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YOU CAN PLAY ALONG WITH THE VIDEO! I may shorten the instrumental for our BUG Jam.
"This Ottawa Valley of Mine" may be Mac Beattie's most classic album. It contains songs that have become standard fare for Canadian folk singers, including this song "Saturday Night Up The Gatineau".
John McNab "Mac" Beattie was a singer/songwriter born in December 1916 in the Ottawa Valley, in Arnprior and he died in June 1982 in Arnprior. Mac Beattie and the Ottawa Valley Melodiers were a prominent Canadian country music band from the 1930s until the early 1970s. In the early thirties, Mac and three friends - Gaetan Fairfield, Mervyn Leitch and Harold Mosley, formed the first Melodiers. Beattie sang and played harmonica and washboard. Their music often reflected the Ottawa Valley's historic past. Beattie was the first member to be inducted into the Ottawa Valley Country Music Hall of Fame in 1981. You can read Beattie's autobiography, "This Ottawa Valley of Mine" published in Arnprior 1982.
This song is about the Neville Hotel in Douglas, Ontario, Canada. Mac Beattie and his Melodiers were friends of the Neville family, who owned the Neville Hotel in Douglas, Ontario, which originally opened as Congress Hall in 1897. The Neville family bought the hotel in 1903 and owned it until 1961. It subsequently changed hands and was renamed the Douglas Tavern, known affectionately as The Diddley. The business was destroyed by fire on the night of January 5, 2026. You'll find the history of the hotel tavern at this link.
Mac Beattie and his Melodiers would stop at the hotel enroute from Arnprior to their radio show at CHOV in Pembroke or on the way home on Saturday night after playing at Sunny Dale Acres. Mac immortalized the hotel and the family in a song named “Neville’s Hotel” and
The crowds were always packed to capacity during St. Patrick’s Day when fiddles, laughter, heat, smoke and a sea of green, greeted each reveller who elbowed their way through wall-to-wall bodies to reach the bar or a space on the dance floor in front of the popular Irish bands. A tradition of impromptu performance by the staff cleared the floor as people cheered and clapped to The Unicorn acted out by various servers who had been carrying heavy trays of beer for hours.