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Fall 97
Articles
Tunes
- Unnamed Reel
- Out and In the Harbour
- Jack Broke the Prison Door
- Millie O'Godger
- Buffalo Girls (not Gals)
- Good-bye Old Paint
- Say Old Man, Can You Play a Fiddle
- Voi Minuu, Polone Poiga
- George Booker
- We Can't Be Darlings Anymore
- Jason's Slide
- Dr. Gilbert
ARTICLE EXCERPTS
The Fiddle
in the Shetland Isles
By Peter Cooke
The best way to visit the Shetland Isles is to sail there with the "north
boat" -- the steamer that sets out from Aberdeen on the east coast
of Scotland at 5 p.m. three times a week and berths alongside the quay in
Lerwick harbour, Shetland's centre of commerce, some 12 hours later. Rough
though the passage may sometimes be -- for it's in these waters that the
Atlantic swell meets up with the numerous tidal currents that swirl around
Britain's northern shores and the weather is as often coarse as it is kindly
-- it is a good way of easing oneself into the social life of these unique
islands, for the sea dominates life in Shetland and one feels almost a part
of Shetland as soon as one enters the ship's saloon. Most times when I took
the north boat, the evening was enlivened by a fiddler or accordionist --
sometimes a sailor returning home on leave, at other times a student going
back for the vacation -- and the piano in the ship's saloon is rarely free
of someone vamping an accompaniment. And there are plenty of friendly Shetlanders
prepared to chat with you and wish you a good visit.
The Shetland Isles are the most northerly outpost of the United Kingdom
-- over 100 low-lying and virtually treeless islands clustered together
almost equidistantly between Aberdeen on Scotland's east coast, the Faeroe
Isles and Bergen on the west coast of Norway. It's not surprising then if
the average Shetlander maintains that he or she is no more Scottish than
Scandinavian and it's a fact that the Shetlands were ruled from Norway until
1469 and old affiliations die hard. A map of Shetland is strewn with place
names that have a wonderful Norse ring about them, and as late as 1774 a
visitor (George Low) remarked on the singing of "visicks" -- Norse
ballads sung to accompany circle dances. Though the old Norn language itself
eventually faded from use, some of the circle dances survived into the 20th
century in the wedding context, and even as late as 1950 two songs in the
Norn tongue (the "Unst Boat Song" and a fragment of the ballad
"King Orfeo") were still in circulation and collected by Pat Shuldham-Shaw,
though by then Shetlanders regarded both fragments as little more than curiosities.
Whatever the old repertory was like -- and we have a little evidence
of the style in surviving fragments of old wedding reels (the "Auld
Reels" or "Muckle Reels," as they were called) -- it is clear
that it was gradually replaced by a considerable number of Scottish tunes
brought in by Scottish farm workers sent up north by Scottish lairds, who
had become the landowners in much of Shetland. Many Scots fishermen also
sailed north each year in search of the rich herring harvest around Shetland's
shores and they, too, brought tunes and ballads with them. The majority
of tunes I found in circulation during the 1970s were of Scottish origin
even if their names might have undergone a sea-change. For instance, that
fine pipe march "The Marchioness of Tullibardine" became a reel
called "The Burra Boys War Dance," and the well known reel "The
High Road to Linton" acquired the name "Lassie get the Bed Made"
in one island and "Cuddle in a Boasie" in another ("boasie"
being the dialect term for bosom). One further example, the reel "Sail
her ower da raft trees," the name given in Whalsay (though not elsewhere)
to what was originally the Scottish strathspey "Lady Mary Ramsay,"
reminds one of the Shetlander's continuous association with seafaring. When
the fishing around their own islands was poor, Shetland men went off in
droves to serve in the merchant or Royal navy and travelled the world, sometimes
buying up a fiddle during shore leave, and picking up a new tune somewhere
else. The result is few homes without a fiddle -- often hanging on the wall
in the parlour -- and a large and fascinating repertory of tunes which all
have distinctive Shetland flavours (I use the plural here because it became
plain to me that there was no single Shetland style, but many, as one might
expect in a cluster of independent island communities).
Despite increasing Scottish influence on the Nordic culture of the Shetlands,
the island fiddling has remained remarkably distinctive. Furthermore, even
as late as the 1970s I was able to come across about 125 tunes that seemed
to have no Scottish ancestry and which certainly had a distinctive Shetland
feel about them. They were virtually all reels, for up until the early years
of the present century reels were almost the only kind of dances performed
and only began to be replaced by polkas, quadrilles and other Scottish country
dances after World War I. Even then the reels survived in the repertory
of fiddlers who continued to enjoy playing them as listening pieces.
