Fall 2004
ARTICLES
COLUMNS
- Fiddle Tune History: Off We Go, by Andrew Kuntz
- The Practicing Fiddler: The Left Hand Revisited, Part Two, by Hollis Taylor
- Cross-Tuning Workshop: DDAD, by Jody Stecher
- Practical Hints on Irish Fiddling: Trebles & Cuts, by Brendan Taaffe
- On Improvisation: Fiddling the Blues, Part I, by Paul Anastasio
- Cross-Canada Fiddle Tour: New Brunswick's Earl Mitton, by Gordon Stobbe
- Bluegrass Fiddling: Curly Ray Cline, by Paul Shelasky
TUNES
- Ralph's Watch, by Judy Hyman
- Darlene MacKenzie's Wedding, by Lucy MacNeil
- Tjønneblomen ("The Water Lily"), by Gjermund Haugen
- Off to California (Fiddle Tune History)
- Fireman's Reel (Fiddle Tune History)
- Silver Cluster (Fiddle Tune History)
- Far from Home (Fiddle Tune History)
- Possum Up a Gum Stump (Fiddle Tune History)
- Jack O' Diamonds, arranged by Hollis Taylor (The Practicing Fiddler)
- Washington's March, transcribed by Jody Stecher as played by Edden Hammons (Cross-Tuning Workshop)
- Washington's March, transcribed by Jody Stecher as played by Ed Haley (Cross-Tuning Workshop)
- Hard Luck, solos transcribed by Paul Shelasky as played by Curly Ray Cline
- Within a Mile of Dublin (Practical Hints on Irish Fidding)
- Mitton's Breakdown, by Earl Mitton; transcribed by Gordon Stobbe (Cross-Canada Fiddle Tour)
ARTICLE EXCERPTS
 Photo: Randi Anglin
Judy Hyman: In the Rhythm Bed
By Brendan Taaffe
"Judy Hyman," a fellow fiddler said recently, "is a force." And that pretty much cuts to the heart of it. For thirty years, Judy Hyman has been playing a powerful groove, exploring the edges of the tradition with the Horse Flies and, more recently, playing with Big Table and Small Tattoo in the dance world, the indie-rock band Boy with a Fish, touring with Natalie Merchant, and doing her own writing for film scores and other media. Like other prominent old time fiddlers of her generation, Judy caught the bug at southern festivals in the '70s, getting a chance to hear old masters like Tommy Jarrell and Fred Cockerham play. Since then, she's done what's come naturally, exploring the rhythmic possibilities of the tradition and putting out some good dance music.
On an early spring day in 2004 we met at Judy's house in Ithaca for some eggplant and brown rice, tunes on the lawn, and a long chat.
When did you start playing?
I started violin when I was eight. I started piano when I was seven. That's not tremendously early by today's standards, but that was pretty typical back then. My dad's a pianist, so it was assumed that everyone would take piano lessons. I started piano and then a year later they said to me, "Well, now it's time for the second instrument." I remember my mom taking me to a grade school orchestra concert and I looked around and thought, "Well, those cellos, those are pretty big and unwieldy, and the flutes, they're just sitting there with the instrument in their lap most of the time, but the violins, they play all the time, and they're getting all the melodies. Wow, that's what I want to do."
Where was all this?
I grew up in northern New Jersey. That particular experience was in Tenafly, and then I went to high school in Montclair. I'm a Jersey girl.
Where'd you go to music school?
Indiana University in Bloomington -- a great experience.
And there is a fiddling community there.
Yeah, there is. At that point we chose Bloomington because Jeff [Claus] is from rural Illinois and always wanted to live a relatively rural kind of existence, and I'm from just outside New York City and wanted some action. Bloomington was a really good combination for us that way.
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Your interest in fiddling had been sparked before that.
I can put a date on it. When I was in the middle of college, I had already decided that I wanted to play violin seriously and go to music school. But I had to finish college first -- that was a parental edict. I was practicing really hard and going to school and just burning it up in terms of hours to the day. I told a friend of mine that I needed to do something for pure fun. She had started playing fiddle, and she said, "Well I can get you a ride to this festival. It's called Union Grove." So I went down to Union Grove [North Carolina] and the driver was Jeff. I was introduced to old time fiddle and my husband in the same weekend -- kind of a life-changing event. That was spring 1973.
