Biography
Once a lumberjack, the burly Maine resident picked up the fiddle along with its accompanying French-American repertoire while working the camps of Northern Canada. Foundational Acadian recordings, especially those by the renowned fiddler Isidore Soucy, supplied much of the material that Simon St. Pierre later guarded as a living archive for younger musicians eager to mine it. Featured on multiple traditional-music releases throughout the 1970s and 1980s, St. Pierre proved more eclectic than many contemporaries by also absorbing the so-called “southern” style—meaning south of the border and farther still into bluegrass and old-time territory. He routinely infused Quebec fiddle numbers with these influences, bringing the clean tone and rapid, exacting fingering required to handle bluegrass pieces convincingly. Taking that music seriously, he led the Dukes of Bluegrass, a group that issued three albums on the Revonah label during the mid- and late 1970s. Selections from one of those LPs, Fiddler From Maine, continued to receive airplay on bluegrass radio programs a quarter-century afterward. Among his most adaptable performances, however, was not flashy bluegrass playing but a comic, atmospheric portrayal of a bickering couple in the traditional fiddle sketch “Growling Old Man and Woman,” a staple of his concerts that survives on the live Rounder anthology Music of French America. St. Pierre himself composed several fiddle tunes, among them “Flanigan Polka” and “Happy Acres Two Step.”
Albums
