Jim Dow, 91, is one of the founding members of the BC Old Time Fiddlers Branch No. 1 that got its start 57 years ago in Prince George.
The BC Old Time Fiddlers Branch No. 1 will be celebrating their anniversary during the eighth annual Spring Jamboree, which is a three-day event that goes Friday, May 2 to Sunday, May 4.
Dow is a guitar player who rounds out the sound of the group that sees fiddle, guitar and piano players come together during weekly jam sessions and hosting monthly family dances.
In 1968 original founders, along with Dow, included Max Sexsmith, Bob Montgomery, Norm Dalgleish, Bill Robertson, Stan Pruden and Jules Morin.
“In the early years there was a number of very good musicians in town here and everyone played in their own houses and never really got together so we decided if we could form a little association or a club we could get four or five people together at one time and thank God for people who had big houses back then because people started bringing their wives and people started dancing,” Dow laughed.
The group did form their association with a board and constitution and held their first competition in 1970. When the provincial BC Old Time Fiddlers was formed in 1978, the Prince George Branch became known as Branch No. 1.
As the group grew they started renting half the hall that was on top of the old South Fort George Firehall, Dow added. Then because the dances were so popular they had to rent the whole thing and soon outgrew the space so they moved the dances to St. Mary’s on Gillett Street.
“Back then we would hold our fiddle contests at the same time as the dances,” Dow said.
“We would bring in top notch fiddle players like Al Cherney as guest artist and he came three different times. Then we got Graham Townsend to come in and some of the musicians were afraid to play in front of these guys but I would say ‘they’re just human beings’ and we’d get on with it.”
For Dow his love of music started at home.
“My dad (Bob) played in a Scottish pipe band since he was small in the Lethbridge area and my mother (Mary) was Scottish and was a Highland dancer,” Dow said.
Through their love of music Bob and Mary met in 1926 and married in 1928. The couple moved to southeastern Saskatchewan and bought a farm and that’s where Dow was born in 1934.
When the dry years came, he said, and they moved north to the Nipawin area and there was wood and water there so farming was easier and that’s where Dow was raised.
Eventually Dow’s father, Bob, moved to a different instrument, the button accordion and would play at Dow’s monthly school dances. Eventually father asked son to help round out the band.
“My uncle brought a guitar for me from Edmonton in 1944,” Dow recalled. “It was an old Palm Beach guitar and he showed me a few chords and my Dad would be reading the newspaper and would tell me ‘Jim, hang that thing on the wall – give it a rest’ – but I was so intrigued with it I just had to play it.”
Eventually Dow joined his Dad and a piano player at those school dances.
“And that’s how I got started with it,” Dow said. “There was a fiddle player in the area that would join us at the dances so that’s how I learned fiddle music and that was when I was about 12 years old.”
In 1951 Dow came to Prince George to work in a mill at West Lake in the winter and went back to work on the family farm in the summer for three or four years, he explained.
“And then finally I just stayed here,” Dow said. “I went down to Lillooet and got a job on the railway in 1956 and it was a pretty good job. I was a locomotive engineer on the PG line for 43 years.”
There was always other musicians around so Dow spent a lot of his down time playing music with them.
When Dow moved to Prince George he would listen to Max Sexsmith’s Friday night radio spot.
“Max was just a musical god in our estimation,” Dow said.
“He was so good and so when I would come to town I got to know him. He lived in South Fort George and on the same lot as his house there was a pool room and the tables were all gone so we’d play music and people would come in there and dance and that was kind of the start of it. There were so many good musicians that’s when we decided to get something going here.”
Still going strong, the weekly jams see between 25 and 30 people come together. The monthly dances have transitioned from adult only to family-friendly and the 67-member BC Old Time Fiddlers offer lessons to youth who are interested in music.
Members of the fiddlers' group are also part of the Elks Elastic Band that was formed 50 years ago.
“It’s called the Elastic Band because sometimes we’ll have five people on stage and other times we’ll have 10,” Dow laughed. “We go out into the community to entertain people and when we go into seniors’ care homes we’ll do that as volunteers. We do that quite often - at least once a week and sometimes twice a week. We also get paid playouts, we call them and we still do a lot of them – we’re pretty popular.”
The BC Old Time Fiddlers Branch No. 1 Spring Jamboree celebration includes a family dance on Friday night and two days of workshops for fiddle, guitar and banjo on Saturday and Sunday, with a concert starring three-time Canadian Grand Masters fiddle champion Mark Sullivan performing on Saturday night at Knox Performance Centre in downtown Prince George.
For more information and for tickets visit https://bcfiddlers.com/branches/prince-george/pg-workshop-and-concert/.
Editor’s note: Norm Dalgleish was reporter Christine Dalgleish’s father-in-law.