So there I was gearing up to go back to music school, which I did about three years later, and getting interested in fiddle at the same time. Which was really complicated, because the techniques are pretty different, and I was ridden with guilt over the fiddling. In those days the violin world was really closed to the idea of fiddle playing, which has changed entirely. You would go into a violin store, looking for instruments or bows, and the minute you started playing fiddle music, they would all turn up their noses and bring you out the cheapest stuff. And I didn't want my teachers to know I was playing fiddle because I thought they would think it was interfering with my progress and ask me to stop. The world has opened up a great deal.
Who were your early influences, the players who really got you excited early on?
I was really excited by a group of the old guard, and I was really also very excited by a group of my peers, some of whom were slightly older and some of whom were slightly younger, but they had been around it longer than I. Of the old guard, I can still honestly say that Tommy Jarrell is my favorite fiddle-player of all time. I still take out those records and they make my heart skip a beat. He's definitely a mainstay, and then other people that I encountered at festivals and was really excited by were people like Fred Cockerham and Benton Flippin and Ernest East.
They were a huge influence, but for me of equal influence were the people who had learned from those guys. So, certainly Bruce Molsky, James Leva, Brad Leftwich, Andy Williams, definitely Pete Sutherland, also later on, Mike Bryant. I look back on it a lot, and at that point my chief aspiration was to be a second fiddle player. It never even occurred to me that I would lead and front something.
It was so interesting to me what people did with their bows. I couldn't figure out how they got that sound and all that rhythm. When you're in the South and it's late at night and there's all that moisture in the air, the fiddles play so great -- they open out and get really smooth and liquid. It was an enchanting sound. And of course when you're in your early twenties you have the energy to stay up for four days in a row, so each one of those experiences was incredibly intense. So I started out thinking that what I wanted to do was back people up, play second fiddle. I listened to a lot of music but I didn't necessarily learn all of the tunes note for note, and then time went on and I started really learning the tunes.
Also, I have to say that a big part of my initial interest was the social scene around old time fiddle. We went to southern festivals several times each summer for fifteen years or more and made some pretty great friends there.
At this point where are you getting your repertoire from?
Well, there are a lot of people now burning discs of all sorts of wonderful things. In the last few years I've been given discs of Marcus Martin -- that's been a really great source -- and Bill Hemsley and Manco Snead. There's a set of John Salyer stuff that's pretty important. I love Rayna Gellert's album, Ways of the World, and a lot of Dirk Powell's and Rafe Stefanini's work. And the Ed Haley and Edden Hammons stuff is great. Some of those have been around for some time, but I've only just acquired them in the past few years.
In addition to buying LPs, I used to get my repertoire by going to festivals and taping. That bureau behind you is full of tapes. I'm not doing that anymore, though I've gotten some good tunes on tape at camps I've participated in. People's repertoire has grown incredibly, and I can't say that mine has grown enormously. Expanding my repertoire hasn't always been the goal. I think I've gotten in deeper with the tunes that I've played for a really long time. This week, Richie Stearn's mother died and so we've spent a lot of time together playing and hanging out. On Monday we played and we played a lot of those great old Round Peak standards, and I have to say a lot of my heart is still in that stuff. I love it. I just love it.
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So as you were going through music school in Indiana, and you were going to these festivals, how conflicted did that feel?
Oh, it was totally intense. In the winter I would try to mostly only play violin, but every now and then I would get the fiddle out, and in the summer I would put the violin away and then go play fiddle all summer. At the end of one summer -- I was in music school -- I opened up my violin case and the violin top had sunk because it had been in southern Indiana in all that humidity and I hadn't opened it up in three months.
After graduating, you came out to Ithaca?
Yes, we came here right after I finished music school for Jeff to go to graduate school. Cornell was one of the places he was accepted and we knew there was fiddle music here. Lifestyle had as much to do with the decision to come here as academics.
The fiddle thing was the Highwoods String Band.
Well, Highwoods was beginning their end by the time we got here. We had already been to a couple of those Highwoods parties -- in maybe '77, '78 and that band was a total inspiration. We moved here in '79. But there were a lot of other great and fun bands in the area. There was the Swamp Root band out of Rochester, with Sandy Stark on fiddle, and the Bubba George band here in town which included Jeb Puryear, who plays guitar with Donna the Buffalo, and Richie Stearns on banjo, who plays with the Horse Flies. There was the Correctones String Band with John Specker and Danny Kornblum on fiddles. It was a pretty inspiring place to be.