Shetland's reputation for fiddling dates back at least two hundred years.
The Statistical Account for Scotland c. 1794 mentions, "Music
and dancing are favourite amusements especially in winter. Many of the common
people play with skill upon the violin," while Arthur Edmonstone in
his View of the Ancient and Present state of the Zetland Isles reported
(1809), "Among the peasantry almost one in ten can play on the violin.
Before violins were introduced, the musicians performed on an instrument
called a gue, which appears to have had some similarity to the violin,
but had only two strings of horse hair, and was played upon in the same
manner as a violoncello." In 1978 fiddler Dannie Jamieson of Cullivoe
made his own survey of music-making in his community. Of the seventy men
in his district aged sixteen or over, twenty-one played or had once played
the fiddle to various degrees of expertise, another five the melodeon or
accordion; four others played guitar, while eight were known as "singers."
It was just such a reputation which took me north during the 1970s and
I was privileged to get to know a large number of older island fiddlers,
each fine representatives of their own distinctive island traditions. No
introduction would be right without some hint as to their background and
upbringing. Take, for instance, Andrew Poleson, of the tiny island of Whalsay
off the east coast of Mainland Shetland: when I first met him he had retired
from a lifetime of various tasks -- jobbing builder, storekeeper, crofter,
etc. (for he was one of those few Shetlanders who could not work at sea).
His strong arms and horny hands brought a bright and sturdy sound from his
fiddle -- a sound which was matched with a wonderful rhythmic precision
and vitality.
Unlike today, when one can find teaching of fiddling going on in most
schools throughout the islands -- of which more later -- Andrew, like most
Shetland fiddlers in their youth, received no formal instruction in fiddling
-- not even how to tune his fiddle. He told me, "When I started first
to play, I had the fiddle tuned to doh, me, soh doh, and it didn't correspond
you see -- my ear told me that I was wrong." Using a borrowed fiddle,
he learned tunes from his mother's singing and his playing style from friends
living around his home:
"She used to sing, you see, and we used to dance, just young boys
-- and I think I picked them up faster when I was younger than I probably
do now, and I knew a lot of them and I never lost them. I would go up in
the dark loft and sit and play in the darkness to myself so as I could annoy
nobody. I knew a lot of tunes, just myself like, I could sing them, and
I knew when I was wrong and when I was going on right."
Catroina
MacDonald: Respecting Shetland's Fiddling Legacy
By Mary Larsen
Hailing from Lerwick, Shetland, Catriona MacDonald studied with one
of the true masters of Shetland fiddling, Tom Anderson. Soon after she started
to play, Catriona began to make a name for herself as one of the great fiddlers
of the young generation. She won the title of Young Fiddler of the Year
in the annual Shetland Folk Society competition in 1983, and in 1991, won
BBC Radio's prestigious Young Tradition Award. Not content to let any of
life's many possibilities pass her by, Catriona went on to study opera at
the Royal College of Music. She has since returned to her first love, the
fiddle, however, and now performs solo, with accordionist Ian Lowthian,
and with Norwegian fiddle and Hardanger player AnnbjÀrg Lien. A performance
by Catriona MacDonald is a delightful mix of exciting music and amusing
stories. It was after one such show during a California jaunt in September
1996, that this interview took place.
How did you get started playing the fiddle?
I was eleven years old when I started to play the fiddle, which was quite
late for a fiddle player. I started playing when I was nine -- for a year
I studied classical music, and got really, really bored with it quickly.
I seemed to get to the end of a tutor, and I was playing "Cock of the
North," which is one of the easiest Scottish tunes you can play. I
gave it up, put it away, and suddenly when I was eleven, I made a decision
which was completely against my normal self, and I went along with a friend
of mine, who said she was going to go take fiddle lessons with Tom Anderson.
I said, "Oh, can I come?" I hadn't played for like a year. And
when I went there I just got totally hooked by it. At the time, it was really
good for me because Tom put a lot into his pupils, and spent a lot of time
with this new group called Shetland's Young Heritage, which was twenty fiddle
players in a band, all playing together, which he was starting to develop
from his students that he'd been teaching since the late '70s. So I went
in 1981, and I started getting a weekly lesson in school -- it's the only
place in the whole of Scotland that has fiddle tuition that you can get
for free at school. So instead of taking piano or flute, you can get Shetland
fiddle lessons. So that was the way I got started.
