J.P. (John Paul) Cormier (born January 23, 1969) is a Canadian bluegrass/folk/Celtic singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist. He has won thirteen East Coast Music Awards and one Canadian Folk Music Award. Cormier was born in London, Ontario, and began playing guitar around age five. As a child, he displayed an unusual ability to play various instruments by ear and won a guitar contest at age nine. Appearances on Up Home Tonight, a television show devoted to bluegrass music, followed at age fourteen. Cormier has stated that he learned to play guitar by listening to such noted country/bluegrass musicians as Chet Atkins and Doc Watson. Other instruments J.P. has played on his albums include fiddle, twelve-string guitar, upright bass, banjo, mandolin, drums, percussion, synthesizer, cello, tenor banjo, and piano. By age sixteen, Cormier had recorded his first album (a collection of bluegrass instrumentals) and began working the U.S. festival circuit. This led him to move to the United States and start working as a session musician. He continued to perform live on the festival circuit and at the Grand Ole Opry with country artists Waylon Jennings, Marty Stuart, Earl Scruggs, Bill Monroe, and others. By the mid-eighties, not out of his teens, he was a sideman for bands and artists of many different genres in Alabama, Tennessee, Mississippi, and all across the deep south. As he traveled and worked, he added more and more instruments to his arsenal of capabilities, becoming indispensable to the bands he worked for. In 1989 he attended the now-named Northeast Mississippi Community College in Booneville, Mississippi, where he majored in music education. At the time, it was one of only three colleges in North America that offered a specialty in bluegrass instruments. During his stay at Northeast, he began playing the dobro and piano. During this time, he had the idea for the song "Northwind." All this before he was 20. In the early Nineties, he became a sideman for one of Canada's favourite sons, Stompin' Tom Connors, and became a staple of the recordings at Studio H in Halifax. His work with the CBC there spanned musical, production, and arranging duties. In the mid-nineties, he reentered the musical scene of his beloved East Coast and the Island called Cape Breton. He exploded onto the trad music scene there as a fiddler, performing some of the most challenging music ever produced by legends like Winston Fitzgerald and Angus Chisholm with a facility that stunned onlookers. Especially those who knew he wasn't born there but in Ontario to Cape Breton parents. Somehow, some way, his music was the real thing, sounding like he had been steeped continually in a handed-down brew of family tradition from the old country. His previous gig was in Nashville playing mandolin and banjo in a grammy nominated bluegrass gospel band, performing on the Opry, and playing television shows with Waylon Jennings. All those people also thought he was one of them, American, reared in the ways of bluegrass, old-time, and Americana music. They knew he was from Canada, but it didn't seem possible. Then in 1997, something amazing happened. An album released in Canada, out of nowhere, called Another Morning. This time it was him as a songwriter and a lead singer. And what a songwriter he turned out to be. Some of the performances on that album are part of the East Coast's musical vocabulary today. Songs like the title cut, Kelly's Mountain, The Molly May (co-written with his cousin Gervais), and others. It inspired, 25 years ago, some of the biggest names in the business today. People like Dave Gunning, Matt Andersen, David Myles, and Joel Plaskett will tell you that recording changed things. The Canadian industry thought so too, and it received a Juno nomination and won an ECMA. And that was just the beginning. 16 albums followed the success of Another Morning, winning 12 more ECMA's, another Juno nomination, a Canadian Folk Music Award, and 5 Music Nova Scotia Awards. Each album was a snapshot of each thing that he could do. There are fiddle albums, Mandolin, Banjo, Guitar, tribute records, songwriting collections, and a purely astounding spectrum of talent and musical vision. His catalog of recordings and the 150 or so records he's produced on other artists resemble the tapestry he weaves in live performances. Cormier was involved in a serious truck accident in 2009, resulting in a fractured vertebra and a halt to his tour schedule. In 2012 he went back into the studio, focused on his singer-songwriter abilities, and released Somewhere In The Back of My Heart in the same year. In April 2015, Cormier released a new album, The Chance, which included the previously released single Hometown Battlefield, about soldiers experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder. The song, inspired by Cormier's 2007 Afghanistan tour and news about soldiers' suicides, went viral, with millions of Facebook visits and over 4.8 million YouTube views (Nov 2022). In 2020 he released Now that the Work is Done, followed by his latest album, Us, in 2021. J.P. has an active YouTube channel where he connects with fans. Every week he posts new episodes of Life In Music, Guitar Stuff With John, and the Wednesday night live broadcast of String Theory, an interactive question-and-answer show. People still leave his shows confused, amazed, and wondering what they just saw. Did they see a storyteller? A Songwriter? Arguably one of the best guitar players in the business today? Someone who crosses the lines between different instruments like there are no lines? Of all the things he is, foremost, he is an entertainer. Discography Return to the Cape (1995) Another Morning (1997) Heart & Soul (1999) Now That the Work Is Done (2001) Primary Color (2002) Velvet Arm Golden Hand (2002) X8… a mandolin collection (2004) The Long River: A Personal Tribute to Gordon Lightfoot (2005) Primary Color: The Owner's Manual (2005) Looking Back – Volume 1: The Instrumentals (2005) Looking Back – Volume 2: The Songs (2005) Take Five – A Banjo Collection" (2006) The Messenger – J.P. Cormier Sings (2008) Noel – A J.P. Cormier Christmas (2008) Somewhere in the Back of My Heart (2012) The Chance (2015) Now That the Work is Done (2020) Us (2021) Albums No Longer Available Out Of The Blue (Out Of Print) The Gift (Out Of Print) Lord Of The Dance (Out Of Print) When January Comes (Out Of Print) The Fiddle Album (1991) CBC UG 1003