Is that when the Horse Flies started to happen?
We started to do the Horse Flies almost as soon as we got here, and it was a very different group of people than it is now friends we had met at festivals who were from up around Geneseo and Rochester. At that point the band was a two-fiddle band. Mike Scott and I played fiddle and John Hoffmann, who is now a very good fiddle player in his own right, played banjo. Jeff played guitar and Molly Stoughton played bass.
At first, were you playing pretty straight with the Horse Flies?
The best I could. [laughs] I mean, when you grow up in New Jersey and then you go through Philadelphia and live in upstate New York, you do the best you can. People get into this stuff in different ways. Some people get really attracted by the ancientness and the history of it, and all the stuff that goes along with that. I was really fascinated by the rhythm. I had always been fascinated by drumming and rhythm, but just happened to play the violin, and I was really taken with the social thing. I was never a reproductionist. I really liked the tunes, I really liked the rhythmic thing, and I always just did it pretty much how it came out. I figured the integrity to it was to try and get it to sound like fiddling and not like violin playing, and I was really interested in the southern repertoire.
At that point we just played fiddle tunes and we sang old songs, so in that sense, we were pretty darn traditional. And when we started with the next iteration of the Horse Flies, which was me, Jeff, Richie Stearns, and John Hayward, we were still just basically doing fiddle tunes and old songs. But then things started to happen. There was never a decision made. There was never a conversation. It just started to happen and we decided that it was worth letting happen. It just felt so natural.
The way I see fiddle music is that fiddle music is what people play naturally. People who grew up with it and learned it from their ancestors, that was the natural thing for them to do. And what we ended up doing and have continued to do, if you put together all the pieces, is just exactly right and the natural thing for us to have done. I think a lot of people have thought we were disrespecting the music and trying to do all these oddball things. Not really.
It's all music, and it all feeds into each other, and you follow your own heart through it. I think that's what people who like to stay within the tradition and make it a point to emulate the tradition are feeling, too. I think they're coming to it in exactly the same way, and that's where their heart is taking them. You know when someone is playing music that's not sincere -- it just doesn't work.
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Given the emphasis on rhythm, do you feel that your natural home is playing for dancers or playing for a concert?
Oh, I think it's both. Sometimes people ask if our natural home is playing live or recording, and the answer is both. I think it's very definitely both. That's one of the great things about where I'm finding myself at this point, is that there are a lot of things that I feel equally passionate and invested in. I wouldn't say that any one thing is more important than any other, and I really like that they're all happening now.
For dancing, there's this obvious interaction between the rhythm of the band and what people are doing, but you're also tied into 32 bar phrasing. Does that limit you?
We like 32 bars. We like predictable rhythm. We don't want to interrupt that intuitive body reception of the music. I suppose we've become known as experimenters, though I wouldn't call what we're doing experimenting because it's just sort of what comes out. We like to play dances because you can really go somewhere with the tune, but we're not at all interested in yanking things around to a place where it's in any way confusing for people. When we play outside the context of a dance we'll play southern tunes that add a measure here or take a measure away there and our songs do some of that as well, but even there we like a predictable flow to the music that makes you want to dance and doesn't make you fall over and get confused.
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www.judyhyman.com
[Brendan Taaffe is a farmer and teacher in central Vermont. He plays fiddle, guitar, and penny whistle. He has a CD called Come Sit By My Chair. www.brendantaaffe.com]
 Photo: Whitney Lane
Brian Conway: Sligo in the Bronx
By Michael Simmons
Brian Conway speaks with an accent that proudly declares his Bronx upbringing, but he plays fiddle with such a pure Sligo lilt that you'd swear he'd spent his entire life in Ireland. Conway is not as well known as he should be -- he's only released one solo recording and his day job as a lawyer in the Westchester County district attorney's office keeps him close to home -- but those lucky few who have heard him at his weekly seisiún at Dunne's Pub in White Plains, New York, or at one of his rare concerts, all agree that he is the real deal.
Conway owes his mastery of the distinctive ornaments, rolls, and rhythms of the Sligo style to a quirk of history. Emigrants from all over Ireland had been moving to New York City since the 1840s, but in the 1920s, when the record companies first started recording Irish musicians in earnest, there happened to be a large number of virtuoso fiddlers from Sligo in town.
