Annotation:Miss Mary Beaton

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MISS MARY BEATON. Canadian, Jig. Canada, Cape Breton. A Major. Standard tuning (fiddle). AABB’. Composed by Cape Breton fiddler and composer Dan R. MacDonald (1911-1976) for a member of the Beaton family of Mabou, famous for numerous Cape Breton style musicians.

Mary Beaton was fiddler-composer Donald Angus Beaton's (1912–1981) sister, herself a fiddler and a merchant in the town of Mabou. Archie Neil Chisholm remembered:

If someone possesses a musical ability, that’s something people will mention, even today. Another rarity in the early days was to see a woman playing a violin. I can remember that picnic that I mentioned already of a girl by the name of Mary Beaton from Mabou who came down and suddenly everybody was rushing towards the stage to see this beautiful girl playing Scotch music and laying it right on for the square sets. I think she could have had any man in Cape Breton that day. The fact that she could play that fiddle. Now today there are almost as many women as men playing.

Source for notated version:

Printed sources: Cameron (Trip to Windsor), 1994; p. 42.

Recorded sources: