I mean it’s funny, somebody just recently gave me a copy of a thing that was done in 1994, so it was 25 years ago and at some festival somewhere. It’s like an extension of your whole being with your relationship, it must be extraordinary? You make the fiddle speak when you play it. Donnell is just with little things, I always get a kick out of when we’re walking through airports and it says, don’t drive your stroller on this walkway and I’ll just quickly do it, you know? Donnell’s like, Oh, you can’t do that. If both of you guys were the fiddle players in The Devil Went Down to Georgia which one would you be? Would you be Johnny or would you be the devil? It was an unspoken thing and you don’t discover it until you’re in your parents’ shoes and you don’t even think of it until someone asks the question. It’s how we live and that’s how our parents lived their lives together and that example was given to us. We don’t try and force change or anything like that and we’re glued.

I think the biggest key for us is that we just come from an era with our parents example where you’re just there forever. It seems like you guys have the ultimate relationship, both career and family-wise.ĭonnell and I look at each other and we say, you know what, it’s pretty good. And then, for gigs that we do separately, we might just take one of the kids, do something special, or something different. It’s like it’s a family, more of a family show and that’s what it’s becoming anyway. Usually the shows that we do together, we do it with everyone. Any big tours we do that are fairly extensive, like two, three or four weeks, we will take everybody. When you go on tour or you play a show, do you get to bring the family with you? We were open to what life is going to give us. So, we didn’t set out for any amount of kids. Then in my twenties, I mean, for me, I’m always open to all of that. I tell Donnell now, and I remember when I was in high school telling my friends I was going to have six kids someday, three girls and three boys. I feel like a Nike ad campaign now.ĭid you always want to have a big family? Now, this is a big story, it’s like, Oh my gosh, you’ve got seven kids, you home school, you tour, you both have careers, how do you last? Well, you can understand this is the path that life has led us down and we have said yes to follow by many little actions and slowly over days, weeks, months, years, we can make a statement and it sounds like a grand statement, but I really think that anybody given the same set of circumstances that we grew up in and were given, that anybody would do the same thing. So even for the example of having seven children, we just didn’t have seven children, we had one. I think like anything in life you come to it in little increments. So there must be a formula for being successful as a parent, wife and a respected musician. You grew up with a very extended musical family. We spoke with Natalie at her Lakefield, Ontario home. 25 and returns to Brantford’s Sanderson Centre on April 8. She heads to Stratford’s Avon Theatre on Jan. Her latest album Sketches is a Celtic masterwork and draws on projecting emotions without any vocals.

Not content with an outstanding music career, MacMaster went on to marry another fiddle legend, Donnell Leahy, in 2002 and the couple have raised seven children together.

Natalie macmaster fiddle