The Dances Down Home\nJoe Cormier\nRounder Records\n"Cheticamp, a French-Acadian village of three thousand souls, is situated on the northwest shore of Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia."\nThus begins Anselm Cormier's essay about life in Atlantic Canada that appears in The Dances Down Home, a collection of jigs and reels by Anselm's brother, violinist Joe Cormier.\nThe essay, which originally appeared in the liner notes for Joe Cormier's first album for Rounder Records in 1974, details how the Cormier family grew and flourished in a land settled by Acadian outcasts and, later, Scottish immigrants. The village and the surrounding landscape were, and still are, beautiful, Anselm writes, but life in often-frigid Nova Scotia during the Depression was tough.\nIt was from that stark background that Cape Breton fiddle music developed and where Joe Cormier learned how to play. "The love of music and fiddling," Anselm writes, "came easy to Joe because our house was one where musicians gathered."\nThe Dances Down Home reflects Cormier's brilliant talents and captures the soul of Scottish Canada. The album is one of a projected 30 Heritage compilations released by Rounder to mark the company's 30th year of operation. The collection was culled from currently out-of-print material Cormier recorded for Rounder during a quarter-century.\nAbly supported by Eddie Irwin on piano and Edmond Boudreau on guitar and bass, Cormier's violin ranges from soothing to haunting over the 20 songs in the set. Cormier, who now lives in Waltham, Mass., and rarely plays for large groups of people, evokes images of lonely fishermen yearning for home and close-knit communities gathering to dance on a Saturday night in an attempt to ignore the cold of the North Atlantic.\nOn an even broader scale, this collection of Cormier's music reminds us that North American folk traditions extend to music made north of the border, where the musical heritage is just as deep as the ones found in the Mississippi Delta or the mountains of Kentucky.\n
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