The dance has ended
Late in the summer of 1972, I swung down from the Ocean Limited in Amherst, and collected my trusty Targa bicycle from the baggage car. With a fair portion of my worldly belongings in a huge green knapsack (still in the basement), I mounted my trusty steed and set off for the Island. With sixty kilometers of road and the wind at my back, it was time to turn on my transistor radio and tune in CFCY.
I was fortunate enough to catch an interview and hear a few tunes from a Celtic warrior, armed with his twelve-string guitar and a great sense of what was important. The name, John Allan Cameron, didn’t ring familiar to someone who’d been in the boondocks of central Ontario for the last half-decade, but I was willing to listen and learn.
His music has been with me ever since. Many songs play on the brain-radio with his accent as integral as the guitar underneath. The Lord of the Dance stopped being a Quaker hymn when he adopted it; now it’s a Caper Tune.
One summer evening in the mid 80’s, my wife joined me for a seafood supper at the Claddagh Room in downtown Charlottetown. As we were finishing up, the announcement that a friend of the owner’s was going to play a few songs for us served as the introduction of a quiet but familiar man who settled in just behind our table. None other than the “Godfather”. He even loaned my his songbook so that I could copy out the lyrics of the Heavy Waterplant song onto a couple of sheets of notepaper. Some moments are better than others.
Unfortunately, the music community was called together last spring for a benefit concert and double CD production, in honour of a man that was more ill than he wanted to admit. Thanks to the Internet, I was able to order a copy which would otherwise have been a rare pearl in this area.
The dance has ended. John Allan Cameron died this morning in Toronto after a long battle against bone cancer.
