Nationally recognized French-Canadian fiddler Simon St. Pierre will return to the Rangeley Lakes Region Logging Museum’s Logging Festival on Friday and Saturday, July 24 and 25. With his friend and fellow musician Joe Pomerleau of New Hampshire, St. Pierre will play several times over the two-day celebration.

Born in Quebec in 1930, St. Pierre loved to listen to his father and brother play the fiddle. “My older brother was real good. I learned a lot from him. He used to play a lot for square dances, weddings, and he played at home a lot. … He worked outside in the woods, and he come every weekend and when he played that fiddle, it made me so happy,” St. Pierre said. “I love it so much.”

St. Pierre was about 15 years old when he began to play at about the same time he began working in lumber camps. He traded tunes with musicians from across eastern Canada. In 1952, he married his wife, Liza, and together they have worked as independent sawmill operators. He moved to northern Maine in 1957 and in several years was able to move his family, obtain a portable sawmill and make his living from his own sawmill again.
In Maine, he continued to play the fiddle, performing sometimes at square dances and weddings, but also at festivals where he was introduced to Irish music and bluegrass. He became particularly skilled with old waltzes, reels and two-step dance melodies, accompanying many of his tunes with the intricate foot clogging, frapper du pied, commonly practiced by French-Canadian fiddlers. He also taught himself how to make violins.

In 1983, St. Pierre was awarded the nation’s highest honor in the traditional arts, the National Heritage Fellowship Award. Pomerleau and his son, Gary, traveled with St. Pierre for the festivities in Washington, D.C. “It’s no fun to just play by yourself,” Simon said.”You got to have somebody to play with you. Once in a while I play my tunes on the weekend. I’m really a happy man down here in that little corner of the wilderness. I love it.”

St. Pierre and Pomerleau will play in the afternoon July 24 and 25 at the Logging Museum on Route  16, one mile east of Rangeley, and at 7 p.m. July 24 at the Church of the Good Shepherd on Main Street.