So you didn't hear too many fiddlers before that, growing up?
Never. I hardly heard any. The only person I ever saw was on the television
-- Aly Bain. I didn't really have any connection with it, because my family
are not -- haven't been up until now -- musical. But obviously once I got
into that circle, then I was hearing a lot of it.
What about your other influences?
When I was growing up, instead of doing the normal teenage thing like
going out to discos the whole time, I just got really into playing the fiddle.
That's all I did, all the time. My teacher was so, so good. Quite often,
we'd go around and do some playing at his house or whatever, and he had
an amazing record collection. He was really into collecting all different
types of music. We'd have "listen nights," when he'd say, "All
right, we're going to listen to ten different things," and it would
be everything from classical music, some American music, Scandinavian music,
old fiddlers from home, so it was constantly listening to lots and lots
of different things. But when I was being taught by him, it was the old
traditional Shetland stuff that he was really, really into. I mean he'd
been quite into lots of different types of music throughout his life, but
by the time I met him, he was in his seventies, and he tuned in very much
into the old traditional style -- traditional as in not the style after
the '30s. Not anything that's been influenced by Scottish dance music or
anything like that. So it was really eclectic -- the music I was listening
to -- but the music I was playing was purely traditional in my teenage years.
When did you get into Norwegian music, and the Hardanger fiddle?
I've always liked it, because Tommy [pronounced "Tammie"] started
to get into it, and I've always been told how close it is to Shetland music,
the old type stuff, but when my teacher died in 1991, he left me his Hardanger
fiddle that he'd got from Knut Buen, who I'd met when I was about twelve,
and I could just remember him as this player. I was told by Tommy, "Look,
I'm going to give you this fiddle, but on the premise that you will go away
to Norway and study it." So I wrote a letter to Knut, saying what Tommy
said, and that I would like to go for some lessons. And that's why he let
me come, because he'd given this fiddle to Tom. So I went there, and he
just totally took me in, and we started doing loads and loads of tunes.
I've been over again and again, and now I'm playing with a girl called AnnbjÀrg
Lien, who's kind of my equivalent in Norway, you know, kind of a younger
player. We have a duo playing, and it's amazing, all the time, it never
surprises me, the connection between the language, and just how I can play
the tunes that she plays really easily, and she can play Shetland tunes
that a Scottish player will have a lot of difficulty trying to play. When
she and I get together, I just can't describe how close it is -- perhaps
more close than me playing with somebody like, I don't know, Natalie MacMaster,
or one of the younger Scottish-based players, you know?
Aly Bain: Breaking
Down Barriers
By Mary larsen and Rob Roberts
Aly Bain was born in 1946, in the city of Lerwick, way up north above
Scotland on the Shetland Islands. As a boy he learned to play the fiddle
from the master of the Shetland style, Tom Anderson. Within a few years
he was recognized as one of the best fiddlers on the islands. While he was
still a teenager he went to the mainland and when he turned twenty-one,
he began his career as a professional musician. After touring the Scottish
folk circuit for a few years with Billy Connolly, he formed the very influential
Celtic band "Boys of the Lough" with Mike Whellans, Robin Morton
and Cathal McConnell.
Over the last three decades he has performed around the world with
the Boys as well as touring as a duo with accordionist and keyboardist Phil
Cunningham. Aly has also produced a number of music documentaries for British
television including "Down Home," a series that traces fiddle
music from Scotland to America and Canada. He has also published an autobiography,
"Fiddler on the Loose," and a collection of fiddle tunes.
To Aly Bain, Scottish fiddle music is more than the sonic equivalent
of "kilts and haggis." He believes that music is either "good
or not so good" and what you are wearing when you play won't make it
sound any better. Over the years he has proved that the style of music he
plays is the good kind.
This interview took place at the Great American Music Hall in San
Francisco in February, 1997.
How did you first start on the fiddle, and did you choose fiddle over
another instrument?
Actually, where I came from, there really wasn't much choice, because
everybody played the fiddle. In the Shetland Islands, you either played
fiddles or you played cards. People with nothing much to do...you make your
own kind of entertainment. You went fishing. I went fishing all summer and
played the fiddle all winter. It was just the normal kind of stuff you did.
Who did you learn from?
Well I learned basically from everybody that was around me. There were
five or six or seven great fiddle players who lived within four or five
hundred yards of where I stayed. I was hearing them all the time, and they
were a big influence. You know, you're a wee boy and look at all the guys
playing and you pick things up.
Did anyone else in your family play?
