Profile of Canadian Musician Nonie Crete
How She Learned to Sing Traditional Irish Ballad Danny Boy
Nonie Crete has been called one of the hardest working musicians on the Canadian music circuit.
Her eclectic music playbill from Celtic songs to hard core blues has taken Nonie Crete and her partner Eugene Rea, across Canada and across the pond to Ireland's famed Leo's Tavern, where she performed with Clannad and Altan.
This weekend Nonie and Eugene play at Winterfolk in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Suite 101: Originally you come from Penetanguishene, in Northern Ontario, Canada? So how did you get your start in music?
Nonie Crete: “I went right from Penetang to Humber College (Toronto) where I studied music and performance. I would like to have been more specific. It was the first year. they were doing performance so it was singing, and the gal who taught us would say for instance, you are going to come up with a country and western song. Then she would make us be country and western and that was a really good thing, or she would make us be blues, using the same idea. She would make us fit the criteria of what we were trying to do. Still to this day when I am doing a song, I think, I am doing a blues song and I focus in on my black goddess and really feel that. And ballads, if you need to do a sad song, make yourself sad, really get into it.”
Suite 101: Like the tools an actor uses for method acting applied to interpreting a song.
Nonie Crete: “Yes, it is really like theatre.”
Suite 101: Do you do that when you sing Danny Boy?
Nonie Crete: “I do to a point. But Danny Boy is the first song I ever learned how to sing. It was taught to me before I was five years old by an old lady that lived down the road from me who I adored. She came from Devonshire, and she was an entertainer when she was young, and she lived in a cottage not much bigger than this table.
"Annie Jury, her maiden name was Whittaker. She would say, 'Let’s pretend we are singing to thousands of people,' and even though it was a teeny weeny little cottage, it was like Carnegie Hall. When I sing the song now, I think about my dad because he was the first Canadian prisoner of war.
He joined the RAF in 1935, and first he was taken to meet some guy blindfolded in the woods. It was Herman Goerring, who was second in command. Then he spent all five years and eight months in prison, except for three days when he was on the lam because he was in The Great Escape.
"So when I think of Danny Boy, because it was written by a father to his son, saying you’ve gone off to war, he means I may not be here when you get back. I have the letters my dad wrote in prison camp to his dad, and his dad was already gone for months.
So I envision my Dad coming back to Penetanguishene, and going back to his grave and weeping, because he adored his Dad. When I sing Danny Boy, that’s what I see."
Nonie Crete and Eugene Rea
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