1 Singer-Songwriters in Cape Breton: Marking Ground Between Traditional and Popular Chris McDonald, Cape Breton University Celts of the Americas, June 2011 IASPM/CSTM, July 2011 Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, has long been acknowledged as fertile musical ground. The island has produced more famous musicians per capita than one would expect from a region with a population below 200,000. The successful maintenance of its traditional Celtic music has been integral to the island‟s identity and its appeal for tourism. Meanwhile, its independent pop-rock scene has been productive, producing widely-known artists such as Matt Minglewood, the Tom Fun Orchestra, and Slowcoaster. Lying somewhere in between is the category of performer – the singer- songwriter – that has supplied many of Cape Breton‟s most renowned musical acts. This paper looks at the history of singer-songwriters in Cape Breton from the 1970s to the 2000s, focussing on their profiles as artists who connect in some way to traditional and Celtic idioms (which have a strong sense of geographical place), while also playing in a loose and flexible way with popular genres. This is apparent in the kinds of musical styles many Cape Breton singer-songwriters develop, but it is also true of the way their music is marketed, reviewed and positioned by the media, in some cases irrespective of their styles. My argument in this paper is that the success of many of Cape Breton‟s most famous singer-songwriters was based on a careful balance between being perceived as “embedded in tradition,” and being marketable to a wider audience by their generic ambiguity. In other words, the musician is both clearly marked by a regional identity, but