The Men of the Deeps
For sixty years, the Men of the Deeps have carried the story of Cape Breton’s coal miners from the communities where it began to stages worldwide.
The choir’s story begins with Nina Cohen and a much larger idea.
In the early 1960s, Cohen began championing a museum to preserve and honour Cape Breton’s coal mining history. Her vision grew into the Cape Breton Miners’ Museum and the Miners’ Folk Society, but preserving mining history meant more than collecting artifacts. Songs, stories and traditions lived in the miners themselves, and Cohen believed those should be preserved too.
Renowned Nova Scotia folklorist Helen Creighton’s work also helped inspire the idea of preserving Cape Breton’s mining culture through song.
That idea led to the creation of a choir made up of miners.
The Men of the Deeps formed in 1966, bringing together working coal miners from across industrial Cape Breton. Their first public concerts took place that November, with performances in Glace Bay, Sydney and New Waterford.
The next year, the Cape Breton Miners’ Museum opened, and the new choir performed there. They also had a chance to reach a much larger audience at Expo 67 in Montreal.
What started as a way to preserve Cape Breton’s mining culture was already becoming something much bigger.
In the years that followed, the Men of the Deeps brought Cape Breton miners’ songs and stories to audiences across Canada and beyond.
In 1976, they became the first Canadian performing group to tour the People’s Republic of China. Their travels would eventually take them across Canada and the United States, into mining communities of all sizes, north to the Northwest Territories and overseas. Their connection to the mining world remained an important part of those travels, including performances for fellow miners at United Mine Workers of America conventions in Cincinnati and Denver.
Their 20th anniversary year brought a two-and-a-half-week engagement at Vancouver’s Expo ’86, where they performed with the RCMP Concert Band and Cape Breton singer-songwriter Rita MacNeil. It was one chapter in what would become a long musical relationship between Rita and the Men.
The choir became closely associated with Rita’s “Working Man,” performing the song with her at the 1989 Juno Awards and continuing to appear and perform with her in the years that followed. They toured together and appeared together on national television. In 2000, that relationship led to Mining the Soul, a collaborative album recorded entirely in Cape Breton, with the vocals recorded on the stage of the Savoy Theatre in Glace Bay.
By then, the Men had become familiar to audiences well beyond Cape Breton. In 1989, they performed at Toronto’s Roy Thomson Hall as part of the International Choral Festival. Throughout the 1990s, tours brought them to major Canadian stages, including Massey Hall, while a 1999 Ontario tour included the recording of CBC’s On Stage at the Glenn Gould Theatre.
Their story also reached audiences through radio, television and film. Over the years, the Men appeared on programs including CBC’s Front Page Challenge, CTV’s Canada AM, Rita and Friends, and television specials with Anne Murray and Rita MacNeil. A 1981 Christmas special with Anne Murray brought the Men to audiences across North America on CTV and CBS.
The Men have also been captured on film. In 1978, the National Film Board featured the choir and Cape Breton’s mining communities in the short film Men of the Deeps, Cape Breton. In 2003, filmmaker John Walker brought their story to the screen again in the feature documentary Men of the Deeps, an intimate portrait of the miners, their music and the working lives behind the songs. The film received seven awards, including three Gemini Awards and the Audience Award at Hot Docs.
The choir’s work has also extended beyond performance. Between 1994 and 1996, the Men joined school choirs across Nova Scotia for the province-wide Light the Darkness program, supporting the Canadian Red Cross.
In 1999, the Men travelled to Kosovo at the request of Canada’s Department of Foreign Affairs, where they performed in a festival organized by actress Vanessa Redgrave on behalf of UNICEF.
Recognition followed the choir at home, too. In 1991, during their 25th anniversary year, the Men of the Deeps received Nova Scotia’s Ambassador of the Year award from the Tourist Industry Association of Nova Scotia. In 2000, the University College of Cape Breton, now Cape Breton University, conferred an honorary Doctor of Letters upon the entire choir in recognition of its contribution to Cape Breton culture.
Their connection to the wider mining world has never disappeared. In 2008, the choir was invited to perform at the international MINExpo conference in Las Vegas, where sold-out audiences heard them over six consecutive nights.
Throughout all of these milestones, conductor John C. “Jack” O’Donnell shaped the musical life of the Men of the Deeps for almost fifty years.
Jack was a professor of music at St. Francis Xavier University, an arranger, researcher and collector of mining music. He helped create a repertoire that went beyond Cape Breton but stayed true to the lives of working people. In 1983, he was named a Member of the Order of Canada for his contribution to Canadian music and culture.
Over the years, Jack began sharing conducting and arranging duties with assistant conductor Stephen Muise. Muise had grown up around the choir through his father, longtime member and business manager Yogi Muise. Before taking over as conductor, Stephen spent years providing technical expertise to the group and assisting Jack, whom he considered both a mentor and a friend. Those years working together gave Stephen an intimate understanding of the music, the membership and the traditions of the Men of the Deeps, and allowed the eventual transition between conductors to happen gradually.
In 2016, the Men celebrated their 50th anniversary with Coal to Gold, a two-disc collection featuring thirty songs from across their recording history. By then, their catalogue stretched back nearly as far as the choir itself, preserving traditional mining music alongside songs written by members of the Men and by songwriters whose work became part of the Cape Breton mining story.
When Jack retired in January 2017, Muise succeeded him as conductor. Jack passed away the following year.
With Muise as conductor, the choir has continued to honour its traditions while finding new ways to share its music and stories with new generations. The Men have continued to tour and record, expanded their work with schools, and released new recordings including Christmas in the Mine, After the Pit, December Coal and, for their 60th anniversary, Diamond Sunset: Sixty Years of Song & Story.
Muise’s work in music, education and the community has also been recognized. He received the Canadian Band Association’s Community Builders Award in 2022, an honorary Doctor of Letters from Cape Breton University in 2023, and the East Coast Music Association’s Stompin’ Tom Award for Cape Breton in 2024.
Sixty Years
In 2026, the Men of the Deeps celebrate sixty years together.
The milestone is even more meaningful because the world around the choir has changed so much.
The Cape Breton coal industry that gave birth to the Men of the Deeps is gone. The collieries where generations of members once worked have closed. Many of the men who built the choir and carried it through its early years are gone, too.
But the songs remain.
Today, the Men of the Deeps carry on a history passed down by generations of miners. Their concerts are as much about storytelling as singing, connecting audiences not just with the work underground, but with the communities, families, humour, hardship, and friendships that were part of it.
One of the most recognizable moments in a Men of the Deeps performance remains their entrance: miners step out of the darkness in their work clothes and helmets, their cap lamps lighting the room before the singing begins.
And sixty years after they first took the stage, they are far from standing still.
Throughout 2026, the Men are marking their anniversary with Diamond Sunset: Sixty Years of Song & Story, a new recording, concert production, and anniversary tour that takes them once again to theatres and communities across Canada. The year culminates at home with a 60th Anniversary Gala at the Savoy Theatre in Glace Bay on November 1, exactly sixty years after the newly formed choir first performed on that stage.
The faces have changed over sixty years. The mines have closed. But the reason for singing remains the same.
The Men of the Deeps still share a story that belongs not just to the miners who worked beneath Cape Breton, but to the families and communities who shaped them.
They sing for the men who came before them.
They sing for those who lived through it.
And they sing so the story will be remembered.