S2 E6 Islands of Fiddlers

Kevin and Ron speak with Caoimhín Mac
Aoidh and Glenn Hendrix, co‑authors of Islands of Fiddlers, a book documenting the musical and historical ties between Donegal and Beaver
Island. The conversation explores how the Donegal fiddle tradition crossed the Atlantic, how it endured through players like Patrick Bonner, and how two scholars — one from Ireland, one from Michigan — came together to preserve that story.

Throughout the episode, both guests share
tunes that illustrate the tradition they’ve spent years studying. The show
concludes with a short bonus segment following the credits.

Link for Book: donegalfiddlemusic.ie

Caoimhín Mac Aoidh is a fiddle player and uilleann piper with a strong focus on the Donegal fiddle tradition. He was fortunate enough to meet, play with and collect from many of the older generation of master Donegal fiddlers. He is a founding member of Cairdeas na bhFidléirí, the award winning organisation which has been promoting Donegal fiddle music for nearly half a century. Caoimhín has written eight books on Irish fiddle music, again mainly focussed on the Donegal tradition. He has toured, lectured, taught and broadcast widely. He was a regular columnist with Fiddler Magazine. In his studies of the Donegal fiddle tradition he came to be aware of the playing and history of Patrick Bonner of Beaver Island and Patrick's important Donegal connections. Arising from that he had the pleasure of working with Glenn Hendrix on publishing Islands of Fiddlers.  

Glenn Hendrix is a fiddler interested in Michigan’s rich fiddle traditions. He has played for square and contra dances all over Michigan and for dances at Holy Cross Hall on Beaver Island.  Glenn has collected many Michigan fiddle tunes and co-wrote Michigan Jamboree, a book of these tunes. He also wrote Songs of Beaver Island, an article with background stories and transcriptions of over twenty songs composed on or about Beaver Island. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:04

Welcome to The Tides That Tie: Exploring Two Islands, One Soul. A podcast that delves into the powerful connections between Beaver Island, Michigan, and Aaronmore, County Donegal. Their histories, their cultures, their challenges, and the enduring spirit that unites them across the sea. Join your hosts Ron Gregg and Kevin Green as they uncover the stories, the traditions, and the voices that keep these islands forever linked. This is the Tides That Tie.

SPEAKER_00 0:51

Hello and welcome to the podcast about all things Aaron Moore and Beaver Island. I'm Ron Gregg. In this episode, Kevin and I sat down with Queen McKay and Glenn Hendricks, authors of Islands of Fiddlers. These gentlemen are scholars who have a shared passion for music and history, in particular, Irish fiddle music and the history of the Donegal Beaver Island Connection. This is the story of how the fiddle music of County Donegal crossed the Atlantic and took root on Beaver Island, sustained through the generations by the legendary island fiddler Patrick Bonner. It is a remarkable chapter of cultural history showing how music can preserve identity and memory across oceans and time. Though separated by 4,000 miles, Beaver Island and Donegal remain connected through the tunes Patrick kept alive and the traditions he carried forward. There is only one bit of housekeeping I'll mention, and that's when Glenn uses the term the island, he's usually referencing Beaver Island. And when Queving does, he's usually referring to Aaron Moore. The story they tell epitomizes the idea of the song by Jerry Early and John Gallagher featured on our first episode. Let's hear their story.

SPEAKER_05 2:19

There's a an annual summer school of uh Donegald fiddle playing in a village called Glencolum Kell. And uh it was a beautiful summer's afternoon, a good number of years ago, that I was just sitting out on a wall and the classes were over, and there was a person there who is interested in traditional music and is uh an Irish speaker and an Irish language and a folklore scholar. And uh we were we were speaking in Irish and uh we were just talking about folklore and and how Irish at times gets carried around the world. And he made this comment, again, we were speaking Irish, but he made the comment that uh that Irish existed in some form up to the 1960s in this place called Beaver Island. I had never heard of Beaver Island, and I think it was fair enough to uh uh fair enough to conclude that it wasn't in Ireland anyway. He described where Beaver Island was at the top of Lake Michigan, and I was amazed at this. I thought it was very unusual, and the next thing I know he said, yeah, and there were and there was a very good fiddle player. There were fiddle players there, and and they have a very big Donegal connection, and all I nearly fell off the wall because I thought to myself, well, wait a second now, we're we're talking about a very remote place here, and there's a big Donegal connection, and there's a big linguistic connection historically, and there's fiddle players here straight away. It was, well, we have to dig on this in a big way and and find out you know what this story is. So um within within a week I was aware of Glenn's uh collection on Patrick Boner, and I ordered it from a music shop in Michigan, and I think I literally bought the last printed collection and uh and that it arrived in Donegal. And I think that with these things, when they arrive in the morning in the post, you you just devour them. And Glenn told an extremely brilliant story of Patrick, and then when I started going through the transcriptions, I immediately recognized a whole amount of music in it. And not only that, but I was stunned by by virtue of the fact that a number of the settings that Patrick played could be played in Donegal today, and no one would know that these things didn't come from anywhere other than Donegal. So I managed to make contact with Glenn and correct me, Glenn, if I'm wrong, but I think one of the early things that I was looking to pursue was any recordings of Patrick so I could I could hear the actual playing. And and the more we work back and forward, the more the idea was, well, look, what we really need to do is put another volume of this collection out, whereby we we tease out the whole Donegal side of it. That's how the project, from my perspective, started. But it it was literally falling off a wall in Glen Column Kill on a beautiful summer's day.

SPEAKER_04 5:10

And for my part, I think I was a student at Michigan State University, and I went to one of these folk music coffee houses. And I had already started playing a fiddle a little bit, but I was just a beginner. But one of our performers was a man named Barry O'Neill, and he was a pipe player, and he mentioned to me that there were all these recordings available from uh Beaver Island, and I I was stunned then because I've been going to Beaver Island for some time and had worked there in the summers, and so I was intrigued. And over the years I I managed to get copies of these recordings, and I wrote them out, wrote out the tunes, and wrote a little bit of text and quotes from Patrick's speaking, and I self-published this little book that Kaveen is speaking of called An Island of Fiddlers, Singular. And that's the book that uh that started it all. I I had intended to stop there until Kaveen contacted me, and then I realized there was much more to the story.

SPEAKER_05 6:06

I think it became obvious to the two of us fairly quickly as as we were just not even pursuing a project yet, that there was the potential to take Glenn's very brilliant original work and put the Irish Connection side to it. And then there was that realization that there is all this other information that if we concentrate and work well, we can get pretty much the entire story down on paper and document it. Glenn was already convinced, and it didn't take any convincing of me to know how tremendously culturally valuable this material was.

