“St. Anne’s Reel” is a reel in D, played by fiddlers in Québec, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and Cape Breton and well beyond Canada. The earliest known recording is by the Montreal fiddler Willie Ringuette, who in 1927 recorded it as the fourth part of a medley, “Quadrille du loup garou.” Joseph Allard (1873–1947), who had begun recording for Victor in 1928, cut it as a piece in its own right around 1930. It appeared as “Reel de Ste-Anne” on Victor 263675, backed with “Reel Jacques-Cartier,” and under the title “Reel des esquimaults.” Isidore Soucy recorded it as “Reel lune de miel.” The Prince Edward Island fiddle archive Bowing Down Home traces the version now heard across much of North America, Britain and Ireland to Allard’s record.
A recording is not a birthplace. Allard grew up partly in the United States, won fiddle contests across New England and did not settle near Montreal until 1917, so the tune may have come to him from musicians there. The name is uncertain too. Jean Duval, in his 2018 study of Allard’s music, thinks it most likely refers to Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue at the western end of the island of Montreal. The French title “La Reel de la Baie Ste. Anne” points instead to one of the bays of that name in eastern Canada, such as Baie Sainte Anne near Miramichi Bay in New Brunswick. The earliest printing found is in the Jarman collections of the 1930s and 1940s, where the arrangement is credited to John Burt with a copyright date of 1937. Francis O’Neill’s older reels “The Factory Lass” and “The Home Made Reel” share some of its melody.
Radio carried it into the Maritimes. Either Allard’s record or live versions of the tune reached Prince Edward Island in the 1930s on broadcasts from CHNC in New Carlisle, on the Gaspé Peninsula. By the late 1930s George Chappelle was playing it on CFCY in Charlottetown, and Don Messer and His Islanders recorded it in March 1947. The next year Messer printed it as “Sainte Agathe” in his collection Way Down East. Fiddlers in the western part of the Island reshaped the tune to suit their step dancers, and those changes gradually spread east across the province.
In the United States, according to the fiddle scholar Mark Wilson, its popularity dates from the 1950s, when Nashville fiddlers such as Tommy Jackson recorded it. It became a staple for most Missouri fiddlers, through Cyril Stinnett among others. It may have arrived there over Canadian AM radio, or with contest fiddlers returning from Weiser, Idaho, and Canada in the 1960s. Irish musicians have recorded it often. As the Fiddler’s Companion puts it, American fiddlers asked for a Canadian tune “generally will play St. Anne’s first.”
