Fiddling On-Air, On-Eire

NORTH AMERICA’S FIDDLING ON-EIRE ? Winnie Czulinski, Fiddler Mag. 2007

When you think of Celtic fiddling coming over the airwaves, the images conjured up might be something like Riverdance, or perhaps Cape Bretoner Winston “Scotty” Fitzgerald (1914-1987) firing those driven-up beats and downbeat pulses into a crackling microphone.

Or – perhaps this:

When Mount Airy, North Carolina station WPAQ marked its long history by airing its first webcast show just over a year ago (2006), second-generation owner Kelly Epperson did more than announce “Hello, world!”

He presented fiddler Benton Flippen, an icon of old-time American music, who had performed live at the station’s first broadcast on Groundhog Day, 1948. Nearly 60 years later, his rendition of “Bile ‘Em Cabbage Down” was the first internet-broadcast live tune on WPAQ.

According to Flippen in The Winston-Salem Journal of April 6, 2007, “Computers, they got everything else. They might as well have this.” And in being instantly streamed to the world, Flippen could perpetuate the importance of the fiddler in old-time Americana music, often as both solo musician and dance-caller at once.

But Flippen’s distinctive fingering patterns and strong rhythmic bowing and slides owe much to something much older. Irish fiddles, rhythms and ballads, along with the music of other Celts, came to North America a few centuries ago, and became an integral part of the music we now think of as belonging to this continent – old-timey, country, bluegrass. WPAQ is not a “Celtic” station. But it is part of the phenomenon of fiddling-on-air in North America that goes back many decades and indicates the centuries-long legacy of the Celts in America.

The blistering energy and sweet poignancy of sounds that reflect the experience of Scottish and Irish immigrants is heard in more recognizable form on programs like Cape Breton Live Radio. This vigorous music continues to keep the hills alive, perpetuated by the likes of Buddy MacMaster, Winston (Scotty) Fitzgerald and Dan Rory Macdonald, who wrote some 400 tunes of his own.

And Cape Breton Live may air from a pub, where you never know who will show up to join the fiddler, or a square dance, “where you can hear the swoosh of the feet along with the hoots and hollers of the dancers,” says co-producer Andrea Beaton, herself a renowned Cape Breton fiddler who plays a 100-year-old German instrument.

“The recordings are meant to capture the atmosphere in the room as much as the music itself. We want to present that feeling to the listeners, as a lot of them may be working away and missing the sounds of home.”

Cape Breton Live was created by famous Celtic fiddlers Natalie MacMaster and Donnell Leahy (who also are husband and wife). MacMaster, who wows world audiences with her dual diverse fiddling and stepdancing, is well aware of the attraction of Cape Breton music and culture to so many. "It excites people and stays with them long after they leave. So, we thought, if you can’t get here in person, join us on the Web."

It’s another example of a North America-wide phenomenon of locally-rooted radio stations embracing and presenting the experience of fiddlers performing live:

A lunchtime live-to-air concert on Knoxville, Tennessee station WDVX, where an avid audience also tucks into box lunches. Virtuoso performances and thoughtful interviews on Boston station WGBH’s A Celtic Sojourn, that also easily evoke that “you are here” feeling, later, with online archives. Los Angeles’ beloved weekly Folkscene program, that has presented many live from-Celtic-to-contemporary fiddlers in its 35+ years.

Going north up the coast to British Columbia, you’ll come to community station programs like CHLY’s Eclectic Celtic where the occasional guest fiddler live on air may be joined by the show’s mandolin-playing host. At WFUV in New York (a region where Irish often outnumber Americans), Celtic programs ceol na nGael And A Thousand Welcomes have welcomed the likes of Eileen Ivers, Kevin Burke, Natalie MacMaster and Ashley MacIsaac, as have many other stations.

Liz Noonan, producer of ceol naGael (which means “music of the Irish”) says, “I try to book as many live performances as I can from local and world-renowned musicians.?The unpredictable and honest nature of live music adds another element to the listening experience.”?Once, musician James Riley busted a guitar string while accompanying Eileen Ivers in a frenzied set of reels on air, but Noonan says Ivers merely shouted “All right, James!” and they kept going.