SPEAKER_04 6:45

So I was I was uh somewhat uh uh amazed that I was contacted and somewhat uh in awe because I know Kovin's published numerous articles and books. His face was even on the cover of Fiddler magazine, which uh after he contacted me, I remembered that. So I I was pretty excited to embark on this venture.

SPEAKER_05 7:10

It really, really begins with the generation before Patrick, and that generation is rooted in the northwest corner, a section of the northwest corner of County Donegal. County Donegal is all the way up in the northwest, but within County Donegal, there's a there's uh there's a section there called the Rassa, so in the Irish language Narassa, and that area um is comprised of the mainland, which is even subdivided uh uh again, and there's a place in that called Ranifast, which all is almost a republic of its own. So you have Narassa and within it Ranifast, which is musically very culturally significant, but it also includes Aaronmore Island and other islands, Aaronmore being the main one, but other smaller islands like Inishvikadorn, Rutland Island, and other small islands. And that's where the story really begins. And during the generation before Patrick, which is pretty much just pre-famine or famine, life in the Rosses and Aron Moore at the time of Patrick's parents was one of complete poverty, other than the landlords who who would have been given the lands of the local people. In the the the British Anglicising of Ireland, an attempted anglicising of Ireland, people would have lost their land and might have had small holdings which they had to pay rent to the landlord. And those small holdings, if you can imagine this in size, a lot of the holdings were only an acre or two, and you would have a family of, you know, sometimes up to ten people, depending on that one or two acres for life. So it's called in modern terms subsistence farming, but it's more than subsistence farming, it's survival farming. You're talking about a limited amount of crops you can grow, and possibly only one or two animals and a few chickens and things like that, and one or two animals being either a pig or a cow, um, and subsidized by fishing. And even at times, fishing was illegal. For example, if there was a beach, the beach provided seaweed, which was the primary fertilizer for the crops, and then other things like shellfish for food, but you couldn't take anything from the beach. That was the landlord. So if you like, you were beaten every way. Every way you tried to make an existence, you you were beaten. And it's not surprising when the famine hit, which was it was a fungal infection of the potato plant, which was the staple food for all of these families. When that hit, it was an utter disaster. It was like everything fell apart. And again, the living conditions were well, in some cases, you you can you'll find photographs, and the houses were made out of turf sods. They weren't stone wall, they were turf sods. So everything was horrifically miserable. And uh when the when the famine came, it was j it was just total disaster. And the island emptied out a huge amount of its people, and there was physical and mental scars of that for generations. But for our part of the story, Jack Boner, who was from one of the little islands between the mainland Rosses and Arnmore, an island in the Irish language called Inishvikadorn or uh Rutland Island, Jack at the age of, and again, thanks to Glenn's research, um, left the island at the age of 16. And this is an important part in telling a story like this, um, particularly for somebody of our age and generation, when when you look back in history and you try and understand a story and tell a story, the more and more as time goes on, the more and more invisible, if you like, filters drop down between you and the people or society you're looking at. There's more and more of these filters, which means as you look back through these, it's harder to see what life was like. And I'll give just one example. Jack Boner left Rutland Island at the age of 16 and began sailing sailing the open Atlantic. And in today's terms, I mean, kids of 16 years of age aren't even out of secondary school. And you know, they're they're very much protected and and sheltered and cared for by their parents. And you think, well, now hang on, you know, what what was his parents doing? You know? Well, first of all, he may not might not have had parents because life spans were not that big. But the filter that I'm trying to remove on this when we when we discuss this story is the fact that at the age of sixteen, back then, he wasn't a secondary school type uh uh person. He was considered by his entire community and by the national community as a full grown as a full grown adult male. And he was dependent upon to either fend for himself or to fend for for his family. So when you say he left Rutland Island, started sailing across the open Atlantic in search of life and and a living, it's not surprising. That was that was normal behaviour. So that, if you like, these are some of the things we need to struggle with when we when we consider this story. But anyway, landlordism was was a scourge in Ireland. You basically you basically had somebody who now owns what a few generations ago was your family's land. You didn't sell it, it was taken away. And not only that, the kick in the teeth, what happens now is you have to pay an annual rent. Despite the fact you're in survival farming mode, you have to pay an annual rent. And the the the landlord could easily, in a lot of most cases, would have been in London living the high life. And if you improved your land, your rent increased. Exactly. Yeah. There's no way you can win. I mean, it is it is a rigged game. And the the the situation is that with absentee landlordism, the view is this if I have an estate in Ireland, I'm in London, I'm living the high life. If I have an estate in Ireland, there are two things of interest for me. Only two things, that there's animals on it, which are generating money, and there's people in it who are generating money. They're either generating money through through rent or improving, as Glenn says, their land and their stock numbers, and therefore your rent goes up again. Or if some or if I if I'm actively farming a tract of that, I don't go out into the fields. I have somebody, an agent who's there, and that person is doing my farming for me and making me money. If you like, in those days, again, removing the filters, land was the primary resource that brought wealth. And the only thing that an absentee landlord or even a residential landlord had was, how much money am I getting out of this? You know, the people who are making the money for me, I have no regard for them. Now, I'm I'm not telling the exact truth there. There were some good landlords, that has to be said. And particularly during the famine, there were some landlords who did their best for their tenants. But by and large, landlordism was either you make me money or you get off. Think of the Highland Clearances in Scotland. That's what that was. You make me money or get out.

SPEAKER_04 14:19

And Jack Bonner from Rutland was was better known on Beaver Island as Black John Bonner. He was called black because of his his dark hair and complexion.

SPEAKER_05 14:28

That's another connection with Donegal in terms of how people are nicknamed in Ireland. That's exactly how they're nicknamed uh here. It's usually a physical trait where you'll have your Christian name and your surname, but following your Christian name will be a nickname, and it's almost always the color of not only it may not be your hair, but the the hair color of the leader of your family or small community.

