MY mother was a fine musician. I used to hear the old people talking about her and in that way I knew she was good. In those days a woman who got married would have to give up playing to rear her family it was part of the bargain. Our house, like most houses at that time, had a concertina in the hob, by the fire. She could play the concertina and whistle, and whenever she went out I'd sneak the concertina down and try to make shapes from it. Music was like that for me then, just colour and shape. I used to think that if you played loud enough it would fill the room to bursting you'd be as well leaving the window open or maybe it seeped out under the door, like grey mist across the countryside.
When she found me she'd kill me. But I used to pester her, following her round her jobs, until she showed me the fingering on the whistle. I picked up a few simple tunes that way. Then she let me try the concertina. She did it as much to keep me quiet as anything else, at least at first. Then she saw that I was serious about it and she encouraged me in any way she could. She used to come between me and my father and argue for me being let play in my time off.
IF you wanted a fiddle you could have one made locally. Shop bought fiddles were expensive and rare. You had families like the Dinans over in Maghera who made instruments. They made carts mostly, and the fiddles were a side line. They made the old style Russian fiddle, the triangular one. The wood came from everywhere from the shafts of carts and the tines of traps, from elder and sycamore, imported lance wood and green heart that they used for fishing rods wood from all over the world. There was one fiddle I still remember in a house down the road from us and you could see that the soundpost was made from an old school desk. They were simple enough instruments and nowadays they have better gear for making fiddles, but many's the tune was learned and many's the fine musician started out on a Russian fiddle.
One day, when they were all out, I was rummaging through the stuff they had stored in the loft where we slept a cardboard suitcase, old papers, and photos of my mother's people sad things, mostly, like you'd find in an empty house, when I came across the fiddle. It was wrapped in a piece of old sacking, a bow alongside it. It wasn't a good fiddle, but I couldn't believe my luck. It might have belonged to my uncle, I never found out it was like it wasn't supposed to be there. I could see the maker's stamp on it. There were only two strings, but I wound them up and down until I got a tune from it. That tune was The Wearing Of The Green. I'm sure now it must have sounded bad, but to my childish ears it was a miracle and nothing would do but I'd get the other two strings.
HE [an old neighbour] told me I had talent but I needed to take my time.
He said no matter how much I loved the music there was no living in it, or what few bob you might glean from teaching lessons wouldn't feed you. He told me to mind the land, that was what would feed us. But music, he said, never left you. I was in too much of a hurry. It took time, he told me. If I mastered the basics, got the finger and tempo right, the rest would follow easily. He taught me to think of how the music worked, how the tunes had secret joins their form and eventually how to embellish them. He made me think of the start of each tune as a question and the turn of the tune as the answer an assertion and a response. In the great tunes the responses just burst out of you. They were the times when the listeners would roar and yelp encouragement, the dancers would batter the floor, the times when you could loosen things in people that they didn't know were there. You couldn't hurry that, but it was worth waiting for.