Without a doubt the most famous of these fiddlers was Michael Coleman, who moved to New York in 1914. Coleman was a powerful musician whose records essentially defined Irish fiddling in the first half of the 20th century, and to this day many musicians refer to Sligo County as Coleman Country. Other notable figures include Paddy Killoran, whose Pride of Erin Orchestra played the ships that sailed the Ireland-to-America route in the 1930s, and James Morrison, who made numerous recordings in the 1920s and 1930s, and whose efforts as an instructor of both fiddling and dancing earned him the title of "The Professor."
Coleman, Morrison, Killoran, and countless less famous musicians passed on their traditions to a younger generation of New York musicians of Irish descent such as Andy McGann, Martin Wynne, James "Lad" O'Beirne, and Paddy Reynolds. This second generation of New World Sligo-style fiddlers in turn passed the music down to a third generation of fiddlers like Conway.
Brian Conway was born in 1961 on June 16, a date that the bookishly-inclined will recognize as Bloomsday, the day that all of the action in James Joyce's Ulysses takes place. "I realize it's an auspicious day for someone with an Irish heritage to be born on," he says. "But if I had my choice, I would have picked a date with a Yeats connection. He had a strong association with Sligo County and he wrote "The Fiddler of Dooney," which is my favorite poem. In fact, the title of my solo recording First through the Gate is taken from a line from the poem."
When Conway was ten years old, it was decided that he should learn to play the violin. "My mother's best friend wanted her kids to learn to play Irish fiddle with Martin Mulvihill, who lived nearby," he says. "My father was passionately in love with the violin -- he played a bit in the Ulster style -- so he thought that was a good idea. So I was told, not asked, mind you, but told, that I was going to take violin lessons along with my older brother Sean. Before we went to our first lesson my father showed us how to hold the violin and bow and taught us a scale and a tune. My brother picked it right away, but I was completely incompetent."
Conway remembers his early lessons as disasters, but over time Mulvihill's patience and kindness helped him over the rough patches. "Martin was so laid back and informal," Conway recalls. "I was so nervous but he was such a nice man. In my first lesson he kept telling me to "pint my finger down" when I was holding the bow. I couldn't figure out what he was saying and my mother had to explain to me that he was saying "point your finger down" in his Irish accent. I don't really think that I learned much of my personal style from him, but Martin ultimately gave me a strong foundation in violin playing, an excellent introduction to Irish music and, perhaps most importantly, a respect for the culture of Irish music."
After a few months of lessons, Conway became very enthusiastic about fiddling and started to show some real progress, when his father discovered that Martin Wynne lived nearby. Wynne had learned to play fiddle in Ireland from Philip O'Beirne, the man who taught Michael Coleman to play. Wynne also knew and played with Coleman, James Morrison, and Paddy Killoran in the 1930s and 1940s.
Jim Conway persuaded Wynne to take young Brian on as a student. "Martin Wynne was an extremely shy man," Conway says. "At first he wouldn't see me in person and he sent me my lessons through the mail. One of the first ones I got was a cross-bowing exercise for "The Mason's Apron," which I still have. Eventually he allowed me go to his house for lessons and in time he became like a member of the family. I was nervous about telling Martin Mulvihill about my lessons with Martin Wynne, but when he found out he so excited. He knew how important Martin Wynne was, even if I didn't know it at the time."
Martin Wynne introduced Conway to the Sligo style of fiddling, and helped inspire in him a deeper appreciation for the history of the music. "Martin Wynne was full of stories about the musicians he had played with over the years," Conway says. "He also had great insight into the various ways of approaching a tune, of how to play it in a personal way but not stray from the tradition. It was like I was able to go to Sligo and study with a master without having to leave the Bronx."
So for the next year or so Conway took lessons from the two Martins and progressed rapidly. He became so accomplished that when he was twelve years old he won the All-Ireland title at the Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann held in Ireland. The next year he won it again, which inspired him even more. "I had a small tape recorder and I would play Michael Coleman tapes every morning," he says. "I would listen to "Farrel O'Gara" to wake me up. I would listen to it when I was eating cereal and I would listen to it when I went off to school. I'm pretty sure none of the other kids in the Bronx were doing that."
