PAUL McGRAW

Phone Interview 1998

----MiramiSHI----

I'm talking to Paul McGraw in...where are you...in New Brunswick, right?
Right...near Miramichi, New Brunswick. We're in the northeastern part of the eastern part of this Maritime Province in Canada.
Is that...it's near Nova Scotia somewhere...
It is a little bit west of Nova Scotia. Actually Nova Scotia is an extension of New Brunswick as we like to think of it.
OK.
Don't tell anybody from Nova Scotia that I said that.
I don't know that anybody from Nova Scotia is here. If there's anybody out there from Nova Scotia or New Brunswick it would be great to hear them call, though.
<aside> You've been there? Yeh, I have too, but not to New Brunswick.
OK my co-host has been to Nova Scotia.
Well, that's close enough. It's almost as good as New Brunswick.
Now, is the music, now there's all this music that's coming out of Nova Scotia right now. You don't see that much coming from New Brunswick.
New Brunswick is one of the lesser known and lesser promoted areas. Nova Scotia just too off a few years ago, probably about 5 or 6 years ago, and New Brunswick has taken a little bit longer to catch up, but we have a very very diverse amount of music and talent here in New Brunswick and you name the type of music and we probably have it to a very very professional level here.
I'd say Celtic. But the immigrants who came...do you have all these Scottish immigrants who came in as well?
We have a mixture here in New Brunswick. We have the traditional Scottish and Irish immigrants that have settled throughout the New Brunswick region and certainly the Merimachi here is no exception to that, because the Miramichi has a very strong Irish settlement here. We have a very strong Scottish settlement here. English as well. Plus we also have a very very strong Acadian community throughout New Brunswick. New Brunswick is the only officially bilingual province that's in Canada. And I think the culture certainly reflects that here in New Brunswick.
Officially bilingual.
So do you have a mix of music that's characteristic of New Brunswick or is it just name every type.
There is a mix. There is a lot of very very unique stuff here. New Brunswick for example has some of the strongest entertainers that have come out of New Brunswick recently, in the last couple of years have been in the Country Music vein. But we also have very strong folk groups here, Scottish and Irish and Acadian and a mix of that where you get a very unique sound that comes out of that.
Now I know that the people over in Nova Scotia have kitchen parties. Do you have a tradition of that as well?
We certainly do. We certainly do in the Miramichi here. It's a very natural thing on the Miramichi to get up and entertain in somebody's...whether it is a kitchen party or whether it's on stage or whether it's one of the many festivals we have here. And it's very indicative of the willingness of people to get up and do their thing, no matter what the type and style. Some of the festivals here are very very typical of that.
Now, you and Connie...Connie and Paul, you call it...
Yes.
You do music...it seems like you do a lot of Irish music.
Our music is Celtic based, but we've pegged our style of music as Maritime Celtic folk. It sort of covers all the bases of what we do. Certainly the music we write has a lot of Celtic influences in it but it also has a lot of traditional folk influences in it as well. I'm from an Acadian-Irish background and Connie is from a Scots and English background and the nature of the music here in the Miramichi is very very folk based, most of the music here...for example at one of the festivals , the Miramichi folk song festival which is the longest standing festival of its kind in North America just celebrated its 44^th anniversary and it celebrates the traditional music of the lumbering community here.and a lot of the music we do and that we write is based on that type and style of music.
Now I just played Peter Emberley.
Yes!
And I think that is the one that you had put down as being...
That is probably one of the better known Miramichi folk songs.and it certainly is one of the most beloved here, primarily because Peter Emberly was a real person, this was a true story.of a young man that come over from Prince Edward Island to work in the lumbering industry back in the 1880s and was here for a very short period of time when he met with a very tragic accident in the woods approximately 50 miles from where I am sitting now. And one of the attractions here, one of the tourist attractions is the Central New Brunswick Woodsman Museum. And there's a graveyard directly across the highway from that and that is where Peter Emberley is buried and that is where his headstone is. He was 17 at the time. It's become one of the most of the ....[sound glitch] folk songs. It's suprising the number of people who know that song...people who are into folklore and into traditional folk music. And I don't think people fully realize that this was a real guy, this is not a fictional character here and I think that's what makes it a little bit more unique and more poignant is the fact that you can, at least from my point of view know that this fellow existed and it was a very very tragic story and a great great song.
OK. I really enjoyed the song! I enjoy the way you do it.
Well, we do a different version of it. The original song has I believe 14 verses and we didn't want to fill up the whole CD with just that one song so we do a little bit of an abridged version of it, but you still get the essence of the story.
So where do you guys play around there?
We do a lot of festivals, we've just finished a busy festival season here this summer ,,,is the norm especially with folk music. We've performed at festivals throughout New Brunswick and into Nova Scotia. The Folk ---- festival in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, and a lot of concerts, the occasional pub. That type of thing.
And what are your big hits, then?
Our big hits!
Yeh.
I could count them on one finger! Five left over I should say. What we try to do is we just try to get our audiences involved in a lot of the music we're doing and a lot of the songs that we're singing. On our latest CD, the one that has gotten us the greatest recognition and the most air time is one of the original compositions on there called "Sail To the Sea." As a matter of fact we just released that about three months ago as a music video, our first jaunt into that genre of expression. And that's the one that's sort of been getting the most attention worldwide. But that's a "small a" attention, when you're independently distributed like we are it makes it a little bit more difficult but thanks to shows and stations like yours that have a...we have the opportunity to be heard in various parts of the world, which is nice, we're getting airtime...we've gotten airtime from our CD in Australia and throughout the British Isles. That one in England and Germany and on a fair number of stations throughout the US, the odd air time here and there.
Are they playing that on Celtic shows or folk shows?
