David James McCallum was born in Sudbury and grew up in Niagara Falls, Loring, Sundridge, and North Bay. He started playing bass and singing in Punk and Metal bands as a teenager and has sung Irish traditional songs since childhood. He moved to BC in his twenties and spent 20 years in Vancouver performing Hip Hop and Gaelic traditional music. In 2021 he and his wife Melanie moved back to North Bay, where he writes and performs original acoustic music and traditional Irish and Gaelic songs, and plays live regularly with his Punk Rock band, Bad Ancestors. His original acoustic songs are a dark yet often humorous mix of folk, indie rock, and country with a punk rock attitude, and reflect the northern experience of isolation, hard times, and resilience from a strong anti-poverty and anti-oppression perspective.