Great Big Sea
Aggressive Folk!
by Tom Nelligan

There's nothing particularly unusual about the sight of a dim, scruffy rock club packed with a primarily college-age audience who are on their feet and pumping their arms as they loudly sing along with four black-clad guys on stage. But it's a different story if those guys are singing an unaccompanied arrangement of a centuries-old sea chantey.

Through a combination of talent and perseverance, the Newfoundland quartet called Great Big Sea have succeeded in bringing the sounds and rhythms of the Anglo-Celtic traditional music of their remote and rocky island to the rock clubs of North America and Europe. They've built a large, loyal following among rock audiences that's almost unparalleled these days for a band that's so deeply rooted in tradition. At the same time, they're equally at home at folk festivals, where crowds accustomed to quieter music also find themselves feeling an irresistible urge to get up and dance. They've won a string of East Coast Music Awards and Juno nominations, and their major-label CD releases have gone platinum in Canada. With strong harmonies, high-power instrumentals, hook-filled songs, and a large measure of rambunctious stage presence and crowd-pleasing charm, Great Big Sea is building a reputation as one of North America's most distinctive and exciting bands, folk or otherwise.

Great Big Sea consists of four singers and multi-instrumentalists who all grew up on the Avalon Peninsula of eastern Newfoundland: Alan Doyle (guitar, bouzouki, mandolin), Bob Hallett (button accordion, fiddle, whistles), Sean McCann (bodhrán, percussion, guitar), and Darrell Power (bass, guitar, bones). They met up about eight years ago in the province's capital city, St. John's. "We all went through the English program or the arts program at Memorial University," Doyle explained last July, between sets at the Green River Festival in Greenfield, Massachusetts. "But really, the biggest meeting point was downtown St. John, where there was an active music scene with a couple dozen players in different bands. Bob once said he thinks we all hooked up because we were the four most ambitious."

"Yeah," laughed Hallett. "At the time we formed this band, there were a dozen bands playing Newfoundland traditional music, more of a Celtic bent than anything else. We had all passed through several of them. At the end of the day we were the four guys who were probably prepared to sacrifice the most and work the hardest. Not necessarily the four most talented."

All four members also shared the background of growing up in an environment where traditional music was a regular part of life. "We developed a love for this music largely from our families," Hallett explained. "Darrell's father was a renowned singer in Outer Cove who played in many bands and made a couple albums. Both of my parents sang; my father made albums, as well. Alan's father was in a band with all his brothers, and both of his parents sang and played instruments. We're talking traditional music here, not Hank Williams. And Sean came from a really traditional family in a place called Gull Island, a fairly isolated community in the northeastern part of Newfoundland. His family is full of stories and songs and music. We grew up on the same continent as everybody else, but the fact is that our families did really preserve and protect this stuff. We felt a certain responsibility, if not to go into it professionally, at least to take an interest in it."

At the same time, there was never any chance that they would become traditional purists. Folk and pop music were blending freely in Newfoundland long before the advent of contemporary folk-rock. "In Newfoundland, the divisions weren't there," Hallett continued. "Traditional music has always sat very comfortably with other kinds of music. Our families played and sang hymns, and traditional songs, and Elvis songs, and they just didn't make these distinctions. There were a lot of artists like Figgy Duff and the Wonderful Grand Band who were making a very good living, playing not the same kind of fusion we do but coming from the same basic neighborhood of taking Newfoundland material and integrating it with various forms of pop music. And they've been doing that for the last 30 years in Newfoundland.

"Cape Breton has a very orthodox view of what traditional music is, whereas in Newfoundland that kind of orthodoxy doesn't exist. We don't get the kind of crap that poor old Ashley MacIsaac gets about 'Oh, you're ruining the tradition' because the tradition in Newfoundland is not staid or static. The fact that you're doing it is the main thing, not how you're doing it."

Many people in Great Big Sea's audience, particularly the younger ones, are hearing Newfoundland sea chanteys and ballads for the first time anywhere. "One of the feathers in our hats so far," Doyle noted with pride, "is that we've been able to bring people to folk music, and to bring people to folk festivals that would never normally go — to a certain degree bring in a whole new age group, and a whole new set of opinions, and whole new set of limits about what folk music can be about. As a band that plays pop songs and folk songs, each of them taking elements from the other, I think we've created a little bridge that people can use to link the two together, and all of a sudden folk music doesn't have to be in smoky academic study halls — it can be on the same stage with American rock, or blues, or whatever."

A predecessor group called Rankin Street, which included Hallett, McCann, and Power, evolved into Great Big Sea in 1993 with the addition of Doyle. "As I had a semi-operable van," he recalled, "it was a marriage made in heaven."

