I am an enthusiastic but untalented fiddle player, despite the incredibly patient tutelage of my teacher. I can spend many happy hours with O’Neill’s Music of Ireland, just randomly picking out jigs and reels and hornpipes based on title alone, sometimes recognizing them under a different name; and of course there are the tunes that share a name but not a note. Sometimes I go to a session that’s supposed to be for “learners,” but the playing is far too fast for me to keep up except on the dozen or so tunes that I’ve got by heart at a good pace. This is a story about learning tunes, and being tricked by tunes, and by the sorts of people who pass tunes along. I was thinking of Martin McHugh when I wrote it, a box player who passed away about a year and a half ago now and whose playing I first encountered at the session at the Irish Well in the 1990s. Slán abhaile, a Mhairtin, and many thanks for all the tunes!
The only working light bulb in the old man’s apartment is in the kitchen, so they sit on low metal chairs with tattered vinyl seats around a table a little too big for the space. The tune collector asks the old man if he can unplug the refrigerator humming in the corner; the old man shrugs. There’s nothing in it anyway but some butter and a bottle of vodka.
“I suppose you’ve come for the tune,” says the old man. They chatted about the weather while the tune collector set up his equipment: he carried two heavy suitcases full of tape reels and wires and microphones, and a violin case tucked under his arm.
“I’d love to hear it,” says the tune collector.
The old man grins. He has just three teeth in the front of his mouth, set precariously in gray, dry gums. “Let me warm up a bit, then.”
The tune collector presses the button on his recorder with his toe. The microphone under the table crackles with static as it comes to life.
“First a song my Ma learned me,” says the old man. He closes his eyes, tilts his head down, and begins a low, droning, rhythmless singing. The tune collector recognizes the melody, but the words are Gaelic, the sibilants slurred against the old man’s empty gums.
When the song ends, the tune collector says, “That was lovely. What do you call it?”
“Ma called it ‘Nuar a bhí thu a’sail.’ Don’t know its proper name, and she’s long dead.”
“And she was from Donegal?”
“Her people were from Armagh. But the song was off my Da’s people. Something an uncle brought back from being a speladoir. The Irish is Scottish.”
The tune collector nods. He’ll copy this tape for O’Brien, who’s doing a geographical study of Irish and Scots song variants. Perhaps this variant will highlight a transitional phase in the song’s migration west across borders and dialects.
“It’s a lovely song,” says the tune collector. “Now, did you learn the fiddle from your uncle?”
“Ay. My Ma’s brother, though. He learned off a cousin from Sligo. They called him a tinker, but he weren’t. Just did business with them.”
“But it’s a tinker tune, right?”
“Ay. So my uncle said. But there was lots called tinkers then what weren’t. Lots of good folk on the road too, then.”
The collector nods vigorously. Patrick Fitzhugh, a musicologist at the university, told him about the old man and his tune. Even played a bit of it on the piano for him. If what the old man says is true, it’s a rare a find.
“Can I hear it, then?” the tune collector asks.
“Ay,” the old man says. He reaches under his chair and comes up with a fiddle—a cheap student model, the tune collector notes, scratched on the face and worn smooth and laquerless where the old man tucks it under his chin.
The fiddle screeches a few times as the old man draws the bow across it, then he sets his jaw and begins to saw with quick, sharp jerks of his elbow. The tune is familiar enough, the way all fiddle tunes are—an A-B-A reel in 4/4 time, the A part in D with a profusion of triplets, the B part in a minor and slow. But it’s different, too, the B part evocative of Moroccan markets and Spanish mosques, with low, droning harmonics as it slips into the refrain. The tune collector closes his eyes and nods his head; it’s a rare find indeed.
“What do you call it?”
The fiddler shrugs. “Hasn’t got a proper name.”
“So, ‘gan ainm’?” the tune collector asks, and chuckles. When he started collecting tunes, the appellation “gan ainm”— “without a name”—had sent him down a long blind alley; how could all these reels, jigs, strathspeys, and slides, in every time and key, have the same name? What common root did they share? O’Brien still laughs about it.
“Da called it ‘Patrick Gorham’s,’” says the old man. “On account of old Gorham always asked after it when he’d been in his cups.”
“’Patrick Gorham’s’ it is, then. Can you play it through once more?”
The old man nods and sets to again. The tune collector listens closer this time, picturing the notes scrambling up and down their staves. When the old man finishes, the tune collector takes out his own violin and checks its tuning.
“I’d like to learn it,” says the tune collector. “To help me write it out. Can you play it slow with me?”
The old man nods and waits until the tune collector has his violin on his shoulder. Then he starts again, the tune collector following behind.
“Wait,” the tune collector says halfway through the A part. “That was different from the other times.”
“Ay?”
“Last time it was a triplet.” He plays three notes. “But this time it was trilled.” And he trills a single note under his finger.
“Ay, like that.”
“Not the triplet?”
“Nay.”
The tune collector nods, and they start again. Near the end of the A part he stops. The old man had reversed a falling arpeggio, sending the notes riding up the staff instead.
“Is that right?” the tune collector asks and repeats the phrase.
“Oh, nay. Like this.” The old man plays the tumbling notes.
“But—“
“That’s how my uncle learned me. Off his cousin before.”
The tune collector nods and starts again. But this time, starting the slow B part, the old man abruptly changes the tempo and begins what sounds like a loose slip jig.
“Wait. Is that the same tune?”
“Of course.”
“I don’t remember—“
“Oh, ay, it’s how my uncle learned me. Said it was a tinker’s tune.”
“Right. Alright, once more through, then.”
Each time the old man plays the tune, it’s new: a reel, then a march, once even a waltz; quick and bright, slow and dark. The tune collector stops him, questions him, tries again. Over and over, the tune falls down the rabbit hole.
Just past midnight his recorder clicks off, with the last inch of his last tape. The machine hums patiently, anxious to be fed. The tune collector yanks out the cord with his foot and turns back to the old man.
“Like this?” he asks before he twists the tune around his bow like a tangle of sea-borne kelp.