Although Conway was studying with two very accomplished fiddlers, he cites another player that he never took formal lessons from as having the greatest influence on his style. "My father took me to meet Andy McGann a few months after I started with Martin Mulvihill," he says. "By then I had learned a couple of tunes and my father was so proud of me. He had me play them for Andy who, in his typical style, didn't want to say anything critical in front me, even though I wasn't very good. I used to sneak into the pub where he played and just watch his every move. Like Martin Wynne, he knew Michael Coleman and even took some lessons from him. He really helped me with my bowing and he taught me how to play a tune at a moderate tempo and still have it sound lively."
His father began hosting regular Friday night sessions, which attracted some of the finest players in New York. Along with Martin Wynne, Conway got to play with fiddlers like Louis Quinn, Tom Connolly, Vincent Harrison, Paddy Reynolds, and Andy McGann. "I think that when I was a teenager, most of my friends were older than my father," he says. "One player who was closer to my age was Tony DeMarco. When I was sixteen we recorded a couple of tracks together for Mick Maloney for his record Irish Traditional Instrumental Music from the East Coast of America, which came out on Rounder. A few years later Tony and I recorded an LP for Green Linnet called The Apple in Winter."
Conway could have pursued a career as a professional musician, but he opted instead to pursue a career in law. But even during his university and law school years and his first years as a lawyer, he still managed to play. In 1983 he made a guest appearance on The Tailor's Choice, a recording by the button accordionist Joe Burke, and over the years he appeared on various compilations of Irish music in America. In 2002 he finally released his solo debut, a wonderful collection of traditional tunes called First Through the Gate (reviewed in Fiddler Magazine, Winter '02/'03).
..."A lot of modern players think it sounds old-fashioned, but there was no way I was going to make an album without some piano. I love the way it sounds with a fiddle. It has such a different tonal characteristic than the guitar and the rhythms have a much richer, almost rolling quality. I play differently with a pianist. I feel more comfortable and I find the phrasing comes more easily. Perhaps it's because of all the Michael Coleman records I listened to growing up, which almost always had piano on them."
Most of the tunes on the CD came from McGann, Wynne, Coleman, and James Morrison. "I get some of my tunes from other fiddlers in sessions," Conway explains. "The rest I learned from Andy, Martin, and the older fiddle players that were around when I was growing up. I find that a lot of the older tunes, the ones that have stood the test of time, are the ones that really appeal to me. Many of the modern tunes are fine, I guess, but I don't think a lot of them are going to be around in a few years."
Conway is still having so much fun exploring the existing repertoire that he hasn't felt the need to add to the stock of tunes. But that may change soon. "I still haven't composed any of my own," he says. "Joe Burke said that you should wait until you're forty to write your first tune. Well, I'm just over forty now and I'm beginning to consider it. I have a few ideas I've been rolling around in my head that maybe I'll write down before too long."
First Through the Gate is full of fine musical moments, but for Conway the finest are the fiddle trios with his mentor Andy McGann and Conway's own protégé Patrick Mangan. "Patrick is a wonderful player, and I was so glad he got the chance to record with Andy," Conway says. "I like the way that we all play in the Sligo style but also sound different, that we each sound like ourselves."
Mangan's appearance marks a new phase in Conway's development as a fiddler, that of becoming a teacher. "I was so fortunate to have teachers like Martin Mulvihill, Martin Wynne, and Andy McGann," he says. "I feel that I really should pass along what they so generously gave to me. And I do have to say that teaching has been the best thing I ever did to improve my own playing. I've developed my own teaching style, which is more focused than the way I was taught. I teach a tune phrase by phrase, just break it down into its parts, and then show the student how I bow it. I don't think my way is necessarily the best way, but that lets the student understand how I think about the music, which in turn may help them form their own ideas.
"I try to stress that it's not just technique they need to learn, but that the students need to understand the cultural roots of the music. They need to listen and they need to get out and play. Taking lessons in a vacuum may lead to technical ability, but I find it makes the music sterile. I try to keep my students from becoming too pyrotechnical, to keep reminding them that music is an art, not a technical exercise."
So what's in the future for Brian Conway? "I've been working on a new CD, but it's taking a while," he says. "First Through the Gate took about four years to complete. My new CD will be more collaborative and will feature many of the musicians I've worked with here in New York. I want to work with some singers and I want to do more slow airs. The older I get, the more I appreciate the beauty and complexity of the slow airs.