SPEAKER_04 14:52

Black John was fortunate enough to leave 1847, I think, and just before the famine, and he became an able-bodied seaman and basically sailed all over the world, but he finally landed in New York City and then he went to Savannah, Georgia, where he took up fishing, which he probably knew from home back in Rutland. He went back and forth for about nine years, I think, mostly fishing in Georgia and Savannah, and came back to New York City and met uh his future wife, whose name was Sophia, and she also was from Donegal. She came to America when she was eight years old, and she had lived in New York City her entire life. She was 18 when they met and married in New York City. And they promptly moved for a few days to Mackkin Island, and then they moved to a fishing camp on Gull Island, which y'all know is probably about the most remote spot on Lake Michigan. It's hard to imagine that that woman, that young woman moving from New York City, all she'd really ever known, to Gull Island in the little of the middle of Lake Michigan. Wow, what a change. So they were there fishing in 1856 when a Native American man paddled over in a canoe and said, the big man shot, big man shot. And he was referring to when King Strang was shot. King Strang was the leader of the Mormon sect, the Mormon uh group on Beaver Island. He was ended up being murdered by his own followers. And Black John Bonner and his wife immediately piled into their boat and sailed to uh Beaver Island. They landed at what's now known as Bonner's Bluff and they bought a farm there and uh bought some land in town too, right by the behind the uh the parish hall. That's why it's called Bonner Street. They also wrote back to others, the friends they had in New York City and elsewhere, and this started the Irish emigration from Ireland and the cities, the big cities on the American and Canadian cities to Beaver Island. And a lot of them came. A lot of people came. They came um as individuals, as families, and they came by the boatload, literally. There were several ships that came directly from Aramore with uh very many people on it. And they found on Beaver Island, they found land had already been cleared by the Mormons who had left, and they could buy the land, which they couldn't do in Ireland. They could vote. There was plenty of jobs, there was lots of fish, there was lots of lumber. So they were pretty happy to come to uh Beaver Island. They were also very sad to have left their homes. So the bonders uh they settled down, they bought a farm. Um Black Jack and his Sophia raised a family there, and they had nine children. I think a couple more actually died. Manis was the oldest, Thomas, James, Mega, John, Daniel, Peter, Mary, and then Patrick was the youngest. And Patrick was born 23 years after his oldest brothers. There was a big difference there. He was he was the baby in the family. And of course, these people brought their language, their skills, like boat building skills. They brought bought their uh their music, which included fiddle music and a lot of songs, and they bought their storytelling traditions, they brought their faith, their religion, to Beaver Island with them. And and a real culture, Irish culture, was maintained on Beaver Island by these people for many years, and and to a degree still is. But among them were a lot of fiddlers. There was some of the more important ones that Patrick mentions, Lanti McCafferty, his parents were from Aaron Moore. Catherine McAuley, who we on the island know as Kotchlin Og, she was born on Aaron Moore, and she she lilted, she wasn't a fiddler, but she lilted the tunes, which is kind of a wordless type singing. And Johnny McAuley, born in Aaronmore. There are many others. Uh there were McCafferty's and Boyles and Gallagher's and Mooneys and a lot of others, fiddlers. And Patrick grew up in this community and and learned from these fiddlers. They were his teachers. He learned everything by ear. He couldn't read music. He said, I couldn't tell music from Chinese letters. And and they fished and farmed and logged. And uh Patrick's father and his oldest brother started a shipping business. They owned a whole series of uh lake schooners and they mostly shipped lumber. And Patrick, Patrick himself kept farming. He did some shipping and some sailing, but mostly he was a farmer. I think he was probably a very conservative farmer. Um, he was probably pretty conservative about change in general. I know in 1952 he was still using a threshing machine that his father had bought in the 1880s. So, uh, Cavin, do you want to talk about the the Irish repertoire and that repertoire on Beaver Island?

SPEAKER_05 19:24

Yeah, um the the f the finder players that Patrick mentioned and described as being the generation before him and from who he was learning, their names, the names that you would have spoken there, Glenn, if you go to the Rossas today, you'll see every one of those names abundantly. If you walk down the main street of Dunlo, uh the largest kind of town in the Rossas, you would have to try very hard not to meet someone who has those surnames that that you mentioned there. So they're immediately identifiable. And the interesting thing for me when I got your your your first collection there was uh trying to think about those people and the music that they would have brought with them. Now we know they brought the language with them. They were Irish speakers, and there's some interesting things about that we'll talk about maybe later. But the music they brought with them, when you look at the the the music on the page, as I said earlier, it has absolute absolute fidelity with the Donegal repertoire, and not only that, but in places very clear examples of the tunes being played exactly the way they're played here in Donegal. In other words, from where I'm at here in South Donegal, if I if I went uh forty-five minutes south to Sligo, the same tunes would be played completely differently. They would be played in a wholly different musical accent or style. But when you when you're looking at the page uh from your collection and you're listening to Patrick's recordings, you hear a Donegal voice, a Donegal musical voice, absolutely. Um and uh there are tremendously interesting things there, and I I think it's is this concept that you were talking about earlier on, Glenn, about they they they brought their culture with them, they brought their music with them. So when we're looking at it, this stuff arrives on Beaver Island and it's being practiced as if it was back in the Rossas. And Patrick is picking it up exactly as he's hearing it, because he's learning by ear. And that's translating that that that speech, that musical accent to him and his playing. It would be uh it it wouldn't be stunning by any imagination or or or unusual by any imagination to say that we're dealing with the Donegal population of fiddle players and looking at the repertoire. For example, one of the idiosyncratic rhythmic groups that is played in Donegal, it's it's almost like a badge of honor for us, is a rhythm called a highland. If you think of different rhythms like waltzes and jigs and And rails and hornpipes, etc., there is a rhythm called the Highland, which is very strongly, hugely associated with County Dunega. It was amazing to me on the first reading of your collection to find tunes in there that are Highlands. Now, Highlands actually came from Scotland originally. There were Stratz Bays composed in somewhere between the mid-1700s and mid-1800s. And these are there. When they come to Dunegal, they're coming back from migrant workers who are learning them while they're working on farms in Scotland. They bring them back. And Highlands are, as I said, a badge of honour in the Donegal tradition. And when you when you look at when you look at the collection, there they are. They're there. When you look at Jigs, you and I, we had a great discussion about this one. There's one there called The Connet Man's Rambles. In Irish, the generation before Patrick would have known that tune is Banabuch Delisc Agusluxialane, which means the woman who went gathering seaweed and got her shirt wet. But the story behind that was the stories come from the famine, where by uh in the mountainous area by the sea, but there were mountainous farmers and didn't know the sea, despite the fact that they lived just next to it. Uh, during the famine, she went down to gather edible seaweed, and there was a rhythm to the wave she didn't understand. She had a a creel or a a basket with her, woven, a willow branch woven basket, and uh she got caught by a wave and was washed out. Clearly couldn't swim, wouldn't have known anything about that. She got washed out and she drowned. That's the bit where she got her shirt wet. But her body was found in Iron Moor. She washed up in Iron Moor, still clutching the basket. But that tune, The Connet Man's Rambles, is one of the most ubiquitous double jigs in the Irish canon. You'll find it played everywhere around the country. But the Donegal version is very, very different from the standard version, and it's there. It's there in Patrick's playing. And not only is it there in Patrick's playing, but he's got all kinds of little inferences in it that only are found in the Donegal, uh, in the Donegal playing of that tune. So this reinforces that that conclusion of when we listen to Patrick Boner, we're listening to something culturally very, very important. Because if you like, take it Patrick Patrick lived into his 90s and he's learning from people who were middle-aged to older that he's learning from. So when you add up those mathematics going backwards, you're talking about music, him learning music, which is effectively either famine time or pre-famine, more than likely pre-famine. So you're going back very far, and the famine destroyed so much culturally in this country that when we start dealing with pre-famine cultural material, all of a sudden that takes on a big, big difference and importance. And it's marvelous that we see this on Beaver Island.