My grandfather and my uncle played. Not much -- they only really
played around Christmastime, but they could play. My uncle was a fanatic.
He sent me records -- Paganini, and Sean McGuire and Hector MacAndrew. He
sent me all these records every Christmas, so I used to learn tunes off
them, as well as learning tunes from all the guys who lived around there.
So it was very much a part of growing up. At least, it was then. Nowadays
you might not imagine it like that, but it was like that then. We didn't
have TV or anything; we listened to music.
What's the music scene like there now?
Oh, it's probably stronger in terms of how many players there are. I
suppose the standard is, too. There's a couple of hundred young kids in
Shetland, five full-time teachers going around to the schools teaching them.
That actually creates another kind of player. We grew up in an atmosphere
of people playing in your house. The kids nowadays grow up in an atmosphere
of learning it in school. So you learn the music, but in some ways you miss
the point of the music, which is very social. But they go out into the community
and they play and the old people like it, so in a way they're doing the
same thing we did, only learning the music in a slightly different way,
and competing with the media that wasn't there when we were kids. It's probably
harder for them. But in Shetland, people like fiddle music, so fiddle players
are quite well-respected up there. So they fit into life now just like we
did then, just slightly differently.
Did you ever have any classical lessons?
For six weeks, yeah. When I was growing up, there was very much a class
society; classical music belonged to the middle class and upper class, and
I was a working class guy, and I played fiddle music. So I was not exposed
to classical music until I was much older, which I deeply regret, because
I love it. I've always believed there isn't much difference, it's just the
way you're taught. Basically the music in people's heads is the same. It's
just a matter of breaking down these silly barriers that people have built
up over the years. It's just mainly a money and class thing. But now it's
beginning to change.
What other kinds of music did you listen to growing up? Were there
any other fiddlers you particularly liked?
Well, I never listened to any other fiddlers much when I was growing
up, because when you listen to other players, you get influenced a lot by
it. I did listen a great deal to Sean McGuire and Hector MacAndrew, and
Jean Carignan. The three of them, I think, represent different kinds of
music, different styles of music, they've all got different temperaments.
And really good fiddle players play what they feel. The music is just sort
of a projection of their character, of the kind of person they are. When
I hear somebody playing the fiddle like that, I really like it. It's like
it's easier for them to play than speak. So these three players were a big
influence in one way or another. I really liked what they all did. So what
you do is you take the best bits of everyone, in your subconscious you don't
really work to learn it, it just turns up.
Bruce Molsky: Tradition and Individuality in Old Time Music
By Mary Larsen
One of today's most gifted and most popular old time fiddlers, multi-instrumentalist
Bruce Molsky has devoted much of his life to the traditional music of southern
Appalachia. Bruce was born in New York City, but moved to Virginia in the
late 1970s to be closer to the music he had grown to love. A mechanical
engineer by trade until this past May, Bruce has recently embarked on a
full-time career in music. He looks forward to being able to devote his
days to teaching workshops, recording, writing, and performing. "I've
been a part-time musician all my life," says Bruce, "and now I
have the chance to give it my complete attention. I guess it took me a while
to realize you don't have to do the same thing forever. You can change."
Over the years, Bruce has played in such venues as the Smithsonian
Institution, Lincoln Center, and the Clearwater, Live Oak, and Wheatland
music festivals, as well as at countless workshops and contests. He currently
performs solo, with his wife Audrey, with the early music group Hesperus,
and with Big Hoedown (formerly called the L7's). Be sure to treat yourself
to a performance or a workshop by Bruce if he visits your area -- you're
guaranteed to be inspired for a long time to come.
This interview took place in Santa Cruz, California, in February,
1997.
What was your first instrument?
Guitar. My parents thought it might be kind of a nice sideline if I learned
a musical instrument. There was a folk guitar player who gave lessons around
our neighborhood. Mom used to send me with my guitar around the corner once
a week. I went for about a year, and was so eaten up with the guitar by
the time I was through, all I wanted to do was play.
How have you learned since then?
Watching people, listening. I keep thinking I might get around to learning
to read music one of these days. I'll get around to it, but I don't think
it's necessary to read music in order to play music.
How did you get interested in old time music?
A series of coincidences. When I was a teenager I wanted to be a bluegrass
guitar player. I played some bluegrass in New York when I was growing up.
And the first time I went to college, in Ithaca, I tried to hook up with
some people, and looked for a bluegrass fiddler to play with. I found a
fiddler, but I didn't know he was an old time and not a bluegrass fiddler.
