Saint Anne's Reel: A Song History
"Saint Anne's Reel" is a Canadian fiddle tune, and its first recordings were made in Québec. The sources consulted name no composer.[1] Even the title is open to question. Eastern Canada has more than one place called St. Anne, but Jean Duval, a researcher who has studied the fiddler Joseph Allard, thinks it refers to Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue, at the western tip of the island of Montréal.[1] The first known printed version seems to be in the Jarman collections of the 1930s and 1940s, which credit the arrangement to fiddler John Burt with a 1937 copyright date.[1]
Detroit Photographic Co., Church of Ste. Anne de Beaupré, photochrom, 1901. Library of Congress. No known restrictions on publication. A Québec Sainte-Anne of the period; the researcher cited above thinks the tune is named for a different place, Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue.
Montréal fiddlers put the tune on record first. According to the Traditional Tune Archive, Willie Ringuette recorded it in 1927 as the fourth part of a quadrille. Joseph Allard followed in 1930, and Victor issued his recording under two titles, "Reel de Ste-Anne" and "Reel des esquimaults." Isidore Soucy recorded it soon afterward as "Reel lune de miel" (Honeymoon Reel).[1] Allard (1873–1947) was a prolific recording fiddler who began recording for Victor's Bluebird label in 1928 and made 75 78s over the next 18 years.[2] The radio and television fiddler Don Messer later popularized the tune, and he printed it as "Sainte Agathe" in his 1948 collection Way Down East.[1] On Prince Edward Island, players gradually dressed it up to suit local step dancing.[1]
Mark Wilson of Rounder Records traced the tune's popularity in the United States to the 1950s, when Nashville fiddlers such as Tommy Jackson recorded it.[1] It has since become part of the repertoire of most Missouri fiddlers, and it has also entered the Irish traditional repertoire.[1] Among mountain dulcimer players, it appears in Stephen Seifert's Join the Jam, a collection of popular tunes from the dulcimer jamming tradition.[3]
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