SPEAKER_04 24:54

One of the things I thought of when I heard that story about the seaweed gathering woman was since the landlords owned the shallow water along the shoreline, I wonder if the poor woman didn't wade out too far and then got overcome by the waves and the water.

SPEAKER_05 25:09

It just goes to show you how restricted and the way the game was rigged. Uh people people from the mountains did and in a lot of cases the mountains pr pretty quickly dropped down to the sea. And people in the on the mountainside villages knew nothing about this the sea because if you like, uh there there were so many barriers to either fishing or or gathering shellfish. So there was no point going to going to the sea. Um so you had no natural environment awareness of what the dangers are by going down to the sea.

SPEAKER_04 25:41

This tune is called Canockman's Ramble. It's also known as the seaweed gathering woman who got her shirt wet. Patrick played this on Beaver Island many, many years ago. And I learned in my research that it's because many of these people actually went to Scotland to to the potato fields in Scotland, and they went in in gangs and lived in the Bothys, which was usually a converted barn for them to live in. And uh they learned Scottish music over in Scotland, and they probably left behind some Irish music as well. This was uh many, many people did this, including children as young as 12. And the young women and girls would go work on farms uh as helpers and or or in the potato fields. It was must have been pretty brutal work. And they work uh worked five typically five and a half days a week, and they got the day and a half Sunday and part of Saturday off when they could recreate. And that included a lot of dancing, and they brought back many of these Scottish tunes to Aaron Mahr and some of the Scottish dancing too. And in fact, on Beaver Island, they actually danced the Highland.

SPEAKER_05 27:55

Yeah, again, that the that dance, the Highland, is very, very, very, very specific to the to around County Donegal. Um, yeah, uh when we we we discussed the the the hardship of life and the notion of leaving Donegal, leaving your home for for uh a better chance at life, there were there were two avenues. There there were only two there were only two points on the compass. One was we east to Scotland and the other was west to North America. That was it. In Scotland, you didn't have to travel so far, and you could you could earn money, earn money there, but the but again, as Glenn was describing there, the life was horrific. Um you were you were a beast of burden in farming. Girls and women were usually domestics, which meant they they cleaned the house, they made, they made the meals, they looked after some of the lighter animals like chickens and pigs, etc. Um, but and you you you lived you lived in a a converted barn. There could even be you could be living in a place where where their cattle were kept. Uh and the only again, removing the filters between us and that life, just for a second, think of this. No electricity, no heat, no artificially supplied heat other than burning something, no light, no television, no radio, no internet, no connection at all. So you're there and for respite from the from the horrific working conditions, the only respite is to entertain yourself, or you know, collectively entertain yourselves. And there's only two ways really to do that. Well, more than two. There's storytelling, joke telling, prank playing, playing music was the big one. Playing music because you could then dance to it. And and that was that would lift your spirits. The other thing is singing. And when you're doing that, if you're in Scotland, you're also learning, you're hearing Scottish musicians, and you're picking up tunes and bringing them back. So it's not surprising where there is a big connection with Scotland that the music and back most people now I'm getting older, but most people of my age and older had somebody in Scotland. It was common to have somebody in Scotland, and because people went over the agricultural squads for planting, uh tending and harvesting potatoes, they were known as tatty hoking squads. Tatty being a potato, a tato, a tatty, and uh a hoke is uh is a word in English that basically means to dig something up, you're hulking it. So they were they were tatty hoax and they would they would go there. If I can give one example of how horrific life working in Scotland was, he he's only dead about maybe three or four years now. Great fiddle player. Glenn, you might have met him, Jimmy Campbell from from the the the Crows Mountain, Cruh Gotuma, the the Bluestack Mountains in central Donegal. Jimmy was Jimmy was working in in the Scottish Highlands on uh on shuttering the cementation schemes for dams, dam building. And uh they had a they had a a 24-hour shift. Um, and they were they were staying, you're in the Scottish Highlands, so there's there's not a lot of villages or towns or cities around where you can go in and stay in a hotel or a bed or a guest house or something. They were literally living in agricultural barns. And because there were so many people in there, and this is absolutely true, from one end, from one gable end to the other gable end, there was a rope, a heavy rope, tied to the two gable end walls on the inside. And because the floor space was taken up with so many bodies sleeping, if you didn't get in and get a space on the floor, you you put your two arms over the rope and you slept standing up. And Jimmy would have done you know, Jimmy would have done that on a regular basis. So, you know, while while you may have left On Egal and gone out seeking your fame and fortune, you might have got some kind of fame amongst your pals, but you definitely didn't get fortune. And again, it's just to re-emphasise the relevance of that, in those in those atmospheres there, people of a musical band, somebody like Jimmy, going back to Catch Lee Noague on Beaver Island, she was a little, and you might have had somebody there, and if there was no fiddle player, usually there were, somebody could play the fiddle. If there were there was no fiddle player there, you'd have a lilter for dancing. And you didn't need a fiddle. But you could pick up that tune, i if you like, you know, in in that kind of a in that kind of a circumstance. So it's it's not surprising these things came back to Donegal and became deeply rooted in Donegal. But it's astonishing that these things went across with that generation fiddle players before Patrick. And Patrick being as astute as he was musically and with such a good ear, he picked it up. And when we listen to his recordings, you know, you're listening to music that were was born in buffies.

SPEAKER_04 32:45

And Patrick said uh he only had to hear two once to put it into memory. So that's pretty amazing. Learning the music by ear would be the norm at that place and time. So probably there weren't very many people that could read music. Now, over the years, that probably changed somewhat, particularly with um uh with women that learned to play piano. And in fact, Patrick's wife Rose played piano and accompanied him. And I suspect that the piano players, many of them could read music, and they valued that that musical education. And they also brought uh particular tunes to Beaver Island, some of the old piano, like some of the waltzes and other tunes that were kind of uh published as piano music. And Patrick would have picked those up from the piano players, I expect. Now, there are other changes were occurring on Beaver Island. The economy was changing there, and new people were coming in and new traditions. Patrick didn't limit himself to just learning from the Irish musicians he knew. There were other musicians. One important group was the Native Americans, and there were many fine Native American fiddlers on and around Beaver Island. Chief Pian was one of those. He learned tunes from Chief Pian. And today Ruby John is a Native American fiddle player, and she teaches on Beaver Island. There are also some French-Canadian, the La Fenaires, came and the O'Brien's and Debris came to Beaver Island, and they probably brought some music. And maybe some of the German families, like the Rickskers and the Smiths that settled in the early part of the 1900s, they brought music. The Beaver Island Lumber Company started, I think, uh 1904 or something like that. And they brought a hundred people over to work in the lumber mill and the logging camps. And Ron, you know that lumber mill was right where your dad's merino was. Yeah. Yeah. There were still remnants of it when I worked there. And sometimes your dad would put us to work with a sledgehammer to bust up the old concrete. So Patrick learned whatever music he liked and what music he thought would uh entertain his audience. He was a little more than a fiddler, I'd have to say. He did sing many songs. He liked to recite poetry and tell a lot of a lot of stories. So he he was not just a fiddler, he was an entertainer also. And he started learning also music. The technology started to change. There's one tune called Shores of Lake Erie, which sounds sort of Scottish, but is really American. And he learned it off a 1908 phonograph recording, which was pretty high-tech at the time. And they didn't have electricity, so it must have been one of those wind-up phonographs with a cylinder or a disc. And he played uh Shores of Lake Erie for many years. And in fact, it was a favorite of uh Jewel Gillespie's. And Jewel used to play guitar to accompany Patrick playing Shores of Lake Erie.

