Sound and Sight: Donna Lee Brock and Merv Mulligan find a healing power in music

People often refer to the healing power of music and how it can heal the sorrowful heart.

Donne Lee Brock and Merv Mulligan met when they were asked to become members of Dan Willmore’s weekly Tuesday night square dance band at the Katrine Community Centre, which was reactivated as pandemic concerns subsided. Both had suffered deep personal loss over the previous years, and found in their ensuing friendship and their common musical background a healing grace that has led them to pursue memorable activities as a performance duo. 

Donna Lee, an accomplished, exceptionally gifted violinist, was re-entering the local music scene after a long hiatus. For many years, she had shouldered immense caregiving duties for both her husband, Eric Long, incapacitated by a debilitating illness, and eldercare for her aging mother. Both died within the same time period. 

Merv Mulligan, a revered guitarist, mandolinist, bass player, and songwriter, loved for his humorous stage presence, is a renowned solo artist and a member of the bluegrass band Scotia Junction. His songwriting is framed by insightful stories and poignant vignettes of family, odd characters, and historical events. Marlene, his wife, childhood friend, and mother of his two sons, had died after a period of illness. 

As one of Merv’s musical heroes Utah Philips is reputed to have said, “Music is the language of the soul, and it has the power to heal.” When Merv met Donna Lee, he understood the meaning of those words. 

As a fiddle and guitar duo, both Donna Lee and Merv have a vast repertoire of timeless classics to the delight of audiences throughout the Almaguin Highlands, where they are active. But it is the music and playing together that have formed the foundation of their support for each other and forged a path through shared grief, allowing them each to rediscover solace and joy in a focused musical partnership. 

Trained in her childhood as a classical violinist, Donna Lee Brock, as an artist, has found creative expression through two mediums that could not seem more like polar opposites – music and stone sculpture. Born in Huntsville, she spent her childhood between Detroit, where her father worked as a stonecutter, in the tradition of his father and grandfather, and Parry Sound, where she attended school.

Speaking of her father, Donna describes how he “was running up and down the Highway, 13 hours at a time in the winter snow, to go to the states to make his money and then bring it home. They made memorial stones and mausoleums and all the fancy carving that you find around the big monuments and facades on banks and stuff like that.”

Donna Lee began taking private violin lessons in her childhood and still reminisces, in wonder, about how strict and disciplined her teachers were, insisting on correct form and posture as the only means to properly approach the instrument – with a back straight and elbow positioned accurately at the strings. She laughs at how most of that changed when she encountered country or old-time fiddlers who seemed to adapt a much looser configuration. After graduation, she moved to Inuvik with her first husband, who was posted there, and started her family. 

When she returned to Ontario in the early 1980s, she decided she needed a career. “I realized I really should get a career, and I wanted something because I like working with tools and working with my hands, and I like the idea of music. George Brown College was running a piano technician program. With her daughter in daycare, she commuted from Guelph to Toronto and became a certified piano tech, tuning and maintaining pianos.  

Merv Mulligan grew up in a musical family surrounded by uncles and aunts who played at every chance. As a kid, he fell asleep to the radio listening to the canon of fiddle tunes drifting into his dreams. Not only did he accumulate a massive catalogue of tunes, but he sharpened his memory for traditional tunes, providing him with an encyclopedic recall. Merv switched from guitar to mandolin in his teens and it remains his chosen instrument in band settings and jams. A journeyman musician, like any other working person, needs to be able to handle many tools. Merv has played bass guitar, mandolin, drums, and guitar in order to survive on the weekly circuit of shows he had to play. A charismatic, empathetic, and modest man to meet in person, Merv has a huge presence when performing. His stage banter is filled with jokes and asides that endear him to audiences large and small. He stands tall on a stage, taking command of the song he presents. Songs are the key to good musicality, in Merv’s opinion, teaching a musician not only how to communicate, but how to craft a sentiment. As a composer himself, he credits the great masters before him, like Hank Williams and Charlie Pride, for their continual inspirations. Music has been the mainstay for most of his professional life, but he has worked in a variety of roles, including real estate and as a councilman in Sprucedale, where he raised his family. 

Family remains the cornerstone of Merv’s life. His dedication to his son’s and grandchildren’s happiness is paramount to him. His love for family, friends and people informs his songwriting. There are some songs he still cannot sing for the heartache his heart spills over with in memory. 

Donna Lee Brock made her way back to the Huntsville area in the late 1990s, working part-time as a piano tuner and full-time as a Life Skills coach, married to her second husband, Eric Long, and longing for some creative outlet. She found a four-week course in Haliburton College in stone cutting and began to perfect her skills in stone cutting and sculpture, culminating in several gallery shows, including setting up her own gallery workshop in South River. Her work as a sculptress/stone cutter is evocative and exquisite, confirming her enormous talents.  

Fortuitously, Donna Lee also found a violin teacher in Emsdale, Marion Linton, who introduced her to the founding members of The Ferglen Fiddleheads, an old-style fiddle band who were extremely popular, until they disbanded during the pandemic. Due to a chronic shoulder condition, Donna Lee had to leave the band and her other quintet, the Deelies, to recuperate, but was unable to play music for several years after her husband’s diagnosis and subsequent treatment for early-onset dementia. 

Finding each other in a weekly band setting, Donna Lee and Merv have branched out into other ventures, performing as often as possible with their busy individual schedules. Playing from the great Canadian/ American bluegrass songbook remains the basis of their show, but they do include several of Merv’s originals. While the weekly square dance occupies a commitment to community activities, they plan to secure more outings in the future. Friendship, openness, and playing music have given each of them renewed strength, and while they both succumb to the preciousness of tender memories, Donna Lee and Merv look forward to many new adventures as a duo.      
 

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