8 minute read
Tradition Gets Ugly
Tradition Gets Ugly
How "traditional" is the ugly stick in Newfoundland and Labrador music?
By Dale Jarvis
"Things are not like it was,"
Granny might say as she sits in her chair. She’s right (Nan always is, by the way). Things do change, and we see it happening all the time. Our musical traditions are a good example of this: the old tradition of set or square dances faded as musical tastes changed, and as jukeboxes appeared in the 1950s, more people had access to commercial music.
Robert Carter Photo
Yet some things stay the same, and home-made music is as popular as it ever was. If you’re having a time or a down-home kitchen party, someone will eventually bring out the ugly stick. Now, pretty much anyone in Newfoundland and Labrador could give you a lecture on the ugly stick. In its simplest form, it is a percussion instrument made out of recycled materials from the kitchen and shed: an old mop handle or hockey stick with a heavy boot for a base, and bottle caps, tin cans, or other noise makers nailed or screwed to the pole. The boot is thumped on the ground, while the stick is banged with a smaller notched stick held in the other hand. It’s not pretty, hence the name, but it is loud.
Daphne Izer Photo
But how and when did the ugly stick become an unofficial provincial musical instrument? Is it truly “traditional”? I figured if I wanted to find out, I better ask an expert.
Mike Madigan of The Sharecroppers is a well-known Newfoundland musician, entertainer, retired educator and ugly stick enthusiast. If you go looking for ugly stick videos on YouTube, chances are you’ll find one of Mike showing off his skills or giving a lesson, so I reached out to him to get the inside shake, rattle and roll on ugly sticks.
Sheri Cornish Photo
The first time Mike saw an ugly stick, or something like one, was around 1975. He and a fellow teacher were backpacking in Europe and found themselves in the little town of Hamelin, Germany (the same town made famous by the Pied Piper). In the centre of Hamelin there was a kiosk, and inside of that was a Bavarian band playing music.
”This guy had this thing on a stick,” Mike recalls. “It didn’t have bottle caps, but it had washers of some sort. It had a horn on it, and it had a bell that he would ring. It didn’t have a boot on the bottom, and it was much taller than the average ugly stick – it was probably seven feet high. He was just banging that and keeping the beat with a stick. It didn’t even have a stick with grooves, like we do nowadays in Newfoundland, but was keeping this incredible beat to these trombones and tubas, playing that Oom-Pah-Pah stuff.
Mike Madigan
“It never even dawned on me to call it a percussion instrument. I just remember saying ‘that guy is keeping the beat really good.’ That was my first exposure ever to what nowadays we call an ugly stick, but back then I didn’t know what they called it.”
It wasn’t until several years later, around 1982, that Mike first saw a Newfoundland ugly stick in the wild, so to speak. It was at the Newfoundland Emporium on Broadway in Corner Brook, owned by Dave Ledrew.
“That first one, it was an elaborate contraption... It had a wooden shoe that went up and down on a spring, and it had a million bottle caps and different horns and everything. I couldn’t play it at all; it was just too big and bulky! But Dave Ledrew lent me another ugly stick that I have to this day. It’s in my shed, and I play that a lot. It’s got a doll’s head on the top, and the kids get a great kick when you tap on it. Everybody gets a great laugh out of it.”
Doris Curtis Photo
Today, you’ll often see the ugly stick described as a “traditional” Newfoundland instrument, but Mike’s experience of first seeing ugly sticks in the 1970s and 1980s is fairly typical of stories told by other musicians. Folk singer Anita Best told me that a man named Winston Stanley made the first one she ever saw, sometime in the late 1970s. I was told by a reliable source that Buddy Wasisname and the Other Fellers got their first ugly stick in 1983, when it was presented to the band by the man who had made it, in Charlottetown, PEI. One person told me that the first time they saw an ugly stick played was by the school janitor in Torbay, sometime around 1989.
The Newfoundland and Labrador Folk Festival Guide for 1987 featured an ugly stick player on the cover. It was Winston Stanley, the same man who made the ugly stick Anita Best remembered. At the time, the organizers thought that festival-goers might not know what one was, so they included the following explanation in the guide:
Who is the fellow on your front cover and what in the .... is that he’s playing? We thought you would never ask. His name is Winston Stanley, a resident of the Goulds, near St. John’s. The object he’s hitting with the shorter stick is just about the most unique folk instrument you’ll see or hear played on any folk festival stage anywhere this summer. It’s called the “ugly stick,” which consists of a mop with bottle caps and felt tins attached to the stick and topped off with a 48- ounce Avon apple juice can. When the short stick is applied in the proper manner, this unique folk instrument can resemble the sound of an entire set of drums and blends in very well with folk music.
Our Australian Cousin The Lagerphone
We might be able to claim the name “ugly stick” as a local invention, but similar percussion instruments were known in Europe as far back as the 1500s. The French Foreign Legion marching band had a similar instrument called a “Chinese hat,” while British Army marching bands used a stick covered with bells called a “Jingling Johnny.” Today in England, folk musicians still play a version of the ugly stick called a mendoza or monkey stick. Other names include thunderstick, Ompa-stick, gazunkaphone, pogocello and clad-hopper. The German musician that Mike Madigan saw in Hamelin might have been playing the Teufelsgeige – the ominously named “Devil’s fiddle.”
If any place matches the fiery passion we have for the Devil’s fiddle, it must be Australia. There, it is known as a “lagerphone,” after the beer or lager bottle caps used in its construction. There are also similar Aboriginal instruments made using shells instead of lager caps. Bush bands playing Australian folk music have been using lagerphones since the 1950s.
Legend credits one of the first lagerphones to a nameless travelling rabbitpoisoner (rabbits were introduced to Australia and are a menace to local species). Our friendly rabbiter showed up at an open-mic Red Cross fundraiser in New South Wales in 1952, bringing with him a broom handle adorned with old bottle tops. With piano accompaniment, he rattled himself up a prize and vanished into the night. One audience member was so impressed that he made his own, paired up with a button accordionist and started a band. The rest is history!
Other Relatives to the Ugly Stick
British Army Jingling Johnny
English Monkey Stick
German Teufelsgeige
By the 1990s, the popularity of the instrument started to grow. Musician Sandy Morris remembers seeing an ugly stick being played at the Folk of the Sea concert in 1992, following the cod moratorium. “Before that – nada!” he says.
From 1992 on, the reputation of the ugly stick only grew larger, and tourists were soon spotted trying to shove them into overhead compartments on flights back home. When I interviewed stick-maker Grenfell Letto for Downhome in 2012, he told me he was making around 150 large ugly sticks and 200-300 mini ugly sticks a year for the tourist market. That’s a lot of bottle caps! But why the popularity?
Ruth Reist Photo
“When you have a Newfoundland time,” explains Mike, “you want to have someone that can keep a really nice beat to the accordion music.” An ugly stick is easy to pick up and play, making it popular for kitchen parties; yet in the hands of an experienced percussionist, it can be used to create complicated rhythms.
“A lot of people think it’s just a noisemaker,” he adds. “It’s not. It’s a really good percussion instrument, where you can keep the beat with it and keep everything going really nicely. There’s a guy in Woody Point, Cyril Abbott. Cyril, to me, is one of the best ugly stick players in the world. He can play any beat; he’s actually fantastic.”
“But it’s not traditional!” someone might shout. Folklorists know that traditions are always evolving, and that a healthy tradition is one that can keep up with the changes in our communities. Heritage never stands still, just like that rubber boot on the bottom of your ugly stick.
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