SPEAKER_05 35:24

Talking about influences coming in, it's worthwhile just to take note of the instrument we're talking about, the fiddle. The fiddle was, in terms of um popular folk or traditional music as we see it now, the fiddle was the instrument in in Western culture because of its versatility. But the one thing about it is it's portable. It's not like a piano. If you're touring, you don't want to be the touring pianist. Um fiddle weighs just about a pound, it's about twelve ounces. Uh so if you like all you have to do is protect it from uh being damaged, in other words, put it in a case. Otherwise, it's completely portable. So when you have people, when you have people uh moving around, and uh as Glenn was saying, uh the crews coming in for the lumber camps, it's uh it's not and again with workforces, the source of entertainment is within that within that community. It's not surprising that those kind of communities traditionally had one or two fiddle players with them just just to be able to play stuff. So it's not surprising, as Glenn says, that music, whatever about Patrick not going off the island, it's worth again removing that filter and recognizing that there were people coming onto the island almost certainly bringing fiddles with them. If they didn't have a fiddle, they could probably they could possibly play and play a fiddle that was provided on the island. And he's going to hear, particularly in the latter years of his life, he's going to hear music from off the island. And you see that, uh, you see that in the in the collection.

SPEAKER_04 36:53

And uh I mentioned Lanti McCafferty, who was one of Patrick's sources for tunes. And Lanty worked in the lumber camps in the upper peninsula, where he must have learned a lot of music. And these lumber camps were they were melting pots, cultural melting pots, and probably musical melting pots as well. And he brought that music back to Beaver Island. He also brought Patrick his first fiddle, or his second fiddle, I should say. Sorry. He brought Patrick his his a violin from a lumber camp near Escanaba. The next influence that came later was uh uh after the phonographs, Patrick started hearing radio music and WLS, the Chicago radio station, they had a show called uh Barn Dance. And there was a man from Beaver Island who actually was a caller for the on the Barn Dance show. And I suspect Patrick learned some tunes from WLS radio station, and later on, maybe even television. Influence, which to Patrick's mind was very negative, was the jukebox. Probably the jukebox in the shamrock bar. And uh you could put a coin in the in the machine and it would play a music for you, and the country music and uh rock and roll started becoming much more popular, and people started to lose interest in Patrick's more traditional Irish music and older tunes. Um, and they and Patrick really regretted that. I don't know that he was bitter, but he was he regretted it because his music was becoming out of favor in the 50s and early 60s. But he did keep playing, he valued his music quite a lot and he kept playing, and we're fortunate that he was recorded by some folklorists so that we can have these tunes today. Otherwise, we would have almost nothing of Patrick's music. Well, I should give credit to the folklorists. One of the main ones was Ivan Walton. Oh dear, there's another one. He was O'Donnell. Yes, Edgar O'Donnell. Thank you. Listening to Patrick's music is also kind of a a study in memory, which I can, you know, he as he got older, he would kind of mix things up. He would forget tunes, he would take part of one tune and patch it on to another tune. He would mix up the names, and darn if I don't find myself doing the same thing.

SPEAKER_05 38:56

Like you said, we're getting to that age, lads. Indeed we are. Indeed, we are.

SPEAKER_04 39:01

It gives me a lot more respect for Patrick and his efforts to preserve his music.

SPEAKER_05 39:06

I think what what Glenn is was saying there, reflecting on the latter periods of Patrick's life, it's one of the things that screamed out of the pages to me when I when I read his work the first time, and it it's it stays has stayed with me very much. If you look uh uh it was that huge change in Patrick's life from having maybe 15 to 20 fiddle players in the generation above you, and and you're surrounded in this community very, very rich in music, and you're absorbing it, you're playing it, you're having so much fun. And as part of that, you be you become a distinguished member of your community. You are the fiddle player, you are the person who is providing the entertainment when we need a laugh and we need to have fun, and when we get together, when you know, when we go visiting in a house, you know, that somebody you play the music and we all dance and have great fun. And in later years, as he saw that the devil incarnate land on the island with the with the jukebox, all of a sudden that was the provider of the entertainment, not you. You know, and it's as cold and mechanical as sticking your coin and it'll wallop out something that you you'd like to hear. But as regards the fiddle, and our thanks, we don't need that anymore. And it it absolutely floored me reading that because I could immediately, I could immediately take that exact same story and change Patrick's name and put in Neely Boyle. And a man from the Rosses, from where his parents were from, from where that community originates, 4,000 miles away, and it was the exact same story, almost the exact same language. Neely, he was born just outside of Easton, Pennsylvania. His parents had emigrated there, they were lock keepers on the Lehigh navigation system, and he was he was about five, six, seven years of age, and they decided they didn't want to uh they wanted to go home. So his grandfather and uh his parents took took him back to to the Rosses. And when he went to school, the schoolmaster heard he has a new pupil who has come back with his parents from from America, and he was astonished. He was an Irish speaker. Uh if you like, he was he was immediately uh amalgamated and integrated into his own community, the community of his mother and father, and he grew up to become one of the most ingenious and powerful fiddle players of his generation. And again, like Patrick had uh he had this in he had a national profile. He went up and played in 1932 in Dublin. Irish National Radio, the national radio station had been established, and one of this one of the normal performers for that was at a performance that Neely played at, and he was stunned by this fella. And he he immediately called up the head of the head of music in the national radio station and said, You have to come down and hear this fella. And when they went down and heard him, the head of music said, You're not going back to Donegal until you broadcast on the National Airwaves. And he did that. He did that. He then he then made uh commercial 78s, which were released and broadcast on the radio. He he was an overnight national hero, although he was a local hero already, and Neely had that same thing Patrick had. He was the man, he was the fiddle player, he was the one who everybody wanted to hear and could give you a great night and a great time and fun and enjoyment. But the exact same thing happened. As as modern culture encroached into traditional cultures, all of a sudden it wasn't, you know, it it was it's what Neely called jazz. It was tin pan alley music, Neely called it jazz. And uh and it just killed it. And he he left. He went to Glasgow and saw out his last few years there. But he gave an interview with Peter Kennedy, it was recorded for the BBC in Britain, and he tells the exact same story as Patrick, you know, about uh about how, you know, the cultural tide had run out on him, that he had lost his currency, and how I think you could say he was bitter. He didn't use that word, but you just need to listen to him speak, and you realise he was bitter about it. And it's it's stunning that Patrick's story is a man who comes from Ross's blood is telling the exact same performer's experience as somebody back in the Ross's, Neely Boyle. And again, another player who was about ten years younger than Patrick and Neely was a fiddle player called Danny Danny O'Donnell, a beautiful, a wonderful, very bright man who knew knew the inside and out of music. He he literally travelled the world uh following uh fiddle players. And Danny was a gorgeous, sweet player of music and and an absolute gentleman. Uh but he experienced the downturn. But he just because he was ten years younger, he just Lived long enough to come out the other side to see where in the kind of late 60s, early 70s, that the music in Ireland was certainly coming back and it was being picked up in America, and he could see this. So if you like, he managed to live long enough to come out of the tunnel. But there's three people there: one on Beaver Island and two from the Rosses, 4,000 miles apart, and the exact same cultural story between them. And not only that, going back to what we said earlier, they were all playing the same, the very same linguistic dialect of music. Unbelievable.

