It is funny how Newfoundland music has evolved over the past 20 years. Whether we intended it or not, Great Big Sea has had a vast influence on how the music is presented here. Our evolved pub band format has itself become an archetype. Like young people everywhere, younger musicians see this state of affairs as permanent. They do not realize that the three-and four-piece pub line-up of guitar, bass, bodhran and fiddle/accordion/whistle is a recent phenomena.

When we started doing this 20 years ago, there wasn’t really anyone else taking this approach in our part of the world, apart from our colleagues and competitors, the Irish Descendants. Other bands existed – Stogger Tight, and later the Masterless Men. However, they were casual, part-time outfits, and based themselves largely on the Irish Rovers, a band that for whatever reason we had hardly heard of. Neither of those acts played much, the members were a lot older than us, and had real jobs. Our model was a bit different - the full on approach of shouters like Fergus O’Byrne, married with the in-your-face performance and DIY attitude approach of my punk bands, and later, the  well-rehearsed approach of Alan’s rock bands. The only other serious folk act in Newfoundland at the time were Rawlins Cross, and they were for all intents and purposes a rock band with bagpipes, and had little time for our pub heroics.

Now there are a dozen bands here pursuing our model, (such as it is), with God knows how many out there in Ft. McMurray, Cambridge, Ottawa and other centres of the Newfoundland diaspora. Yet, like everything else in Newfoundland culture, it was all a bit of a fluke. We have often talked about how influential bands like Ryan’s Fancy and the Wonderful Grand Band were, but by the time we were teenagers, no one was really listening to them. By far the most popular and influential Newfoundland band was Simani. If their influence had been maintained, or if they had been a little bit younger or more charismatic, then it all might have been very different indeed.

Simani have faded off the radar in Newfoundland, and they never made it onto the radar anywhere else in the country. For a time, however, their music was by far the most popular of any group in the province, and their distinctive sound created a whole musical movement. The band was a duo, actually, made up of Sim Savoury and Bud Davidge. (‘Sim and I’, in other words, the sort of pun much loved by Newfoundlanders). Davidge sang, and played guitar, while Savoury played accordion, mandolin, and also played bass pedals and ran the PA. Simani also embraced the tick-tock sound of the drum machine, and popularized the device among Newfoundland performers. They started playing in 1977, and made their first album, Salt Water Cowboys, shortly after.

It was an instant hit, and the two went onto record a dozen more albums over the next 15 years or so. They had a very distinctive sound. Unlike the groups that GBS has spawned, Simani seemed either oblivious or just uninterested in pop music, Irish acts like the Clancey Brothers, or anything else that came out of the 60s folk revival. Their model was simple – classic country, a la Hank Williams, Johnny Cash and Ray Price, married with Newfoundland-style button accordion. Davidge was a fine singer, with a rich baritone, and Sim was a great arranger and instrumentalist, with a good ear for a hook. They wrote almost all of their own material, and apart from a few instrumental sets, rarely played anything I would call traditional. The sort of country music they loved had (and has) a huge following in Newfoundland, and Simani was one of the first local bands to get airplay alongside the more easily absorbed mainstream North American acts. They did not tour a lot, but their tapes sold in the tens of thousands, so well in fact that the two set up a very successful recording studio and tape manufacturing factory, both in the tiny fishing villages on the isolated south coast where they lived. Dozens of other bands followed their model, many of whom are still going strong today, still packing them into outport lounges, with their blend of high-twang country and soft, sentimental accordion. They played for a largely older audience, but one that absolutely loved them.

Let me say that I was often doubtful about Simani; they embraced a level of Newfoundland cliché that made me very uncomfortable, and their explicit encouragement of the term ‘newfie’ pissed me off.  Like a lot of older Newfoundlanders, they were fine with it, and seemed oblivious to the negative connotations the term carries. They did not like St. John’s very much, hardly ever toured here, and made no secret for their dislike of  townie folk pretensions.  Their heavy use of drum machines was irritating, made worse by the hundreds of imitators who jumped on their band wagon.

That said, they wrote and recorded a couple of some great songs, songs that deserve a place on any Ipod. Their best is the ‘Mummer’s Song’, a Xmas song that dominates radio stations and house parties around here at the Yuletide. It is very, very good, but it is also a novelty song, and well outside their normal repertoire.

More interesting to me was their song ‘The Wreck of the Marion’. Shipwreck songs are common in Newfoundland archival collections, but they have pretty much evaporated from local songwriting. It was left to Simani to write the last of the great ones. The song is about an incident which took place within living memory, when a small Newfoundland banking schooner and it’s skipper, both from the south coast community of St. Jacques, ran into trouble with an aggressive captain from the nearby French island of St. Pierre. The Marion disappeared after a dockside confrontation in St. Pierre, and local people believed that the two captains had settled their accounts with a battle at sea, a battle which left no trace of the Marion.

The song has clever lyrics, an unusual story, and unlike most others of its genre, an anthemic chorus. It is the only song of Simani’s which continues to be sung and recorded by younger bands. It deserves the tribute. It has also stayed with me for another reason. Around the time GBS was getting rolling, I was visiting with an elderly family member, who came from the same area as both Simani and the Marion. She remembered the disappearance of the Marion very well, and had mourned the crew with others from her community.  For me, it was a surprise, a sudden shift sideways, into someone else’s reality. Up to then, all the lyrics of the traditional songs I knew pretty much existed in a parallel world – I loved them, but all the talk of ‘ships in sail’ and ‘milk-white steeds’ and what-not really had little to do with my life. For Aunt Essie, however, this song was part of her own story. Traditional music sometimes has that ability – it can open a window you didn’t know existed and draw a connection with the past, in a way which just does not happen elsewhere in life. ‘The Wreck of the Marion’ was original, but Simani wrote their song so well it both embraced and became part of the tradition, and in doing so, made the circle whole. We should all be so lucky.