan Rogers Festival, now that I think of it. But I never spat on Stan Rogers’s widow. He was a phony-baloney manufacturer of fake “Canadian” culture that got overplayed on the national radio station for Imperial purposes. But I never spat on his widow.

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