The year was 1980. Don Roy was a budding teenage fiddler, and his cousin wanted him to play on a hayride. Roy had one condition.

“I said, ‘Find a date for me. I don’t like what I’ve got,” Roy said, laughing.

You could say it was a date with destiny. The cousin set him up with a young pianist named Cindy, whose grandfather was friends with Don’s uncle and musical mentor, Lucien Mathieu. They’ve been making beautiful music together – in life and onstage – ever since.

In time, Roy earned a reputation as Maine’s dean of Franco-American fiddling, but it’s not uncommon to find the couple jamming in their Gorham home.

“I don’t need a gig to play for,” Roy said in a recent phone interview. “I’m just as happy sitting in the kitchen playing.”

On Friday evening, the Don Roy Trio – which includes Don, Cindy and their longtime friend and collaborator Jay Young – will get out of the kitchen and onto the main stage as part of the Maine Music Showcase at the Bates Mill Complex in Lewiston. Hosted by Nick Spitzer of National Public Radio’s “American Routes,” the event will cap off the Blaine House Conference on the Creative Economy.

“If there was a musical instrument I’d associate with Maine, it would be fiddle before anything else,” Spitzer, a folklorist and authority in roots music, said by phone from Louisiana. “I expressed an interest that Maine music be represented, and I was pleased to see Don and Cindy Roy on the program.”

Spitzer calls New Orleans home, but he holds Maine close to his heart. His sister lives in Hollis and he has twice traveled to Bangor for the National Folk Festival. There is even discussion of moving “American Routes” to Maine.

“We’re certainly going to keep thinking about it,” Spitzer said.

The discussion has grown out of his relationship with the Folk Festival, the success of his program on Maine Public Radio and the support of the Maine Arts Commission, whose chairman, Alden Wilson, invited Spitzer to speak at the creative economy conference. Spitzer says Maine would be well served to look inward, rather than outward, for inspiration.

“I’m not one of those people who believes you have to import a creative class,” Spitzer said. “To me, this isn’t done with art museums and latte shops. You do it by building on the real cultural and natural resources of a place. In Maine, these are things like hand skills, boat building, carpentry, how people farm the land, clothing manufacturers … art forms and aesthetics that range from the bean suppers and contradancing to the French fiddling.”

Roy’s music is steeped in Franco-American tradition, with strains of Ireland, Ontario and Canada’s Maritime Provinces. He learned fiddling from his uncle, who learned from his grandfather. As a boy, music was a way of life – the family would gather two or three times a month for a house party, where everyone would sing, dance and play guitar and fiddle as their ancestors did before them.

“We get a lot of the elderly people who remember the music being part of their household, or from the Saturday night dances,” Roy said. “It was a social event. That’s one of the best compliments we can get, if some elderly woman comes up and says, ‘You remind me of my uncle.'”

Roy has played such venues as Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center, and he has appeared on Garrison Keillor’s “A Prairie Home Companion.” Next week, he and the trio head to Washington, D.C., to play at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. In his travels, Roy has found that the music is gaining popularity among a broader audience.

“Some people are just really big fans of the music, some are fans of the instrument and some are interested in the heritage and history part,” he said.

Given the heritage, Roy’s music was an obvious fit for the showcase, Spitzer says.

While other musical genres don’t have the same deep-rooted history in Maine, there is a summertime jazz tradition here. This is reflected in the Maine Jazz Ensemble, which has come together specifically for the showcase. Made up of Tom Snow on piano, Bronek Suchanek on bass, Trent Austin on trumpet, Nick Falk on drums and renowned clarinetist Brad Terry, the combo brings a range of experience and influences to the stage.

So does Sean Mencher, who moved to Portland from Austin, Texas, in 1994. His music blends jazz, rockabilly, bluegrass and other styles that he explored while in Texas. His Sean Mencher Combo includes drums, acoustic rhythm guitar, bass fiddle, electric guitar, regular fiddle and – if he can persuade his friend Al Hawks to play – the mandolin.

“It’s kind of a smorgasbord of my favorite American music filtered through these instruments,” Mencher said. “We’ll just mix it all up.”

Austin was a musical hotbed for Mencher, but he has found an equally strong – but less visible – scene in Maine. Though musicians such as Lenny Breau and Clarence White, songwriter and Old Town native Patty Griffin and institutions such as Bourgeois Guitars in Lewiston have put the state on the map, music isn’t the first thing people think of when they hear about Maine.

“There’s great music here in the state of Maine, but traditionally Maine is not well known for it,” Mencher said. “It’s known for lobster. … There’s no reason why there shouldn’t be a heck of a good circuit – the talent is certainly here.”

It’s just a bit more spread out, a bit more rural and there aren’t many true concert halls, even in cities such as Portland and Bangor. Still, Mencher has thrived here, and he hopes the Maine Music Showcase brings some of the tucked-away artists out of the woodwork to collaborate. And to show people that there’s more to see than lobsters.

“I don’t know what it is,” he said. “Maybe it’s the winter, the harshness of it. Maybe it’s being isolated, the ruralness. I don’t know, but there’s something here.”

Kristen Andresen can be reached at 990-8287 or kandresen@bangordailynews.net.