Michelle Porter: How a crooked Métis fiddle tune changed the way I think about stories

No one was more surprised than I was when I started work on a novel and it came out in the form of a crooked Métis fiddle tune.

I always thought I’d been born without the music, that this ancestral gift had skipped my generation. And yet somehow the music of my grandmother and great-grandfather shaped the form of my first novel “A Grandmother Begins the Story.”

When I thought about why, I kept coming back to my middle name. A few years ago, at a storytelling workshop, I was asked to talk about my middle name, Elise.

Tell us about your middle name, they said.

At first, I considered its meaning, the one you’d find in a name dictionary, “God’s promise” and variations on that theme. But a name goes so much farther back and reaches so much farther into the future than what’s written in those dictionaries.

Tell us about your middle name, they said, and that changed the way I think about the stories I tell and write and their relationship to music.

My mother gave me the middle name Elise to honour her aunt, my grandmother’s sister, Olive Elise Goulet, whose skill with the fiddle and the piano made her a rising, shining talent before she passed away much too young, in 1960 at just 36 years old. She in turn was named after her own grandmother, Elise Genthon, from a family well-known for their ability to make everyone’s feet dance with their fiddles.

If my mother gave me that name in the hope that I might pick up the fiddle or the piano, it didn’t work. I always felt like I dropped that part, the music. I was never taught fiddle as a child and when I learned some basic violin with my daughters, it didn’t come easily and I left it behind to make more time for the words that wanted to sing themselves in my pencil, my notebook and on my word processor.

And for that, I felt a little bit less-than. I come from a family of very talented musicians: why couldn’t I stay with music? I’ve always understood myself as the descendant of musicians.

I began approaching music through family story research, tracing the history of the band that was well-known in Winnipeg in the 1930s, called the Red River Echoes, though sometimes known as Bob Goulet and His Red River Echoes. My great-grandfather and great-grandmother, my grandmother and her sister were all part of the band, and they performed at all kinds of venues and dances, and even had a regular radio show.

One day my auntie sent me a text message and attached some songs. These were songs she’d been able to digitize from old records she’d kept in her back closet. So many of our Métis aunties have treasures stashed away like this, all dusty and patient. The songs she sent me are among the first Métis tunes ever to be recorded and some are now so brittle that the act of digitizing them to preserve the music for the future risks destroying them.

I didn’t know that then. I pressed play.

That old scratchy record sound. A baby cooing from way back in the 1930s. Which of my aunts or uncles is that baby?

The music begins. Piano first. The fiddle comes in later.

And then I am listening to my grandmother and her sister and their father speaking to me through the music they make together. I write about this moment in my nonfiction book “Approaching Fire,” the moment I heard their music, the passion that poured out of that fiddle and that piano.

Their music brought me home.

I realized that I was a musician, that I pour my music into the stories I tell and the way I arrange words. I realized too, that my ancestors were always writers who used music to share their stories. Since listening to those songs, I’ve realized that I approach writing with the same crookedness that my ancestors brought to their music.

Crooked describes the Métis fiddlers’ refusal to stick to the standard metre, as it is understood in European music traditions. You can hear both First Nation and European influxes in the old-style crooked Métis tunes, but the music, like our people, is not part-this or part-that; it took on its own identity and consciousness as in the hands of the first Métis travelling across the prairies and along the old river routes.

A traditional Métis fiddler will add or drop a phrase, an extra beat or even a couple of beats. In the live performance tradition, the crookedness could be improvised anew each time a song was played so there was an endless creation aspect to it. For many, to take a song and play it exactly as the person you learned it from was to steal it. Instead, you take someone’s song, give them credit, but make it your own by adding something of yours to it.

This novel is like that. I borrowed my mother’s stories and made something new with them. And the structure of the novel refuses to follow the regular measures of a novel, adding beats, phrases and notes where called for and dropping it when it makes for better rhythm. I’ve been told I broke rules in writing this novel, but I simply stayed true to a different set of rules. The traditional Métis fiddle style allowed me to do this.

“A Grandmother Begins the Story” follows five generations of Métis women and a bison herd that is awaiting transfer to the land that will be their home. In this book traditional Métis music flows between two sisters, one of whom is in the spirit world and the other who is in rehab following a terminal diagnosis of cancer. In these sections the music itself becomes a character, spilling over the sisters’ ability to understand each other and their lives as Métis women in this country called Canada in mid-20th century.

The voices of each of the characters are instruments in the song: Mamé, Geneviève, Lucie, Allie, Carter, Tucker and all the bison characters who face dislocation and ecological change. Each of the chapters are notes arranged to form irregular phrases. At times I’ve added and dropped notes in a sort of improvisation, like crooked fiddling. Sometimes the notes play long in chapters that are pages and at other times the notes take the form of a short paragraph before moving on to the next note. Some notes are prose, some borrow from poetry, some borrow from the sound of a buffalo herd on the plains, and some are text exchanges.

Tell us about your middle name, they said.

My youngest daughter’s first name is Elise. She started with the fiddle, but she’s no musician either. She’s a visual artist, who makes sense of her work through beading, painting and working with clay.

I’m thinking one day one of my daughters will have a child who will play fiddle. Maybe a son. Maybe a daughter. Maybe her first name or her middle name will be Elise, after her ancestors.

Or maybe it will be a new name, a new beat improvised and dropped into the music of our ancestors.

And I’m thinking that one day one of these grandchildren might tell stories with the fiddle and make people want to dance.

Maybe one day in the future they’ll pull the books I’ve written out of a dusty closet and try to understand what they find inside.

Maybe they won’t feel called to the paper or the pen, like me. Maybe they’ll turn all the old stories into music, using the instruments that have baffled me, the fiddle and the bow.

And who knows what that child of music will be able to do with all that history then.

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