The Mirrored Archive

"He had always been called Archibald or sometimes in Gaelic ‘Gilleasbuig.’ Perhaps because of what was perceived as a kind of formality that hung about him, no one ever called him ‘Arch’ or the more familiar and common ‘Archie.’ He did not look or act ‘like an Archie,’ as they said. And with the passing of the years, letters came that were addressed simply to ‘Archibald’ and which bore a variety of addresses covering a radius of some forty milles. Many of the letters in the later years came from the folklorists who had ‘discovered’ him in the 1960s and for whom he had made various tapes and recordings. And he had come to be regarded as ‘the last of the authentic old-time Gaelic singers.’ He was faithfully recorded in the archives at Sydney and Halifax and Ottawa and his picture had appeared in various scholarly and less scholarly journals; sometimes with the arms of the folklorists around him, sometimes holding one of his horses and sometimes standing beside his shining pickup truck which bore a bumper sticker which read ‘Suas Leis A’ Ghaidlig.’ Sometimes the articles bore titles such as ‘Cape Breton Singer: The Last of His Kind’ or ‘Holding Fast on Top of the Mountain’ or ‘Mnemonic Devices in the Gaelic Line’ – the latter generally being accompanied by a plethora of footnotes."