They, and so many others, spring from a decades-old tradition in which radio brought live musicians to eager audiences, long before TV, videos and the Internet, and where anything might happen.

For all that, there often was a formula both cheerful and reassuring. And one of the best could be found in Canada during the 1940s and 1950s when thrice-weekly, listeners smiled to “And now it’s time for the Down East music of Don Messer and His Islanders!” That was the opening cue for 16 bars of “Fireman’s Reel,” thrusting into The Islanders’ theme, “Going to the Barndance.”

Champion fiddler Messer, who first did a live radio program in New Brunswick, became a down-home king of the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) airwaves, out of Charlottetown, PEI (Prince Edward Island). It was a time when performers like Messer and his musicians often had to crowd around one radio mike, but the on-air experience continued for about 2,000 broadcasts.

“Big John MacNeil” was a centuries-old Scottish tune that thanks to live radio performance made it a big hit in Canada in the 1940s. Canadianized pieces like “Beaver Jig," “Saskatoon Breakdown,” “Maple Leaf Two-Step” and waltzes and reels named after Canadian prime ministers also reeled out of the airwaves.

Fiddlers like Graham Townsend (often considered Messer’s musical descendent), Randy Morrison and many others would continue this Celtic-Canadian legacy, in playing that brought traces of Irish, French Canadian, Cape Breton Scot, Cajun and Nashville, to listeners.

Townsend, and peers like Don Reed, Rudy Meeks, story-telling fiddler Jimmy MacLellan with his Irish Cape Breton style, and Paul Menard with his vigorous Quebec flavour, delighted listeners’ ears on programs like the 1982 13-week series “Grassroots,” and the CKLU (Sudbury, Ontario) Bluegrass and Old Time Fiddle Hour that ran for 15 years.

Program creator and co-host Martin Chapman often featured fiddlers live in the radio studio, and recorded them in their homes, on to cassette tapes to air later. "The biggest thing for me is just how good all the players were, and how all of them had great stories to tell about either the tunes or their own experiences. I wanted to capture the essence of the players ...not just from examples of their playing but as individuals too.”

Chapman does have a favourite, Don Reed. “His slow back-up stuff and waltzes will bring tears to your eyes. And his ability to come up with the perfect break the first time makes him loved by every producer who has ever worked with him.”

Like bluegrass in the US, says Chapman, Canadian fiddle music developed from old cultural traditions to become a genre a nation can call its own. “The more we record it, the more we will have something to reflect our music history.”

That history includes programs like CBC’s Nova Scotia Kitchen Party, which in turn owe something to stations like southwestern Ontario’s CKNX, one of the earliest. It flung its doors open to on-air performers, while crowds gathered in the street at the window. Ultimately CKNX went on the road, broadcasting back via long-distance telephone lines.

Programs like Serenade Ranch, Western Roundup and Good Time Country, were part of the Eastern Canada “roots” existence that followed the Vaudeville music era. Many other contemporary programs, from major CBC shows to Toronto university station-program Back To The Sugar Camp, continue to feature live fiddling traditions.

By the mid 1990s, Irish stage shows like Riverdance and Lord of the Dance made Celtic music big enough to bolster the careers of hundreds of excellent fiddlers, whether solo or in Celtic folk/rock bands, but the roots were already there. Young fiddlers like MacMaster and MacIsaac, PEI’s “bow-shredding” Richard Wood, the barrage of young hip fiddlers named Barrage, and countless fiddle-driven bands with names like Celtic Chaos and Coole Park, have embraced on-air along with concert performances.

Like Canada, the U.S. has an enormous presence of traditional and vamped Irish/Celtic music, especially in cities like New York, Boston and Chicago, where many Irish came 100-200 years ago for a new life.

Chicago-based Celtic fiddler Liz Carroll recalls a Sunday night Irish radio show at a pub called “Hanley’s House of Happiness,” when she was about 10. “I was playing fiddle for maybe a year when Tom (McNamara) asked me to play on the show.?My parents still consider it a highlight of my life, and I never forgot it.”

Other live shows went out from the Hibernian Hall, and teen-aged Carroll often played with the likes of Michael Flatley, a champion flute player long before his fancy footwork in stage shows Riverdance and Lord of the Dance.