They're playing them on Celtic shows and playing them on folk shows...we were actually on one station in Canada in Ontario last spring, we were on their folk charts, on their top ten folk charts for about 16 weeks, we peaked at number 4 I think it was if I remember correctly so it's a cross section of what we're being played on, some traditional, some traditional Celtic, some just folk stations or folk programs.
Uh huh. Now, what is...I've heard that Canadian radio is better than American radio.
Well, better's a relative term.
What's radio like up there where you live?
Well, I don't think it differs too much from what it is in the US. With one big exception--we have Canadian content regulations here and radio stations have to play a certain percentage of Canadian music by law, it's regulated by the Canadian radio and television commission. That has its good and bad points. I believe the percentage is 40 or it might even be 60 percent, I can't remember exactly. But the way that that is interpreted is very very broad so they could play, for example, a hit from Paul Anka from back in 1964 and that's considered Canadian content because Paul was from Ottawa.
Huh.
So there are pros and cons on both sides of that. That's the primary difference. We have the commercial radio stations much like yours are in the US that are governed by the magic F words that a lot of people don't like, by that I mean format. We have our country stations we have our AC stations, contemporary or golden oldies that type of thing. But we also do have community radio stations which is agaion similar to your system, but the community radio stations here, the large majority of them...the very very large majority of them are campus radio stations and they've been the biggest promoter of folk music per se. Most of the private radio stations in Canada have been formatted in one form or another and if you cannot pigeonhole your music into Rock, into Adult Contemporary, into Country, then unless they have a specialized show, which a few of them are getting back to now. You don't have too much of a great hope of getting your stuff on the air. The other big saviour in Canada is of course the government owned Canadian Broadcasting Corporation-CBC. CBC is just phenomenal...their the biggest public station we have and they are the largest bar none promoter of independent artists and of folk music and of all different genres of music that are not formatted to the private radio stations.
So there is really a government support of folk music up there...
Very much so. It's considered a very stong part of the Canadian culture here to support Canadian musicians and Canadian folk music and if it hadn't been for the CBC in recent years, for example you mentioned Nova Scotia, a lot of the artists that have gained prominence nationally and internationally from Nova Scotia and Cape Breton got their start on CBC and had it not been for the government owned radio stations and the government supported radio stations and the support that they give these artists in some cases even using facilities for example the CBC radio station in Halifax has one of the best recording studios in Canada and a lot of the artists have been recorded out of that and a lot of these artists that are internationally known now were recorded through there and CBC helped with the production and the whole deal.so your defintely right they strongly support for that in an indirect way.
I think that's really nice and I wish our government were like that.
Well, it doesn't mean that the government has an open door policy as far as when people record and that's what I mean by helping them indirectly. The CBC has come under great great government constraints financially in the last 3 to 4 years and CBC operates not only a radio network here but also a national television network as well.and it's been an ongoing debate as to whether or not its been the television stations, the television network that's cost the CBC tremendously. The radio stations have always shown profits but unfortunately when the government cut backs come down they always come down across the board and there's been tremendous reorganization in the last year or two and some very prominent people have take retirement and we're still looking at CBC as our largest supporter but it is not today where it was 2 or 3 years ago when it was just phenomenally supportive but the government itself as far as supporting artists individually or by province...the provincial governments...and the prominence of Nova Scotia for example against New Brunswick which I mentioned earlier...the government support there is indicative of how much Nova Scotia has been promoted as opposed to the artist in New Brunswick have been promoted. The government of Nova Scotia has sunk tremendous dollars into that and using that as a tourism scheme to gain some tourism into Nova Scotia. Certainly New Brunswick hasn't gotten to that point yet. We've just gotten the government's attention like 5,6 8 months ago so we're on our way.
So maybe you're gonna have an Ashley MacIsaac out there pretty soon.
We'll you know, the funny thing about it is that we have a lot of people that are as equally talented as anyone who's come out of Atlantic Canada and the biggest thing is that they haven't had the exposure both regionally, nationally and certainly internationally that some of these other artists have and again it has come indirectly because of the government's support and the government's program of grants to try and push that through in Nova Scotia. And more power to them, I think it's fantastic that they are able to do that, and we hope in a year from now you will be able to hear someone of say Ashley's caliber or the Rankin Family's calibre in a worldwide...from New Brunswick and has some traditional roots. There's some country music artists who are on the rise in Canada and are starting to make a little headway in the US and I think you'll see that in the not too distant future, the first ones to sort of break the barrier and hopefully it will gain attention not only for country music here in New Brunswick but also for the remaineder of types of music and there's some great great bands here, individual artists, we have great gospel music, great jazz and blues music, great traditional music, and the Acadian music here is just second to none.
I'm gonna have to hang up in a minute.
No problem.
But I was going to ask you, it's still Hot here. I was wondering what the weather is like up there.
Right now it is raining and let me see, today it was probably, I'm trying to convert because we are in Celsius up here, we're not in Farenheit, it was probably about...around 43, 44 degrees here today.
Wow. You really have autumn.
It's a typical autumn, certainly for New Brunswick. We've had a trmendous amopunt of rain the last few days. A real warm day here in the fall is probably in the high 50s, low 60s is a real warm day.
Ah!
And like I said, today was probably in the mid 40s.
Yeh, we're getting down to the 80s here.
Wow, balmy. That's our summer weather.

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