The von Trapp Family had nothing on the Rankin Family, in terms of numbers. “The Musical Rankins,” as they were known around the town of Mabou, Nova Scotia, boasted 12 siblings who could all play and perform. And the hills of Cape Breton were indeed alive with the sound of their music, with fiddles and piano and step-dancing filling the halls in the 1970s. That was way before the family group became famous across the country in the 1990s, with hits such as “Rise Again” and “You Feel the Same Way Too,” and platinum-selling albums such as North Country and Fare Thee Well Love.
Back when they started performing at the local ceilidhs, weddings, and dances, often the whole dozen, from toddlers to teens, would take the stage, including the youngest boy of the bunch, Jimmy Rankin.
“I remember very early on, probably the 12 of us, and John Morris playing piano, we would sing for variety concerts in the community,” he remembers. “Around Inverness County, each community had some kind of a celebration, like a festival, and everybody had a hall or an outdoor stage. I remember my mom rehearsing us and standing up singing these songs, and in the summertime, you’d go and sing them.”
Even though it was a crowded house, their door was always open for musicians, especially the famed Cape Breton Fiddlers.
“My father was a big fan of fiddle music and Dan R. MacDonald, John Allan Cameron’s uncle, lived right across the road, you could reach out and touch his house, which is now part of the Red Shoe Pub,” says Jimmy. “He would come over, and I remember John Morris [Jimmy’s older brother] practicing with him, recording for him. My father had a reel-to-reel, and different fiddlers would land in. They would have sessions, and my father would record. Donald Angus Beaton lived across the road from where we lived, you could hear him playing in his kitchen. And the community hall was right across the fence from us. That’s where they had all the fiddle dances, weddings, a lot of dances in those days.”
As their fame spread, a more formal version of the group emerged, featuring the older siblings, Genevieve, Geraldine, David, Raylene, and John Morris. But the rest were still expected to get up on stage as well.
“I remember several of my younger sisters — there are four younger than I am — at one point it was myself and Cookie and Heather and Susan, we would open up for the Rankin band at these festivals or concerts, like a Thanksgiving concert in Mabou or Margaree.”
But at that ripe old age, Jimmy quit show biz for the first and only time.
“Maybe when I was around 11 or 12 my mom asked me if I wanted to do that anymore, sing in front of people, and I said no, I didn’t, so I got out of the music business!”
That didn’t last too long, but it wasn’t singing that was responsible for his return to the stage. What Jimmy loved the most were the local rock bands that played the Mabou Hall, future legends such as Matt Minglewood and Sam Moon. It was the beat that brought him back. The older Rankins had been hired to play a wedding in Mabou, but the drummer they used couldn’t make it.
“John Morris asked me if I wanted to play,” says Jimmy. “I said sure, and I played my first gig as a drummer having never played drums before. John Morris literally showed me how to play drums, and how to keep a beat, in front of everybody, before each song. There was no rehearsal. They had a little old cheap set of drums set up, and I remember he said, ‘To keep a beat, you hit the high hat and the snare at the same time, and you kick with your foot on the backbeat. And every once in a while, hit a cymbal.’
“Those weddings were open bar, and were basically open to the public, so the hall was always packed inside and outside, and they would play until one in the morning. So that was my first gig as a drummer, and I remember kids my age coming up to me and saying, that was great, and I had a lot of fun doing it, I didn’t have to be out front, I was sitting back taking everything in, and they paid me forty bucks. I said okay, I’m in. I was hooked after that. I just started practicing drums, learning how to play from records and going over to the hall and watching rock bands do soundcheck.”
Over the next few years, some of the older siblings moved on to college and other careers, giving up their spots in the band as younger members joined up. Jimmy remained one of the mainstays though, just not in the co-lead singer-songwriter position for which he would become famous.
“I played drums for the band right up until we started making records,” he says. “I didn’t play for the pop or country stuff on the records, but I played for the Celtic stuff, and even when we started touring, I would play drums and at that point before and during college, I started singing and playing acoustic guitar. Through my teen years, I played for pickup country bands around home on the weekends, and I just honed my chops as a drummer, I could keep a beat pretty good. In college, I started writing songs and got totally hooked on practicing guitar six hours a day, playing all the time and singing, whatever open mic I could find or party.”
Even then, the idea of a Cape Breton Celtic group getting any attention off the Island was just a dream, not a career choice.
“Nobody had any musical training, I don’t think anybody in my family expected to pursue something like that for a living,” Jimmy says. “We were supposed to go off to college and get a degree or trade. Fortunately, when I finished college in the late ’80s, there was myself, John Morris, Cookie, and Raylene, and Heather got involved at that time. My sisters had been doing the Summertime Revue productions, the Rise and Follies of Cape Breton. They had become regionally recognized as singers, and John Morris had played on a lot of fiddle recordings, he was the only one of us doing music full-time.
That all changed when the group started making albums, beginning with their self-released 1989 cassette, called The Rankin Family. It featured mostly traditional Celtic piano and fiddle music, and even some of Jimmy’s drumming. But it also included his first recorded composition, “Roving Gypsy Boy.” Lots of CBC airplay and strong word-of-mouth got that cassette widely circulated.
“My mother’s phone number was on the back of that original cassette, and her home address in Mabou,” says Jimmy. “She started getting fan mail. I remember being back home at my mom’s place, which had an old black dial phone with a long cord. I remember picking up the phone, and it was the Winnipeg Folk Festival calling, looking for the Rankins. Mariposa, things like that, eventually we got out there by playing festivals, they were the first ones that took us out across the country.”
When it came time to record another album, Jimmy was ready with more tunes. Recorded just a few months after their debut, the record featured four of his originals, including the now-classic title song, “Fare Thee Well Love.”
“I started writing songs when we were still figuring out what kind of a band we were,” he says. “When we made those first two records we were like, let’s put on the records what we do live at those dances at home. You do some Celtic stuff, a traditional ballad, you might do a country song, you do maybe an old rock and roll song.
“By the second record, we’d been doing a lot of festivals and people wanted to hear Celtic music. So I wrote ‘Fare Thee Well Love,’ I just wanted to write a good Celtic ballad, never thinking it would have the success it did. When we were making that record, we’d try to feature everyone equally, and it just so happened by the end of that record, Cookie and I needed a song, and I had that one. It became a duet. It was the last song to make it onto the record. It took on a very contemporary arrangement but with a very traditional Celtic feel to it.”
Once again, the group released the album as an independent cassette and couldn’t keep up with the demand.
“We had an office set up on Barrington Street in Halifax when we were independently distributed, almost right across the street from Sam the Record Man, and I remember borrowing somebody’s pickup truck and going over to Dartmouth to pick up a pallet of cassette tapes, lugging them up three flights of stairs to the office, and then lugging a bunch of them over to Sam the Record Man’s. They just sold like hotcakes. The buzz started with people spreading the word about us in the industry, and record companies got hip to the fact we were selling a lot of product, as they call it.”
EMI Music wanted a piece of that action and made The Rankin Family the first contemporary Cape Breton Celtic band signed to a major label, helping kick-start the Celtic and East Coast music explosion of the 1990s. “Fare Thee Well Love” was released as a single, and the album went to #1 on the country charts and #5 pop, selling a half-million copies.
“I sort of became the primary writer for the band from then on,” says Jimmy, whose composition “Fare Thee Well Love” was inducted into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2020, cementing his legacy as a treasured songsmith for the Rankin Family — and not the drummer.