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Appalachian, old-timey, country, bluegrass, Texas swing and western swing (also described as “hillbilly jazz”) are some of the Celtic outgrowths that developed over many decades, then were aired. Live mountain music soared in popularity and into folks’ homes from the 1930s through the 1950s, on Philco, Motorola and Zenith radios.

The listener might feel swept into the very barn-dance or hayride it sometimes was broadcast from. The Louisiana Hayride radio program began 60 years ago, seeding the careers of many country music greats. As for Louisiana fiddling, it reflected influences like jazz, Cajun, Zydeco, blues and rockabillity, as well as that far-off Irish/Scottish connection.

Local (and webcast) programs with names like Opry Possum and Wild Hog in the Woods, This Old Porch, Music from the Mountains and Tennessee Saturday Night continue to carry on the country and mountain music legacy.

In Whitesburg, Kentucky in the heart of Appalachia, community station WMMT thrives on live fiddlers, like Snake Chapman and Curly Ray Kline, Uncle Charlie Osborne fiddling on air at 100, and Jesse Wells climbing the rungs from promising youngster to one of the best fiddlers in the region.

“You could get an argument whether the fiddle or the banjo is closer to the ‘heart’ of the music,” says Rich Kirby, production director at WMMT. “Either way, the excitement is undeniable.” Just as in Canada, regional fiddling can be quite defined. There is both a southeastern and northeastern Kentucky style, as well as a far southwest Virginia style (in part of their broadcast area), different from the Blue Ridge style.

Many of the tunes are “obviously Celtic,” says Kirby. But he also feels that the heavily syncopated bowing of mountain fiddlers owes much to African Americans. And in fact the interweaving of black music with Irish is behind tap, as well as rock.

Old live-fiddling radio programs inspire many of today’s fiddlers. For some, it might be something like old broadcasts of legendary band The Light Crust Doughboys, who happily combined Texas and western swing with gospel, then later blended that with Pacific/California “surf.”

For New York-based Celtic fiddler Cady Finlayson it’s series like “The Talking Violin,” a program hosted by Dr. Billy Taylor, presenting musicians from the 1920s up to the present day. “I like listening to fiddlers from long ago because they each have their own individual style. That is what makes fiddling special for me, creating something that is a part of you and that is based on your musical influences, and your life and your soul.”

Like many touring musicians, Finlayson will send a CD to local stations and mention she’s available for live performance interviews. Often, there’s a tie-in with something related the program is doing. “WJFF did an interview that included my Harp and Shamrock CD but also talked about the Irish (American) baseball movie, The Emerald Diamond, that has some of my music in it. They interviewed the film director about baseball and me about music -- and in this way appealed to a wider group of listeners.”

Often the performance has an emotional basis. Liz Knowles, a Chicago fiddler who toured with Riverdance, and her husband, renowned Uillean piper Kieran O'Hare, recently did a WUMB Boston show with fiddler Seamus Connolly to promote a benefit concert for friend and ill Cape Breton fiddler Jerry Holland. The trio did jigs and reels, and Knowles did a solo.

Live radio performing often is an enigma. It can bring with it a kind of freedom in that you aren’t seen. But radio shows with audiences may be easier if you’re used to performing on stage, with that special back-and-forth connection. Knowles laughs about one show, where she and touring Riverdance colleagues tumbled into a radio studio at an hour early enough to be painful for night-after-night performers. They hadn’t known there would be an avid audience hanging on to every note the “slightly disheveled” musicians played.

“In most cases (with radio) you do not get an immediate response. You also don’t get a sense of how it sounds.” Likely, you’re either on headphones or in a small and “dead”-sounding room. “After the Boston radio show, we did make a call to someone who heard it to see how it sounded and how it came across.”

Short bursts of performance and talk interspersed with totally silent breaks every so often for commercials and announcements can be disorienting. “So, unlike a concert where you get to warm into the playing and build momentum over the course of an hour, on radio, you feel more of the stops and starts. It is a wonderful jigsaw puzzle of programming they do on a live radio station!”

The sheer opportunity of being able to talk about her music in a way that would be impossible in a concert setting, does make the interview aspect of radio enjoyable and rewarding for her.