One thing led to another. We played all these cool tunes, and the next thing
I knew I wanted to learn to play the fiddle. That was 1972. And I started
tagging along to all the fiddlers' conventions in the summertime. By 1976
I had just uprooted and moved to the South.
How did you hook up with Tommy Jarrell and Albert Hash?
I met Tommy Jarrell at his house. I was staying with a friend near Mt.
Airy -- Tommy lived in Toast, right close by. My friend dropped me off at
Tommy's house while he went to do some grocery shopping, and his car broke
down, and of course, Tommy didn't have a phone. So there was no way for
him to get in touch. I ended up spending the whole day there, just playing
music. Tommy was a really engaging, nice guy. Just a nice man. He loved
people. I'd been playing fiddle for about a year at that point, and he just
said, "Well, let's play together," which scared me to death. Then
he told me, "Stop doing that, do this." He wasn't what you might
call a music teacher, but he heard everything I was doing and he was very
happy to tell me what I wasn't doing right. That's where I learned to play
the fiddle -- that one day, just hanging out with him. I had no idea how
important that experience would be to me years later.
Did you go back again?
I used to go visit him whenever I could after that.
How about Albert Hash?
When I lived in southwest Virginia in 1976, there were a bunch of people
there that I played music with and they knew him from festivals. Some of
us used to make little trips up to his house, kind of en masse, in
these old Volkswagen bugs and pickup trucks, going up the side of Whitetop
Mountain to see Albert. And I got to play with him a few times. He was also
a really nice guy. He'd been around. I got to play head to head with him,
and just watch him.
All these old guys, they all played their own way, and here we come along
one or two generations later and study each rendition like it's the definitive
way the tune goes. But in truth it's not the "correct" version,
just the way this individual player played it. I've always based my playing
on old-fashioned renditions, but I also think there's always a danger of
getting bogged down in reverence by saying that you should only play something
a certain way because so-and-so did it that way. It's more important to
understand what that person did, and how they did it. That way, you've got
a baseline understanding of the tune when you choose to change or embellish
it. You can see the differences much more clearly. I've listened to a lot
of eastern Kentucky music, including most of the archival recordings that
Lomax made in the '30s. Many of those players lived in pretty close proximity
to each other, and I imagine many of them knew each other. Yet they all
played tunes differently.
Listening to John Salyer was really eye-opening for me, because he played
many of the same tunes as Bill Stepp and Luther Strong, but boy, he was
not afraid to add beats and twist parts around and change them. I've got
a little theory that I think these fiddlers did that on purpose. I think
they took a tune and to kind of make a signature out of it, they might purposely
change it. John Hartford and Bob Carlin have been working with all these
old Ed Haley recordings, and Ed Haley recorded, for example, "Hell
Among the Yearlings," a common tune a lot of people play. But he also
recorded a phenomenal, beautiful variation of it, called "Wild Ox in
the Mud," all changed around, so I guess that's kind of his creative
embellishment. John Salyer did the same thing. He played "Lost Girl,"
a fairly common tune, and then he played "Lost Boy." "Lost
Boy" is pretty much "Lost Girl," but with the first part
being in 9-time instead of 8. Maybe these were contest pieces, I don't know.
Who are some of your favorite old time fiddlers, past and present,
aside from the ones you've just mentioned?
I should have made a list. There are just so many. Like the Round Peak
fiddlers -- the Virginia, North Carolina fiddlers -- there's Tommy [Jarrell],
of course. Fred Cockerham, too. Fred was an unsung rock and roll hero, and
his playing was so syncopated and powerful. And many others from around
there, like Ernest East and Benton Flippen. I met Robert Sykes a few times.
He had a very bluesy style. And I've always been a big fan of Norman Edmonds'
playing. He was a great dance fiddler.
One of my favorite fiddlers in the context of a band is John Lusk of
Tennessee. He played with Murph Gribble and Albert York. They were recorded
for the AFS [Archive of Folk Song, Library of Congress] in the 1940s. That
band was the most interactive three musicians I've ever heard. That's something
that I place a very high value on, is being interactive with other people
while you're playing. The very best band music you can hear happens when
the players are listening to each other instead of to themselves.
Could you mention some of your favorite current players?
That's a dangerous question. I've had the pleasure of knowing so many
great players -- I'd feel terrible if I gave you a list and left anyone
out. I can name you some of the ones I've enjoyed playing with over the
years: Dirk [Powell] and Rafe [Stefanini] of course, but also Paul Brown,
Benton Flippen, Mike Seeger, James Leva, Brad Leftwich, Jeff Goehring, and
others. And of course the music I've played with Audrey [Molsky] has been
some of the very sweetest. There are so many great players out there. Anyone
who thinks old-time music is dead and gone has missed not only the boat,
but the whole ocean!