SPEAKER_04 44:34

The arcs of their lives were very similar, how they learned music and who they played for, the dancing, and later influences on their music. You mentioned Tin Pan Alley. Patrick actually did learn some Tin Pan Alley tunes. Not a lot, but things like Ragtime Manny and Snow Deer and Silverbell, he played those tunes, and some of those tunes are uh still played on Beaver Island, or at least until recently. Ed Palmer loves some of those tunes. And I still play them from time to time on the island.

SPEAKER_05 45:00

I could put a challenge to anybody. If you read Glenn's early publication, or or even the the more recent one uh where we where we would have covered it again, if you read Patrick's uh own storytelling of that kind of erosion of of cultural status and stature and value, and you listen to the Neely Boyle interview with Peter Kennedy for the BBC. Now you're gonna you're gonna hear Neely's dunny all accent, but if you just if you just listen to the words, I would challenge you to think who's say who's t telling the story? It could be either of them. And again, two people coming from the same blood origin, 4,000 miles apart, and their lives are so exactly parallel. Exactly. And he called it uh the Irish Trot.

SPEAKER_04 46:58

Here there's a Detroit Irish Music Association, and some of their fiddlers play it as Some Say The Devil's Dead, or uh Love Won't You Marry Me, I think is another That's another one, yeah. So we should probably talk about uh um what's happening now on the island and the and kind of the future of fiddle and good stuff. Yeah, it is good news. So there are people on the island that have taken a lot of interest in traditional music or just music in general, and I think that's great. And there's people learning to play fiddle, they're learning from uh Katriona Kennedy from Donegal is teaching online to several students on the island. And uh Ruby John that I mentioned, she's teaching on the island, she's teaching fiddle, and there's other people learning other instruments and other kinds of music. To me, the important thing is people are playing music. And you know, I I prefer some of the older traditional music, but it's wonderful that people are playing music at all. And Beaver Island is really special that way, that people are playing music, they're learning, they're teaching themselves and taking lessons and learning to play. And that's just a wonderful thing. And I think that's something that's really special about the island.

SPEAKER_05 48:02

I would agree with Glenn. I think um I think it's tremendously important that that music is uh is up there, very highly up there in the in the cultural agenda on Beaver Island, promoting mu promoting the learning of music and and even promoting the appreciation of music is tremendously important. John Doherty, who is a fiddle player that we didn't mention, but was uh a massive, massive influence on the Donegal tradition. John used to have a saying that it's no burden to carry. In other words, if you if you have the ability to learn music and learn it, it's no burden to carry. Uh and again, I I suppose he was thinking about uh not being the the the piano player in the orchestra kind of a thing, but his instrument was the fiddle. And again, with so many fiddles and houses in Donegal that you didn't even need to have a f own a fiddle. You can go to the next house and there was a fiddle there and you could play it. So that that point that Glenn was uh stressing there about the importance of learning music and the enjoyment that music will give you, and and the fact that you can take it anywhere. You could go to a country that doesn't know one word of English, and if you can lick the tune or or or play or play an instrument automatically, you have friends, you know. And the the fact that that's happening on Beaver Island, I think is a tremendous credit to the people of Beaver Island. I know that Cargus and the Fitch Lerry, which is the the organization back here uh promoting Donegal music, uh, with Katrina Kennedy teaching, we're absolutely committed to to keeping that link going. I have to congratulate the young ones because uh I was there two summers ago, I think, Glenn, you'll correct me if I'm wrong. But uh played a few tunes with one of Katrina's uh pupils, a fantastic player, lovely girl playing great stuff. And Katrina was saying, like they're they're just coming coming along brilliantly. So uh it's great progress.

SPEAKER_04 49:54

It is good to see, and I should give a lot of credit to the Tunes organization has uh raised raised funding and supported many of these students of all ages, not just uh young people. So there's there's financial support as well as as teaching available on the island. It's a wonderful thing.

