The term legend is often overused but in the case of Hugh Allan MacMaster – or Buddy as he has become known – it’s almost an understatement.

For over sixty years Buddy’s fiddling has driven Cape Breton dancing and through concert appearances across Canada, the USA and in Scotland Buddy has celebrated the undiluted Scottish traditions that travelled across the Atlantic from the Gaelic heartlands with the Highland diaspora.

Buddy was born into a Gaelic speaking family in Timmons, Ontario on October 18, 1924. Four years later the family returned to Cape Breton, settling in Judique. His father, John, played fiddle but it was his mother, Sarah’s lilting puirt a beul that drew Buddy to music making. Using two pieces of kindling, he would mimic a fiddler’s actions, adding the tunes by mouth music.

The MacMasters’ house was routinely filled with fiddle music and as a youngster Buddy heard all the best local players and many others who were passing through Judique in his own living room. He could hardly fail to be inspired to follow them and he started to play fiddle when still a boy.

He played his first professional gig at the age of fifteen, earning the princely sum of $4, which meant that he cleared $3 after paying his bus fare there and his train ticket back the next day. It would be almost fifty years before he could concentrate solely on music, however, because in 1943 Buddy joined the Canadian National Railroad as a telegrapher, station agent and unofficial fiddler in residence.

Passengers grew accustomed to hearing Buddy filling in the gaps between trains by making full use of the station’s acoustics and CNR colleagues would often request tunes for Buddy to play down the company’s phone line as they signed off for the day. Impromptu sessions with travelling musicians weren’t unknown.

Away from work Buddy was cementing his reputation on Cape Breton’s dance circuit, always paying attention to the dancers’ steps and reactions, continuing the role of community fiddler and building up a vast repertoire that covered three hundred years of Scottish tradition.

He made his first trip to Scotland to play at the National Mod in Oban in 1970, and as well as appearing regularly on the John Allan Cameron and Ceilidh television shows, he toured with the Cape Breton Symphony and made a huge impression at the Fiddle Tunes Festival in Port Townsend, Washington.

Buddy recorded his first album, Judique on the Floor, a year after he retired in 1988 and has gone on to play hundreds of concerts yet never refuses a request to play at a community or fundraising dance. He is not just a fiddler’s fiddler, combining gentle Gaelic phrasing with the rhythmical vigour of a centuries old tradition; he is a dancer’s fiddler too. The Order of Canada, which he received in 2000 for contributions to Canadian culture, and his Lifetime Achievement Award from the East Coast Music Association in 2006 could hardly have found a more deserving recipient.