2019 inductees

John MacKay’s family and friends gather to remember and honour his accomplishments.

Larry Martineau of Winnipeg carries one of the deeper family lines in Manitoba Métis fiddling. His father was a Métis fiddler, as were both of his grandfathers and his great‑grandfathers on both sides of the family — a heritage that has shaped the course of his musical life and his decades of service to the tradition.

Although Martineau came from a fiddling family, his own first instrument was the guitar, which he bought at age fourteen. He became proficient enough to teach and to play in rock bands through high school, and he went on to work over the years as a guitar salesman, a violin repairman, and an insurance agent — a varied background that would later inform the unusual business he built around the fiddle.

In Winnipeg, Martineau opened Martineau Strings, a shop that combined three of his passions under one roof: he taught fiddle there, repaired stringed instruments, and ran a small restaurant that doubled as a performance venue for traditional Manitoba musicians. The shop became a gathering place for the province's old‑time and Métis fiddling community, giving young players a place to learn and veteran players a stage on which to keep the tunes alive.

His work as a community builder grew from there. In 1999 he helped to establish the Manitoba Fiddle Association and served as its founding president, laying the organizational groundwork for the jamborees, competitions, workshops, and Wall of Fame that the association continues to run today. In 2004 he launched a fiddle program for grades five through eight in St. Malo, bringing traditional fiddling into the classroom and passing the music on to a new generation of Manitoba players.

Martineau has continued to perform as well as teach, appearing with groups such as the Michael Audette Band at events including Ste. Madeleine Métis Days, and he was cast as a fiddler in the 2004 CBC television film *A Bear Named Winnie*.

His contributions to the tradition have been formally recognized twice. In 2019 he was inducted into the Manitoba Fiddle Association's Wall of Fame as a Builder, and in 2022 he was inducted into the Canadian Grand Masters Fiddling Association's Hall of Honour, again in the Builder category — an acknowledgement of the teaching, mentoring, organizing, and venue‑building work that has done so much to sustain old‑time and Métis fiddling in his home province. He remains an active supporter of, and volunteer for, old‑time fiddling throughout Manitoba.