NESS CREEK, Sask. – A lifetime of hard labor may have dulled the ears and hardened the hands, but it hasn’t stolen the soulful sound that Jack Millikin can make with a bow drawn across a saw.
Pushed and pulled across a “cheap, old saw that I still use to rip a one by six when I need one shorter,” the violin bow coaxes musical notes from the saw back’s bend.
“It’s good for any tune I know, but it’s best for the oldtime numbers. The Black Velvet Waltz, Soldier’s Joy, you know the ones,” said the 76-year-old Millikin, a homesteader, former railway man and folk musician.
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“It’s the folks’ music, so I guess that makes it folk music. I still think it’s oldtime. That was the folks’ music too.”
Millikin’s family came to Canada from Scotland in 1926. After a few years in Saskatoon where he took up playing the mouth organ on downtown streets, the Millikins moved north to Big River, Sask. With the family went their music.
As a teen, he and his two brothers played dances at community halls and schools for $2 a night.
During the Second World War, Jack and his brother Andrew built a community hall on Andrew’s homestead near Ness Creek, Sask., near the current Ness Creek festival site. The pair held benefit dances for the war effort. The community came to know the Millikin place as a social centre.
“I’ve seen the countryside change but the rural people still like a good party and where there is a party, there is music. … I taught myself to play a variety of instruments. The violin, the banjo, the saxophone, bottles. If it could play music, I was interested in it.”
He came to the saw late in life, “only 30 years or so ago.
“I didn’t know you could play a saw. I picked it up and sure enough, it worked. I hadn’t seen anybody else play one until I saw it on TV, on one of those old variety shows. The fellow held it different than I do. I kind of stand and use a chair. He played it between his legs. It was too late for me to change my style. I still play my way.”
His fans among the pick’n and grin’n crowd at the Ness Creek Music Festival, think of Jack as the grandfather of the four-day annual event held in mid-July.
Today he plays with his son, Don, as the Old Style Millikin.