"For me, there is no more personal instrument than the violin. You may start out imitating someone, like I started out imitating Michael Coleman, but ultimately, you need to stop listening to them and start finding your own way. The challenge is to work within a tradition, but still put your personal stamp on it. Learning to do that is something that takes a lifetime."
www.brianconway.com
"The Fiddler of Dooney" can be read at www.irishfiddle.com/fiddlerofdooney.html
[Michael Simmons, Fiddler Magazine's Review Editor, is a guitar player and writer living in Mountain View, California. He is co-publisher of the Ukelele Occasional, a frequent contributor to Acoustic Guitar and Guitarmaker, and the author of Taylor Guitars: 30 Years of a New American Classic.]
 Photo: Carol Kennedy
Cape Breton's Kyle & Lucy MacNeil: Kitchens and Concert Halls
By Paul Stewart Cranford
Fiddlers Kyle and Lucy MacNeil come from a family rooted in the Gaelic music traditions of Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia. They play with brothers Sheumas (piano) and Stewart (flute and accordion) in a group known as The Barra MacNeils. Touring extensively and making recordings since the mid-'80s, The Barras were the first successful group to come out of Cape Breton's rich solo fiddling tradition.
Lucy, what are your earliest memories of hearing the fiddle?
It would have to be listening to Sheumas, Kyle, and Stewart practicing with the help of Mom's guidance, and getting ready for concerts and local community events and things like that. I remember an awful lot of practicing and tunes, and Mom jigging the tunes because she'd be teaching them by ear. Other than that, being up in Washabuck hearing my uncle Carl [MacKenzie], who's quite well known, and my late uncles Simon and Charlie. And also our uncle Hector. And the other times that really are vivid in my memory are when the Stubberts came into our living room in Sydney Mines. Those were long afternoons of lots of fiddle.
You mentioned that your mother jigged the tunes -- jigging the tunes means lilting the tunes, singing them. Is that how you learned your first tunes?
Yes, I'd have to say. I could read music and I was taking lessons for several years, but it was three Irish tunes -- don't ask me the names -- three Irish reels that I had learned from Mom to play at an Irish concert in North Sydney.
And yourself, Kyle, would you have learned your music by ear from your mother?
The earliest fiddles I remember were at my grandmother's place. I was fortunate because I heard a lot of the older fiddlers -- like Dan Hughie MacEachern -- and I remember an afternoon after the Highland Village concert, Donald Angus Beaton being there. So I was very young, but still there was an influence on me as far as hearing all this great music then. But my first tunes were from that, and from Mom teaching me by ear. And it was like two or three years before I ever took any music lessons.
What made you think you needed music lessons?
Actually, Mom wanted us to learn to play slow airs the way that Winnie Chafe played them. That's the reason we all started lessons. Sheumas and I were taking fiddle lessons at the same time from Professor Jimmy MacDonald here in North Sydney. He taught us how to hold the violin, and the technical side of playing, the tone. Sheumas took lessons for quite some time and as things progressed he moved towards the piano and we became a fiddle-piano duet thing, but Sheumas still plays.
We played together a lot, actually, when we were young. We could all read music and we were still taking classical violin. The majority of the traditional tunes were still by ear, and at that time there were very few recordings of Cape Breton fiddlers. Most of it was on home-made cassettes. There would have been some albums -- Carl MacKenzie, John Campbell, and of course all the Winston LPs. So I would learn all the tunes off the records and the tapes that I could find so I'd have enough tunes for dances. The dance is where I developed a lot of my Cape Breton fiddle style.
Your mother's a dance teacher, so was it playing for her dance classes or for square dancers?
Both, actually, because Mom was a great dance teacher.
Lucy: Still is.
Kyle: Still is! But she liked to have live music. So I played for her dance class all through my teenage years and earlier than that, and it was a big influence on my tempo, I suppose -- not to play too fast or too slow -- and to be able to read the dancer and know how to play for each dancer. I remember her saying that she really liked Donald Angus Beaton's playing for step dancing, and Joe MacLean's, because they looked at your feet and followed your feet and played to your feet. So I think that was a big influence as far as my style of playing. And of course the square dances, it's all about tempo there, too, because it helps to make you a better player, playing for a group of dancers.
Did concerts change that then? Has that changed your tempo, or do you think you were rooted strongly enough early in the game?
There's definitely an element of dance music in our concerts. That's still probably the most popular thing for a crowd. There are also tunes that are more listening tunes, solo tunes, I guess you'd say.
