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Describe the atmosphere and live music at a local pub, restaurant, festival, church or temple, club night.... inspire other people to check it out!
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Musician: Johnny Adams
Location: Halifax, W.Yorks
Instruments: vocals / fiddle
Music: English folk / Irish folk
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HOW I CAME TO THIS MUSICÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýWHERE I PLAYÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýA FAVOURITE SONG |
  
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 ÌýÌýListen (3'10) 'She Wants a Fellow' & 'Thomas Birkett's Jig' 9, performed by Johnny Adams along with fellow-fiddlers, Chris Partington and Paul Roberts.
'I learned a lot from Willie Taylor, a shepherd in the Borders who played fiddle with a very special feel that only the border fiddler can give'
How I came to this music:
I fell in love with the fiddle when I started as an apprentice at Rolls Royce in 1966. It was my first week away from home and I visited a Derby Folk Club to see ace fiddler Dave Swarbrick with Martin Carthy. Dave played fiddle and mandolin. I didn't think I'd ever be able to play the fiddle but I thought my skills might stretch to mandolin. When my first wage packet of £3 17s 6d came in, I spent £3 10s of it on a mandolin from a local junk shop. My landlady was furious because I couldn't pay my rent, but I had (and still have) the mandolin. I paid double rent the next week.
As the fingering patterns of fiddle and mandolin are the same, I eventually managed to transfer all my mandolin tunes onto the fiddle.
After a couple of years, I started to hang around the local Irish Centre where I was taught old style Irish fiddle by old Michael Byrne from Co. Mayo and Johnny Gibney from Co Waterford. It was many years later that I found Willie Taylor, a shepherd in the borders. He played fiddle music from everywhere but it was all filled with a very special feel that only the border fiddler can give - complicated by the fact that Willie had a finger missing.
 I learned a lot from Willie and from recordings of fiddlers, from other parts of England. Over time, I’ve put them together into a style of my own. I think it's an English style and it's certainly different from the Irish and Scottish players that I hear. There are other people that play like me though and it sounds good when we play together.
I never lost the bits that the Irish players gave me because they played in a very old-fashioned way, much the same as how the old English players did. It’s the new Irish players who are different - flashier and faster in style. Since Chief O’Neill of the Chicago Police published his O’Neill’s 1001 Dance Tunes of Ireland (which actually also contained English tunes, operatic airs, bits of classical - the usual eclectic mix) Irish fiddling has developed into a highly technical art form. It was the ex-pat Irish players like Eamonn Coyne and Sean McNamara of Liverpool and others in London’s Camden Town who stayed nearer to the ‘old’ music for longer. It’s that ‘old’ sound that I prefer.
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