Chief Francis
O'Neill
By Michael Simmons
In his excellent book on Irish music Last Night's Fun, Ciaran
Carson confesses to a common confusion about the identity of Chief O'Neill,
a name that appears in the title of a number of well known dance tunes.
"Back in the Sixties, before I knew better, I associated the then popular
hornpipe, "Chief O'Neill's Favorite" with some class of Gaelic
lord." But as Carson goes on to say, "The paradoxical reality
is even better."
Chief O'Neill was not some legendary figure from ancient Irish history
but he was, rather more prosaically, the Chief of Police in Chicago at the
turn of the century. Over the course of thirty or so years, Chief O'Neill
devoted himself to collecting the traditional music of Ireland. He published
the results of his efforts in two books, O'Neill's Music of Ireland
and The Dance Music of Ireland, that have come to be regarded as
the standard references for players of Irish traditional music. He also
wrote two books on the history of Irish music, Irish Folk Music: A Fascinating
Hobby and Irish Minstrels and Musicians.
Daniel Francis O'Neill was born in the rural village Tralibane in County
Cork on August 28, 1848, the youngest of seven children. His family was
well off and although he was born during the Great Famine, he seems to have
been relatively untouched by the ravages that affected much of Ireland.
In his biography of O'Neill, A Harvest Saved, Nicholas Carolan says
that "music, song and dance were an integral part of the largely Irish-speaking
rural society in which O'Neill grew up, and his father's house and that
of a sister were venues for neighborhood dances." Young O'Neill would
have also heard fiddlers and pipers at weddings, wakes and crossroads dances.
In Irish Folk Music, O'Neill describes a dance that occurred when
he was a boy: "Being young and insignificant I was put to bed, out
of the way, while others went to enjoy the dance next door. It just chanced
that the piper was seated close to the partition wall. Half asleep and awake
the music hummed in my ears, and the memory of the tunes is still vivid
after the lapse of fifty years."
While he was a boy, O'Neill started to learn the wooden flute from a
local farmer named Thomas Downing and was soon playing for himself the airs
and melodies that his mother was always singing. He was a good student at
school and he was physically fearless. When he was sixteen he ran away to
sea. In his years as a sailor he traveled to Egypt, Russia, Japan, Mexico,
Hawaii, the West Indies, South America and he rounded the Cape of Good Hope.
A Harvest Saved describes what was perhaps his most important journey:
"On his first voyage to the United States, on the steamship "Emerald
Isle" in August 1866, he met Anna Rogers, a young emigrant from Feakle,
Co. Clare, and his future wife." After returning home briefly after
the death of his father, he went back to sea and didn't return to Ireland
for forty years.
O'Neill's adventures at sea included a fractured skull on a trip to Odessa
and a ship wreck in the Pacific. When he and his fellow crew mates were
rescued, his musical ability saved him from malnutrition. As he describes
it "rations were necessarily limited almost to starvation. One of the
Kanakas had a fine flute, on which he played a simple one strain hymn with
conscious pride almost every evening. Of course, this chance to show what
could be done on the instrument was not to be overlooked. The result was
most gratifying... My dusky brother musician cheerfully shared his "poi"
and canned salmon with me thereafter. When we arrived at Honolulu... after
a voyage of thirty-four days, all but three of the castaways were sent to
the Marine Hospital. I was one of the robust ones thanks to my musical friend."
After one more journey around Cape Horn O'Neill retired from the sailor's
life. He was twenty-one years old. He wound up in America and tried various
occupations including teaching and sheep herding. In 1870 he moved to Chicago
and later that year he married Anna Rogers in Bloomington, Indiana. In 1873
he joined the Chicago police force.
In the early 1880s he met James O'Neill, a young fiddler working as a
laborer. Although they shared a name, they were not related. Francis O'Neill
used his influence to get a James a job on the police force (a practice
that continued throughout Francis O'Neill's career) and the partnership
that would make the later collections of tunes possible was born. James
O'Neill was a trained musician and was able to read and write music, skills
that Francis O'Neill never fully mastered.
In the late 1880s Francis and James embarked on the transcribing of tunes
that would grow into the famous collections. The project started simply
with James transcribing the melodies that Francis remembered from his youth
and was afraid of forgetting. Francis would whistle, sing or play on his
flute and James would write down what he heard. As word of the their efforts
got around, other musicians would stop by with other melodies to be transcribed.