So you integrate dancing in your concerts -- you have step dancing.
I think even today, dancing's still the biggest part of our concerts. Today our music, some of it, is pretty modern, but the traditional aspects of the fiddle playing and the dance music are still there.
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Lucy: We kind of bring a little more personality to a stage/theater concert. It's not just sitting down, you have to entertain. Some people really enjoy sitting around listening to just the fiddle, but we get a lot of compliments that they like both sides -- we can be very traditional, we can do songs, or a capella singing The biggest thing is that we're a family. They're really amazed by that, or intrigued, or can't believe that we still do it [laughs].
How long have you been on the road as a family?
Lucy: My first summer with the Barra MacNeils was 1986, and that's when their very first album came out. And I really wasn't playing with the band at that time, but they decided, they knew eventually I would join them, so I played a little bit of fiddle on the first album, and bodhrán, but no singing or anything like that. And then I was hooked.
And you play different instruments besides the fiddle.
Yes, I play a lot of bodhrán, which I do quite enjoy, and I'll double up with Kyle on the fiddle from time to time, and when they need a bit of background on the songs on the fiddle. Later on I started with the Celtic harp, and that comes out more at Christmas-time. It's devilish hard to travel with, but we'd like to include it more in the show. I do play a few fiddle tunes, strathspeys, on it, but you have to really keep the practice up to keep your fingers going, I find, anyway, on the harp. But it's something I'm getting more into all the time.
Your Christmas concerts and recordings have been well received.
Lucy: Yes, we drew a lot on our past, the music we grew up with, and our Christmases in Washabuck and at home, and it was quite an enjoyable project because we had a lot of material that we had gathered over the years, whether it be the tunes or the songs, so it came together quite easy. And a lot of people actually say they play it all year long!
Well, it certainly gives a real family feeling.
Kyle: We were out doing an Irish festival in Chicago last year, and this friend of ours out there was saying that one of the reasons people are so interested in Cape Breton music and the Cape Breton culture is that they don't quite understand the fact that music was a family thing and in the homes, and the get-togethers were in the homes, and for them, out in Chicago and parts of the U.S., traditional music is something they see at an Irish festival, or in a bar or pub or whatever. So they're very intrigued by the concept of the family music, having a session in the home...
People dropping in unannounced for a tune.
Lucy: We take it for granted. You grow up with this, and you have all kinds of first cousins that play There are so many families that can all play, it just happens that we do it professionally. But we have cousins that are very talented and play and sing, but we do -- we tend to take it for granted. And so you travel away and you're in areas where it's not as common.
Your family is exceptional in that there are six brothers and sisters and all six are professional musicians.
Lucy: [Laugher] I don't know how it happened, but we get that question a lot. Because there are some families where you'll have a couple of musicians or people who are interested in music and then some people that, even if they're interested in music, they'll go off to be a doctor or a lawyer or something like that. But I think that our parents saw that we had the talent, and they guided us and certainly didn't want us to waste our talents.
The biggest thing was that first time, when we were asked to play a tune in the living room with some people around. It was an outlet It's quite a proud feeling you get -- "I can join the rest now and be a part of something." To go and be by yourself and go to lessons and practice by yourself -- you don't see where it's going and it's not fun. So a social gathering brings a lot of fun to it, and you see a lot more fiddle players and piano players and dancers. Today they're gathering together at younger ages. Down at the Gaelic College, you'll see them get together in the evenings, having little sessions, so the practice becomes a lot more fun.
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Kyle, you have been digging into the older music for years. Is it overwhelming sometimes?
Kyle: It's funny, I think I go through the same books they went through twenty years ago and still find tunes. Just recently, Stan Chapman and myself, we did a twelve-week course at UCCB, and we had a chance to get into the Beaton Institute there, and they have a large collection of Cape Breton and Scottish music. It's very overwhelming in there -- you could be in there for months -- and I didn't even get to listen to the tapes or anything. The repertoire is so huge, and I think it goes in cycles, too, because when I was learning to play, most of the fiddlers were playing tunes out of the Skye Collection and the Athole Collection and all those big collections. The last few years, fiddlers are playing more original Cape Breton tunes, especially the younger players. Now when you play some of the older tunes, you have the younger fiddlers going, "Where did you get that? What book is that in?" So it'll come back around again. There are so many tunes in the Cape Breton repertoire that they'll circle around and be in the repertoire for years to come.
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