"Goal number one was to make a record," Doyle explained. "Of all the other bands kicking around town — there was a bunch playing trad or semi-trad music — we decided the easiest, quickest, and the only way to set ourselves apart was to record a really good CD. So we sat down and for about $700 did a CD that we're still proud of because it had great songs on it, primarily. We played about a dozen gigs, if that, and then we recorded. We started in March, and by the time that summer came around, we had an album out, which was unheard of at the time." That early independent release was simply called Great Big Sea, the lead track being the song from which the band took its name.

"Goal number two was the obvious thing. We're from an island. Get off the island and onto the mainland, where the gigs aren't 27 hours drive apart. So an apprenticeship in Halifax started in 1994."

"We'd go to Halifax for three weeks," said Hallett. "We'd play every single night, if not twice a day. We'd go back to St. John's for two weeks and play every night, and then go back to Halifax. We did that for months. It's something rock 'n' roll bands can't do, go out on the road like that and play four sets. We didn't make a lot of money, but we made enough to pay the rent, and everybody ate. I remember the first year of the band I made $4200, but we survived. For so many rock bands, there are these horrible tours, driving from L.A. to New York and back in a station wagon, whereas we'd go every night to the same spot and basically in front of the same people. It was a great learning curve because we had to play so much material every night to entertain these people.

"We had a lot of fun, and we learned a lot, and we learned a lot about each other. The four of us shared a hotel room for a month at a time. And we were really stretching ourselves as musicians because we didn't have four hours of material. Who does? What are you going to do after the first hour? We really learned a lot quickly about each other, and how to play, and how to entertain. We did this for two years every night of the week, and we learned how to get an audience's attention no matter what was going on, no matter how bad the sound was or how little they knew about us, or heard us, or liked us. We learned how to stand there and command their attention."

The band built a strong word-of-mouth reputation based on their exciting live shows. Meanwhile the self-produced Great Big Sea disc was selling an impressive 20,000 copies, enough to lead to their signing with a major label, Warner Music Canada. "We garnered their attention by pestering them," Hallett says with a laugh. "We were lucky in that the Rankin Family had sold 400,000 copies of Fare Thee Well Love, which was largely a traditional album, a good chunk of which was in Scottish Gaelic. So you had this precedent, and every label in Canada started looking for their own Atlantic Canadian act. Obviously we didn't fit anyone's idea of what was going to make the Top 10 in Canada, but I guess we did have a track record for selling a lot of records independently, especially for a band that lived a three and a half day drive from Toronto, where everything happens.

"We hemmed and hawed a lot — what are we giving up? — but ultimately it was the right thing to do. We never would have been able to assemble the kind of marketing power they have in a million years. We could have toured till our heads fell off and we still wouldn't be able to phone up the major daily in a town and get an interview. It certainly wasn't for lack of trying."

In 1995 Warner Canada released Up, which combined rollicking arrangements of traditional songs like "Mari-Mac" and "The Jolly Butcher" with band originals like the gentle love song "Fast As I Can." It was followed in 1997 by Play, which had an even stronger collection of material, including GBS concert mainstays like the traditional "Jakey's Gin" and "The Night Pat Murphy Died," a couple of sea chanteys, and pub-shaking originals like "Ordinary Day." Their first U.S. release was 1998's Rant & Roar, a compilation of tracks from Up and Play.

The band's most recent disc is Turn, which continues the mix of traditional and original songs. Doyle commented on its thematic track: "There's a song on it that Sean wrote called 'Feel It Turn' that's sort of the title track. Lyrically it's a really cool expression of optimism and hope for the '90s state of a very traditional place called Newfoundland. It kind of speaks of an inherent change for the better that we all hope for, and in a very un-corny way explains the optimism of Newfoundlanders, and young Newfoundlanders especially. Musically we're kind of proud of it because we bring out folk instruments into a completely different world by multilayering them — again, not by adding drums and synths, but by finding cool ways to record folk instruments. And vocally, we learned to sing in a completely different way from what we had done in the past — we listened to a whole bunch of Beach Boys records and learned a whole bunch of tricks. We had a chorus that has one word in it, and we made that really powerful and passionate. I know we're really proud of that one."

While many listeners would categorize Great Big Sea as a folk-rock group, the band doesn't see itself that way. "We're not a pop band," says Doyle. "I'd say we're a really aggressive folk band that happens to be popular. I came up with that one as a reaction to 'Celtic rock', bands that are based in rock 'n' roll but have Celtic tinges, or pop bands like the Corrs [who do] pop songs that happen to have fiddles or guitars in them. Our music is based in folk music with acoustic instruments. Most of the energy those other bands put into folk music they do by adding rock 'n' roll elements instead of just playing the instruments harder and singing louder."

"We keep coming up with new descriptions," Hallett added. "That's a question we get asked a lot, and we keep changing our minds about it. I used to use 'post-modern folk' for a long time, but that's too university. We think of ourselves primarily as a Newfoundland folk band that happens to play a lot of their own songs.

