The bearer of traditions who serves as a link

Collector of pieces from the repertoire of the elders of his village, teacher of traditional music at the CEGEP… and active member of the groups De Temps Antan and La Bottine Souriante: at 52 years old, Éric Beaudry is a pillar of the trad scene in Lanaudière. The Press met him at his house.

On the exterior wall of the plank barn, built on the Beaudry family land in Saint-Côme, some twenty shovels and other tools are lined up like so many trophies for this family descended from a line of lumberjacks and log drivers.

On the ground floor, the father, Denis, has always stored his trapping equipment. Éric Beaudry’s kingdom is upstairs. With his brother Simon, he transformed the attic of the old hay barn into a recording studio. “About thirty albums have been recorded here,” says the musician, sitting in front of the console of the Studio de la Côte jaune.

We were described as a man of few words, a silent man who expresses himself mainly through his guitar, his bouzouki and his podorythmics. The one who opened the doors of his creative lair to us is, on the contrary, a passionate man who spares no effort to talk about trad music and his corner of the country.

Above all, he is one of those who work to keep traditional music alive in Lanaudière. Since 2022, the musician has also acted as a go-between by teaching guitar in the traditional music program at Cégep de Joliette. “Thanks to those who came before them, students can dream of touring the world with their music.”

In 2008, he also founded the Trad Violin Camp with his accomplices André Brunet and Stéphanie Lépine. Nearly a hundred participants of all levels – and from all over the world – learn the joys of the Quebec violin repertoire for a week. “On Friday evening, the students are on stage to launch the Mémoire & Racines festival in Joliette.”

Held from July 23 to 28, the festival dedicated to traditional music is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year.^e anniversary; the musician from Saint-Côme will be one of the headliners with five appearances on the agenda. “Those who don’t like me will be tired of seeing me,” says, with a wry smile, the one who was on stage at the very first festival.

De Temps Antan will celebrate its 20th anniversary (and the recent release of its album I have pain in my folklore). The group La Bottine Souriante, for which Éric Beaudry plays (among other things!) the mandolin, the Irish bouzouki and the guitar, will be on stage to close the festival. Le Cômier will also accompany a bombarde player from Brittany. And he plans to jam until dawn again this year with the musicians and spectators present.

“It’s an intergenerational festival that allows young musicians to meet their mentors and play with them. And it’s always packed with kids!”

Trad in the veins

Even though, as a teenager, Éric Beaudry swore by “big rock and punk music”, he quickly realized that trad music was running through his veins. His grandfather Joseph is a well-known fiddler in Saint-Côme. His aunt Jacqueline sings, his uncle Roland plays the accordion. His father, who occasionally sings, had a good friend Gilles Cantin (former singer and guitarist of La Bottine Souriante)… In short, Éric Beaudry didn’t fall into the pot as a child; he was born into it!

But for this father of two, love at first sight really happened at a Manigance concert in Sainte-Béatrix, while he was studying music at CEGEP. “It threw me on my back! I said to myself: ‘I want to create a band like that!’”

With friends from CEGEP, Éric Beaudry founded La Galvaude in the early 1990s.

Directory Collector

For Éric Beaudry, this search for pieces to perform marks the beginning of a new vocation: that of self-taught ethnologist. In the early 2000s, he collected the traditional repertoire of the people of Saint-Côme to save them from oblivion. He did the same with a fiddler from the village of Grande-Vallée, in Gaspésie, Édouard “Ti-douard” Richard, with whom he recorded an album. “His repertoire was very colorful and quite difficult to play. I learned the piece from him.” The Rachouidine. The title is actually theIrish Weddingpatented in Quebec style!”

In Saint-Côme, this music graduate recorded some 500 songs by 16 seniors, aged 70 to 92, during a very busy fall.

In this old forest village where many men were log drivers or lumberjacks, traditional songs often embroider around the same themes. “They talk about religion in a satirical tone, about marriage, about family celebrations… They were a lot of lumberjacks’ complaints, songs from the work sites that the men sang to keep themselves bored during the winter in the forest camps, in the end of Saint-Michel-des-Saints.”

The presence of Irish and Acadian families in this sector of Lanaudière also largely contributed to the popularity of fiddle tunes, call-and-response songs and call sets at the turn of the last century.

How can we explain that even today, traditional music and song are so alive, in Lanaudière in general and in Saint-Côme in particular? For Éric Beaudry, the answer is in one word: pride.

“In Saint-Côme, many families have preserved their traditional songs, thanks in particular to the women who transcribed the lyrics. People are proud of them. At one time, there were seven or eight trad groups in the village, including Hommage aux aînés, which still fills its halls with every show…” It’s no surprise that Saint-Côme was named Quebec’s capital of traditional song in 2008! And Éric Beaudry works hard to keep this title – and the traditions associated with it – relevant.

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