Soon the two men were actively searching Chicago for other musicians from
Ireland and their tunes.
Francis and James were not the first to collect Irish folk melodies but
they were the first to seek out and transcribe dance music in any quantity.
Earlier collectors tended to concentrate on slow airs and songs. Edward
Bunting's book only had 10 dance tunes while George Petrie and Patrick Weston
Joyce had 170 and 140 respectively. By comparison, the O'Neills had over
700 dance tunes in their first book and their second boasted "1001
Gems: Double Jigs, Single Jigs, Hop or Slip Jigs, Reels, Hornpipes, Long
Dances, Set Dances, etc."
Chicago of the 1880s and 1890s was a perfect time and place to look for
old Irish music. The refugees from the Famine of the 1840s had settled down
and had started the work of assimilating into the American mainstream. Irish
neighborhoods sprang up that in turn attracted more recent immigrants from
the old country. There were a large number of traditional musicians in the
flood of immigrants. In the 1850s and 1860s the Catholic clergy in Ireland
started to suppress the traditional venues for folk music. Farm house and
cross roads dances were forbidden because they were believed to be locations
for licentious behavior. Deprived of a means of livelihood, scores of musicians
left the land of their birth and traveled to America.
This new population was an excellent source of material for the tune
collectors and the sheer number of musicians had an unexpected benefit.
Unlike the earlier collectors in Ireland who had to travel from town to
town searching out musicians, O'Neill had musicians from all over Ireland
moving into the neighborhoods he was patrolling daily. Francis and James
were able to collect tunes from all of the regions of Ireland with very
little effort.
In his book Irish Folk Music, Francis O'Neill tells of numerous
occasions when he learned tunes while on duty. "While I was traveling
on post one summer evening in 1875," he writes of one such encounter,
"the strains of a fiddle coming through the shutter of an old dilapidated
building on Cologne street attracted my attention. The musician was an old
man named Dillon who lived alone. His only solace in his solitary life besides
his "dhudeen" was "Jenny" as he affectionately called
his fiddle. A most captivating jig memorized from his playing I named "Old
Man Dillon" in his honor."
Francis O'Neill searched for tunes as doggedly as a detective on the
trail of a wanted man. He gathered melodies from criminals and honest folk
alike. On one occasion he described an encounter with George West, a fiddler
and petty crook. When he was introduced to the cronies of West as a police
captain, the room grew very cold. Once it was clear he was there for music
the atmosphere lightened up, beer was procured and a lively session resulted.
The Primeval
Call of the Jouhikko
By Niles Hokkanen
The first time I heard a jouhikko played was in Kaustinen in 1989, during
my first trip to Finland. I was to teach advanced mandolin styles for a
week before playing the big folk festival. The music camp kicked off with
a short informal afternoon concert by the folk group Tallari, then a sextet.
There was a lot of instrument changing and, at one point, it seemed that
it was all fiddles, upright bass, and this weird primitive bowed instrument.
The sound was wild, primeval, and droning, as if something had been unfrozen
from the ice age; it made quite an impression on me!
The jouhikko belongs to the family of bowed lyre instruments (commonly
erroneously called bowed harps) which includes the Welsh crwth and the Swedish
strÔkharpa. (The fiddle is a bowed lute.) It's a primitive instrument
with two or three strings, with melody usually only being played on one
string. Though in use in Scandinavia since the early middle ages, it didn't
arrive in Finland until the 1600s (or at the earliest, the late 1500s),
and was used for playing fast dance tunes. With the introduction of the
violin some 100-200 years later, the instrument began to disappear from
usage except for the wilder areas in eastern Finland, particularly Ladoga-Karelia
(a region lost to the Russians during WWII). However, collecting expeditions
at the turn of this century were able to capture some of the last remaining
players on phono-cylinders.
During the 1970s, as the folk revival had been underway for awhile, there
was renewed interest in the older indigenous instruments of Finland and
Karelia, and the kantele (zither), jouhikko, and old style flutes and clarinets
began to reappear in such bands as Kankaan Pelimannit, PRIMO (PRImitive
Music Orchestra), Tallari, and Niekku.