SPEAKER_05 50:12

I know there's an importance um attached to to learning Patrick's music. And again, that that's part of the local heritage and culture and the living tradition. It's important that that is done. Again, full credit to the people at Beaver Island who who who have that awareness and again appreciation. There was one thing that I wanted to say, lads. Um, while I was on Beaver Island, uh I think two summers ago, I I was mad keen to go to the cemetery and play a tune at Patrick's grave, which I did. But as I was wandering around, as I said before, so many of the names that are that I had read about on Beaver Island and then started experiencing firsthand being on Beaver Island, these these are standard everyday names for me here in Donegal. And I have to say, uh I spent a good bit of time walking around uh the cemetery and looking at the names, and there's two things. One is one is the just instantaneous impact of it, of walking around and seeing so many gravestones, particularly the older ones, uh born in Ireland, born in Donegal, and seeing this repeatedly, repeatedly, and even down to the fact there there's one gravestone there, it says of, meaning from Bonifasta, which actually you can find that gravestone. Is it Bonifasta? It's a B at the beginning. But obviously, it was a writing mistake or it was misheard from the person telling the stone carver. It's not Bonifasta, it's R. It's the letter R. But if you look at it, it was written phonetically. The stone carver carved that as he heard it. The person was speaking the Irish language. It's that it's that place that I was saying in the Rosses, Ranafarstya, nah farstia. Uh three words in the Irish language, but just pronounced quickly across. Ranafarstya. But it's literally carved into the tombstone as Bonifaste. And I'm walking around that there's the instantaneous, but there's the emotional bit. And I was surprised at myself. I'm walking around and I'm looking at this, and I'm just getting hammered with each one of these gravestones being so in some way, so familiar with me, seeing all these names that I know, surnames that I know, seeing Born in Ireland, Born in Donegal, and places like Ranafarsted on it. And just there there's there's an there is some kind of an emotion that comes over you. You're so close to home, but you know that you're not. And and then there's that reflection on everything that these people went through, you know, to to finish up here, you know. And you're just wishing that, you know, they they saw out a good life, knowing the hardship that they came from. I would I would recommend to any I would recommend anybody to go to Beaver Island because it's a fantastic place. The people are absolute absolutely wonderful. And the the fail at the fail there is one of the best I've ever seen in America, and I have no hesitation in saying that, because it's small, it's local, it's just absolute friendly and fun. You'd have to try not to enjoy it, to not enjoy it. Take time to meet the people and talk to them, but definitely walk through the cemetery and just see what it does to you. It's not a bad feeling, but it is a very deep feeling. Before we leave the cemetery, there was a woman in the cemetery there, and she she saw me walking around and she came over to me. Now she'd be a bit older than myself. She came over to me and said, Uh, uh, can I help you find somebody or something here? And I said, No, I'm just having a wander around. She heard my accent anyway. And and I told her I was there for the music. She says, Well, my grandmother's buried here. She was a very famous musician. Her name was Katchleen Og. I said, So I know Katchleen Og. She nearly fell down that I knew her grandmother. So she took me to her grandmother's grave. Again, I knew Katchleen Og as a little from Glenn's work. But going to uh going to John Duffy, John Duffy was, and again, no exaggeration, was one of the most important uh heart surgeons uh in the Western world during his prime. At one stage, I only learned I only learned this uh I was I was uh with Aaron Moore Islanders uh three or four days ago. I never knew this. But apparently John, he he he worked in the Mayo Clinic and he worked in uh in a in a uh is the head surgeon, uh cardiac surgeon in Chicago. But I never knew this until the other day. He was recruited out of Chicago eventually as the private physician to one of the Arab sheikhs who had a car had a heart condition, and he went everywhere with them on his private jet and all this kind of carry-on until the until he eventually died of natural causes, and John eventually came home. But he was uh he was born on Arnmore Island and very brilliant man, a very, very gifted individual, again, would have studied in the English language, a second language to him, and became one of the most prominent uh heart surgeons in the Western world. But he uh he eventually wound up, as I said, as a very, very senior clinician in America and was based in Chicago, but he loved traditional music and he could tell me stories about when he was a child, the uh he's in his nineties now, he's still alive. He could remember musicians uh like Neely Boyle, we spoke about earlier on, uh coming to the island when he was a child. But when he wound up in Chicago, he heard about Beaver Island, and there was an Irish community there, and there was music there, and there was nothing going to stop him. But he went he went to Beaver Island and uh and he loved it. Absolutely loved it. And he met Patrick and he and Patrick fell in big time together, and he went back several, several times and he had great memories of Patrick and very, very fond of him. Um about two years ago, Gaddog Waney, who would be the brother of Moraine Waney, the the fiddle player and singer with the the band Dalton, Gaddog and I went over and we did uh an interview with John about his whole life, but really with a very strong accent on traditional music, and Beaver Island and Patrick. And it was in the Irish language, and it's it was about an hour and a half long, but tremendously interesting, very bright, very bright, very gifted man, and somebody who who loves and cherishes the music.

SPEAKER_04 56:26

And I've talked to uh Danny Gillespie, he remembers Dr. Duffy visiting the island and teaching a tune called Dark Island, and Danny has sung that on on a few occasions. I met Dr. Duffy in Aaron Moore and I played a few tunes for him, one of which was a highland called Huban, which means fair hue. And uh Dr. Duffy told me the story behind that tune and that name, which is quite a story. It's in our book, Islands of Fiddlers. And perhaps we should say uh where someone could get the books, right? We're optimistic that we can supply the Beaver Island Historical Society with some books this summer. And you could also order them from Ireland. It's Donegalfiddlemusic.ie is the website. Donegalfiddlemusic.ie.

SPEAKER_03 57:13

Blessed be we are to be to Ireland the way of one so.

SPEAKER_00 57:20

I'm so glad Glenn recognized what he found here, and that Queen helped him balance the story with the Donegal side. We're grateful they shared that work with us, not just in this conversation, but in their book, Islands of Fiddlers. Glenn's article, The Songs of Beaver Island, appears in Volume 2 of the Journal of Beaver Island History, and the book at the center of today's episode, Islands of Fiddlers, is available at Donegal Fiddlermusic.ie in the recordings shop section. Glenn also mentioned that the Beaver Island Historical Society will have copies on hand. You'll find the book link and our guest biopieces in the show notes. We can't thank these gentlemen enough for their time and support. After the credits, you'll find an 11-minute bonus segment from our post-interview chat if you'd like to stay with us a bit longer. So, from Aaron Moore to Beaver Island and back again. We'll see you next time. The Tides That Tie is sponsored by the Beaver Island Irish Heritage Group. Music provided by Ed Palmer and Rich Scripps, Jerry Early, John Gallagher, Ann Connahan, John Flanagan, Hillary Palmer, Cindy Cushman, and Ruby John. With special thanks to Kevin Boyle for our introduction voiceover. To learn more or support the storytellers behind the Tides That Tie, email us at Tides That Tie at BIIHG.com. That's Tides That Tie at BIIHG.com. Copyright, 2026, Beaver Island Irish Heritage Group, all rights reserved.

SPEAKER_05 58:53

So it's the gravel walks or the gravel walks to Groundy.

SPEAKER_04 1:00:11

I actually learned that tune many years ago from an Irish band called The Boys of the Lock, and I've also heard it played with two fiddles playing an octave apart.

