The father-son folk duo of Marc Audet and his son Bradley entertained a modest crowd who braved the weather on Saturday night at the Little Red Wagon winery in Clarendon. 

Audet hails from the Ottawa Valley and weaves in plenty of local historical nuggets into his lyrics.

Speaking before the show, winery owner Scott Judd said that listeners were in for a treat.

“We are so blessed to have Marc back,” he said. “He’s one of my favourite storytellers in the valley.”

Audet was soft-spoken but his passion for the history of the area was apparent when he spoke in between songs. The younger Audet provided accompaniment to his father’s guitar on the melodica and Irish whistle.

Prior to his song Holden Pond, Audet gave a little backstory about the meaning of the tune. He explained that several villages were submerged when the Ottawa River was dammed at Rapides-des-Joachims in the mid-1900s, creating the Holden Lake Reservoir. Audet interviewed people who lost their ancestral homes in the flooding and even took a scuba expedition to the area. He said that the lyrics came as he sat on the steps of a church 20 feet below the water’s surface.

“Under the dull purple glow below the river, in the stillness of it all, in the coldness of it all, I could feel the wear in the concrete that people had come and gone from that church for many decades before it flooded,” he said. “The feeling of sitting on those front steps is where this song came to be.”