"We're not coming from a rock 'n' roll background or a rock point of view. I look at what people like Del McCoury and Steve Earle are doing, and I see a lot more sympathy between that and what we're doing than with a lot of folk-rock bands. We're not looking to the big sound of guitar amps and drums to fuel the power of the music; we're trying to find the power that's inherent in this stuff. The rhythm in Newfoundland music is very powerful, very fast compared to the Irish tradition, and often very simple because there's so much emphasis on speed. The faster and harder, the better. These are the rhythms that we're trying to bring to the front, not the 4/4 of blues-based rock 'n' roll."

Great Big Sea's live setlists and CDs feature a roughly even split between traditional and original songs, along with a few clever covers, like a frantic version of REM's "End Of The World." Hallett explained how they choose the traditional material that they'll present to their audience: "It's tough. We're performing these songs in the context of an audience whose ears are tuned to popular music. So we'll probably never record a lot of our favorite songs, because we know they'll be wasted in the context of where we're performing. We just play them for each other at parties and sessions.

"But they have to be able to work within that [pop] format. So they're songs that had to have a strong chorus or we had to be able to create a strong chorus, because most of them don't have it in the first place. They had to be strong lyrically. A lot of traditional songs are very diffuse. It's not easy to take 27 verses and make five of them, and you probably shouldn't do it anyway. The other thing is, we always try to include as much material as possible that is, if not previously unheard, certainly underplayed. There's a lot of songs in Newfoundland that aren't really widely known in the North American tradition. So we've leaned on them as much as we can.

"We were lucky, too, in that in Darrell we had a guy whose family knew a lot of songs that were completely unknown. Songs like 'Excursion Around the Bay' and 'JP's Jig' just don't exist anywhere besides in Darrell's family. So we were lucky to have that huge resource behind us. We can never record enough of them, because they're so delightful."

A striking part of any Great Big Sea show is their strong four-part harmony singing, particularly on powerful unaccompanied sea chanteys like "General Taylor" and "Donkey Riding." That wasn't part of their initial plan, Doyle suggested. "None of us would shut up," he said with a laugh. "I don't think it was our goal in the beginning to be a singing band. It was a delightful discovery, that. Everybody figured out something to sing while the other guy was singing lead. To this day we have no idea what proper four-part harmony is in the schooled fashion. We sing whatever comes naturally and then fix whatever we don't like."

Aside from their music, a contributing reason for Great Big Sea's success is the endless touring schedule that keeps the band on the road most of the time. "We don't tour, we just play," Doyle said with another smile. "There's only been one GBS tour — it started in 1993. We've been averaging 200 to 225 shows a year over the past two or three years, which, in all honesty, is too much. But we get so many cool offers to do cool stuff that we just found it hard to say no."

"Unlike a lot of folk-based bands, we have this dual career," Hallett noted. "In North America and in Europe, we're one of the better known — for lack of being modest — folk bands, and we play that circuit of festivals. Also in Canada and increasingly in the U.S., we have this career as a pop crossover band, and to maintain that category we play considerably more concerts than we would if we were doing 20 folk clubs a year. In the fall we'll do 70 or 80 gigs just in Canada, some of which are pretty big. So to maintain our career at that level requires a serious work commitment. Plus, we're trying really hard to develop the band in the States, so that means a lot of touring. We'll do over a hundred dates in the States this year. Plus, we worked really hard to develop our career in Europe, even going back to our days as an indie band. We've worked really hard to develop markets in places like Germany and Denmark without any label support, really, so we hate to let that go, either. So by the time you parcel it up, it's goodbye holidays.

"We're not saying the road is so hard. We're not whining about it. We're lucky to be able to do this. To be able to play in front of an audience every night is a privilege that many musicians don't have. We're very grateful for it."

In spite of their considerable success in the pop world, it's clear that the members of Great Big Sea feel most proud of what they've done to preserve and popularize Newfoundland's traditional music. "When a career is over, it's those songs that I'm most fond of," said Hallett. "Not necessarily the best recorded ones, or the ones we played the best, or whatever. It's the ones that are going to live a little bit longer and not going to be lost because they exist in this permanent form; that didn't just kind of disappear into the winds when the person who taught them to us passed away. There's a bunch of those.

"There's one called 'Irish Paddy' on our first record. Myself and Sean heard it at a party at a place called Fallwell Island, a very obscure place in Newfoundland, very isolated, and it stuck in our heads. We didn't know who sang it or the name of the song or anything, and we looked for years. We finally found someone else who knew the words. We were really proud to record that one. And there's the song called 'Jakey's Gin' that Darrell's father forgot he knew. Someone gave Darrell a tape of his father singing at a party, and Darrell said, 'Hey, Dad, you know this song?' And he said, 'Oh, yes, right!' It's a unique St. John's song. We brought that one to life again, and we do it every night, often close our shows with it. It's wonderful to be able to play that for people and see that the song will live forever."

"It's a good feeling to be a successful band," Doyle added. "I think any pop band or whatever could get that. But it's a really good feeling to think that you've made a little slice of Newfoundlandia that will last for a couple generations."