SPEAKER_05 1:00:19

Yeah, it's very much a standard Donegal treatment is to play two fiddles. If you have two fiddles or more, you play play in octaves. The sound effect of it is if you play an octave, it usually sounds like there's maybe three or four fiddles playing. And that was important uh if you're playing in a noisy area, if the house dance got loud, you played an octaves. It was called reversing. Just going back to Catch Lee Oak, on that very point about octaves, she was clearly a very important source of uh of tunes. And she was a little, she was born, she was born in uh in Iron Moor, uh, and she would have learned lilting uh as a ch as a child and uh would have brought that and the her repertoire to Beaver Island and Patrick picked up a great regard on her tunes. It was whether it came from the Lyters or it came from the fiddle players, it's not really known. But males were fiddle players and women were lilters for house dances. And the one thing about it is when you had when you had a mother and daughter particular, it was it was really treasured music that the mother would sing with with Lyt, the lower octave of the tune, and the daughter would lytt the higher octave. So they were actually lilting in octaves, and that was that was very much a treasured performance to do that. So it's no surprise when Catchly No goes to Beaver Island that she is she's very deeply steeped in beautiful uh Lyting music. It's not a surprise to see that she was uh she was a kind of prized and treasured musician on the island.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:48

I love to channel this, just thinking, Glenn, and you've been out there to the Greentown farm where Patrick uh would have been playing in those house parties at my grandmother's place, you know, where the old piano is in the Greentown farm and that that was actually there. It's just crazy to think about. It seems like it was long ago, but it really wasn't. Well, not in the big scheme of things, I guess that.

SPEAKER_05 1:02:10

It's astounding how close he reached into our modern era. It's what what I was saying in the beginning, if you do the mathematics of counting back, because he lived into his nineties and he learned as a young fella from players who were already mature adults, if not old adults, you know, and and then and then stretch them back, you're you're you're getting well back there. The fact that it got so close to us is I mean, there there's there's three of you sitting there and you you you were able to experience Patrick.

SPEAKER_04 1:02:39

Pretty crazy. It also speaks to his dedication to the music. He knew what he was doing. He he knew he was preserving the music, I believe. And we wouldn't have it if he hadn't uh treasured it so much. That's very true.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:52

That's a good point because you know you talked about when, you know, in his younger days there were so many that influenced him, but as as he grew older, it's like they were all falling off, and he didn't have you know peers on the island that we know of. Patrick seems to be the only one that that emerged either because he lived longer than the rest of them or because of that those modern conveniences that that somehow lowered the the uh I guess the draw for people to play fiddle as he did.

SPEAKER_04 1:03:24

There was a few there were a few people that learned a little bit from him. Jewel Gillespie and uh Glenn McDonough was another.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:31

Yep.

SPEAKER_04 1:03:31

Learned some tunes from Patrick. And I played a bit with Glenn when he was still living too. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:03:37

I was thinking about that, and it is a very important question to ask in transmission of tradition. Patrick wasn't the only person of his generation. You know, there were other people of his own age, both male and female. Now, but again, there there is a gender thing there that uh fiddle playing tends to get pointed towards males. Thanks be to God, that's gone. But you have to ask yourself, why was he the only person, as a young person of his generation, with with people who were quite willing to pass the tradition on, why was he the only one? And I've thought a lot about that. And I suspect the practical answer is that life even on life on Beaver Island would have been hard enough, you know, with physical farming, lumberjacking, sailing, fishing, etc. etc. That if you like, there was a there was a real demand, a physical demand on you, you know, both in times of tiredness and and and time. And if you like, when you add all that up, there isn't there there may not have been an awful lot of time for people to f for young fellas, you know, we're talking about kids from maybe 10 to 20, which is the learning years, that you know, they're they're more they're more concentrated on on getting on in life, you know, just making life work uh for them. And you know, it was just that maybe Patrick uh having a lot of older siblings who were carrying that weight in the family, that he had maybe a bit more free time to be able to engage this. But if that's not the answer, uh it is a very interesting question about why he was the only one of his generation who did it. And again, as Glenn said lasting, if he didn't do it, imagine what would have been lost.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:19

Exactly.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:21

I wonder too, Glenn, do you do you know offhand how many of the other uh boners ended up staying on the island? Yes, I do know. None. Yeah. See, I I think that's uh I think that's part of it, Kiban, that you know, we had uh we we had a lot of our own immigration. You know, you had the big push when fishing was strong and the population was large and you could count uh ten Anthony O'Donnells or something like that, right? But then I'd be real kids, this could be a good project. I would like to see if some of that m music moved off the island when the fishing was gone and when logging d dissipated. You know, we got To we got to starvation point, like when Ron and I were young, you know, it was this is the bleak, desperate time. So it'd be interesting. I don't know how I'd do it, or maybe get any suggestions, let me know because that would be fun to track down. See if if any music left.

SPEAKER_04 1:06:15

Yeah. I suppose some did you're exactly right because um when the commercial fishing crashed due to the the sea lamprey and overfishing, that was Beaver Island was depopulated. Yeah. In the early sixties there were like what, 150 people maybe there?

SPEAKER_00 1:06:32

Yeah. And were there s little cells somewhere out there of these people that that left that ended up together and bringing music with them?

SPEAKER_05 1:06:41

They went to the cities where they could find jobs. And again, the the the big thing there is finding those families. And the first thing is, do you have any cassettes of your your grandfather or your father? Is there any music lying around? You know, was there a house party that you recorded? God knows what you find, you know, really. Can I can I just can I just say one one thing as well that that that we tend to um because of the the the the the virtuosity of Patrick that tend to sometimes get overlooked. Uh and it it hit me when I was first going to this material, thanks to Glenn uh for all the pointers, was listening to the songs. I mean, I'm listening again, it's a it's that graveyard effect that I had. I'm listening to songs about Oma Town and Derry Town. And you know, from from the singers of Beaver Island, and I'm I'm not necessarily talking about Irish-born members of the population, I'm talking about uh Beaver Island-born people. And that I know a lot of these songs that they're singing, and they have the lyrics word for word with as they are here now, and as I remember when I was very young listening to singers sing these songs, people like Geordie Hannah and people like that who had this repertoire and listening to them. And while there might be a bit of a twang in the accent, the timing of the delivery of the lyrics is exactly as you hear here in the northern counties. It's exactly the same. It amazes again again, it's that amazement from the from the cemetery effect. You're listening to somebody who's 4,000 miles away on a remote island in the top of Lake Michigan, and they're singing these songs exactly as I could hear them going, you know, going to the next village. And the lyrics are exactly the same, the story is exactly the same, but the the timing of the delivery, if you like, whoever whoever these people are when they're singing, they learned it exactly as they heard it from people who knew it back here. And they're singing exactly the same. And I I find you know that that the 4,000 mile gap is nothing. You know, it doesn't exist. It's unbelievable the standard of preservation of that. And when I start to reflect on that, and I start thinking uh a band of integrity, which I would consider Alphan, a band which is deeply rooted in County Donegal, professional musicians, musicians of the highest standard, but have the greatest understanding and personal respect for this music. And singing in the Irish language and singing in the English language as they do, I just sit there and I think to myself, there's an absolute gold mine. They have done all their work. They've done all their work and they know this material very well. But I'm sitting there thinking, Jesus, there's two or three gem gems there that I'm pretty sure that they haven't heard, or else they're versions of ones they know. And this stuff is sitting there right. And I wouldn't be surprised if I see it on a on another CD and part of a world tour. And again, it's coming from Beaver Island. No surprise.