As for the instrument itself, among the turn-of-the-century players,
there was no standardization as far as design, scale length, number of strings,
etc., as you would expect with rural, homemade instruments. A log, or thick
board (2"-4") would have a resonating cavity hollowed out of it,
and a thin top put on. The "neck" (for lack of a better term)
would be reduced down to about 1" in thickness and a hand-hole or two
would be cut, giving playing access to one or more of the strings. Carve
a soundhole, F-holes, etc. into the top, make a tailpiece and simple bridge,
and the instrument was ready for horsehair strings.
The simplest model only had two strings. The melody string was on what
we would think of as the bass side of an instrument. The player's hand would
go inside the hold and the string would be stopped with the backs
of the fingers. The drone string, tuned a perfect fifth or perfect fourth
below would be sounded simultaneously all the time. It was/is quite limited
in the number of pitches available. On the three-string models, the third
string would be located on the other side of the drone string, and tuned
a whole tone below the melody string (a' - d' - g' or a' - e' - g' for example)
adding a lower melody note that could be accessed. Sometimes, the hand hole
would be large enough that the drone string could also be stopped, or there
was a large square hold giving access to all the strings, as in the case
of the talharppa (tuned e'-a'-d'-g) which came from the Swedish areas of
coastal Estonia, and used the top two strings as melody strings.
Strings were of twisted horsehair, in gauges of twenty strands (a'),
thirty strands (g'), forty (d') and eighty (g'). The instrument wasn't necessarily
tuned a-d-g, but could be higher or lower pitched. The bow is a simple curved
bow with horsehair. The middle and ring fingers are inserted between the
stick and the hair and they control the tension of the bow. Some of the
old players occasionally used fiddle bows instead.
I had picked up a copy of a book (in Finnish) entitled Jouhikko,
published by the Folk Music Institute in 1984, which reprinted all the jouhikko
music and tunes from early 20th century fieldwork, plus music for the related
talharppa and the Estonian huikannel. There was also a section written by
Rauno Nieminen (who had been in PRIMO and is an archaic instruments authority
and builder) about the history and building of these instruments. As my
interests in playing Finnish music became deeper, I decided that maybe I
should make one and add it into the mix. Some of the better tunes in that
book came from a guy named Feodor Pratsu, who was a fisherman in Ladoga
Karelia. There were some diagrams, with measurements, of his instrument,
so I thought, "I'll build a Pratsu model." A friend of mine named
Tony Coberly had a music store in Winchester, Virginia, as well as plenty
of scrap wood and lumber lying about. So we took a 2" thick piece of
cherry and hollowed it out, and then hollowed out a second piece and screwed
the two together (so now it was 4" deep), and cut a couple of holes
in the "neck," and strung it up with four metal viola strings
(a'-d'-g'-c'). The idea behind adding the fourth string was to give myself
an extra accompaniment chord for ensemble playing. There was a cello bow
on hand, so that's what I used. Now it looked pretty enough, but it didn't
put out much volume, and in my inexperienced bowing hand, it sounded downright
awful! Still, I fooled around with it until I could play some of the slower
Pratsu tunes.
The next trip over was a year later, and I taught some mandolin classes
at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki. In the room where I gave lessons were
numerous violins and jouhikkos hanging on the wall. Naturally, I had to
give some of them a try, and the difference between those instruments and
my homemade jouhikko was like night and day. Everybody said, "You have
to have horsehair strings." A week later I met Rauno Nieminen up in
Kaustinen and he gave me some strings as well as a natural scale flute.
Four or five months passed, and Rauno was in the U.S. attending the big
A.S.I.A. luthiers' convention (he works as one of the instrument designers
for the Finnish guitar company Landola), and was able to stop over for a
night in Winchester after checking out the instrument collection at the
Smithsonian. I had never gotten around to putting on those horse hair strings,
mainly because I couldn't remember the directions as to how to do it, so
I asked the expert for help. Rauno was impressed by the fact that I had
a jouhikko, but after playing a little on it said, "You need a better
instrument," and proceeded to tell me that the diagrams of the Pratsu
instrument in his book were there for historical purposes and not to be
used as a blueprint for building one. Oh, well, that's what happens when
you try deciphering a foreign language.
Eventually, I did obtain a better instrument. A Finnish-American named
Gerry Henkel (Bobalu Musical Instruments, 1541 Clover Valley Rd., Duluth,
MN 55804, (218) 525-7609; email: gkarhu @aol.com) began building kanteles
and jouhikkos, and marketing them to the ethnic community. With one of his
well-built instruments (shown in the photo), priced at about $180, there
was a renewal of my interest to do something with the jouhikko.
For full versions of these articles, please visit Fiddler Magazine store to order back issues.
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