Knowles credits good DJs, like WUMB’s Dave Palmatier, with keeping the energy going. Other musicians echo this kind of sentiment. New Yorker Cady Finlayson says, “I have the ultimate respect for DJs because they are really keeping music alive and helping to connect people in a way that is so important and so easily forgotten with all the technology out there.”

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Technical aspects of on-air itself vary. Coming in for a performance/interview with an announcer who’s already on-air means you must get in and have mics set up during the space of a few minutes in commercial breaks. Another scenario might involve recording in a separate booth from the programming before you – with more time for setup.

The size of the room, and the engineer’s capabilities also can affect production quality. Engineer Joe Grimaldi at New York station WFUV says that an instrument with good tone needs very little equalization. Sometimes he might pull out some of the high end pitches to prevent the fiddle from overpowering other instruments, and when working with bluegrass (not Celtic) musicians he tends to emphasize the mid-low frequencies.

He adds that it’s not uncommon, and often is quite successful, for a fiddler/vocalist to use one basic dynamic microphone for both their voice and instrument. Grimaldi likes to place a high-quality condenser microphone about two feet over the F holes.

Fiddler Stuart Martz, who has done radio around the world, also suggests it’s good for engineers to ask musicians, many of whom know the tech side, if there’s something that usually works well for them, give them a set of headphones and let them hear it if possible.?“Here's more good news. Most fiddle players like the acoustic sound of their fiddle. If it sounds like that fiddle through the cans, you are doing great.”

Los Angeles-based Martz, who recently recorded Irish fiddle for the new film Flash of Genius (starring Greg Kinnear and written/directed by Mark Abraham of "The Committments" fame), says “Live to air music is a lot like recording.”

Martz had enough technical suggestions to constitute a small book, but here’s some of it: “Make sure you put the fiddle mic on a boom stand. (pretty elementary, but some folks don't know this). Any quality medium diaphragm condenser mic will do the job. You see lots of AKG c414 mics used for this because they are great all-around instrument recording mics.” He also likes the “spendier” Neuman mics.

“If the station is on a budget, I still like Shure sm 57's. These are great mics for all kinds of things.” The Flash of Genius engineer, Tree Adams, had a 1950s Shoeps CMC5, “and it sounded like a million bucks on the fiddle. There are no hard fast rules. Trust your ears.”

Inevitably, when recording a CD, a good fiddler will spent a lot of time with mic placement, and several mics. “For a radio show, it's a moment in time and you usually end up using whatever is available,” says Cady Finlayson.?“You play with your most beautiful sound, you hope it sounds nice on air, but ultimately what's nice about live radio is that the listener hears not just the music, but the story behind the music and what the artist is saying with their music.”

Finlayson also gets the opportunity to have live Internet chats with listeners on programs like Whole Wheat Radio, an Alaska station with live webcasting and house concerts, and which gives a featured artist a “day.”

Increasingly, you’ll find “Celtic” merging into “multiCeltural.” San Francisco fiddler Ben Roberts, who is inspired by influences from Mozart to Arabic singing and beating on a pot, weaves in and out of musical groups and influences. Irish rebel. Original Afghan. Alternative, progressive, groove and electronica, The Santa Cruz Symphony, and various country-rock and bluegrass bands.

Listening is the key to playing good music, says Roberts. A strong sense of rhythm and pulse, tone and intonation and dynamics are all there too.”Those are the common threads to all genres. And it's always good to know the history of what you are playing, for little anecdotes, if you are getting interviewed.”

Liz Knowles says that in some ways she feels part of the continuum of the culture that hung on every sound and every word the radio had to offer. Certainly, there was a time when that is all people had.

On her way home one night she found herself listening to Ma XiaoHui, a Chinese Erhu (Chinese two-stringed fiddle) composer/player on NPR’s All Things Considered radio show. “My experience of hearing her instrument, her music and her voice talking about the music live cannot be all that different than hearing Winston Scotty (Fitzgerald) in those days.”

We can go to a website, says Knowles, and see Ma XiaoHui play in a video stream so there is much more than just the radio experience.

“But it does not change the impact of that live performance. It only adds to it.”

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