Folk, Jazz, Etc: Reviving a lost art - the return of the singing fiddler

Published on Thursday 1 May 2008 21:03

MUSIC and song from a fiddler who couldn’t see, captured piquantly by an artist who could not hear it – that’s Walter Geikie’s etching, A Blind Fiddler, reproduced in the excellent new book by Katherine Campbell, The Fiddle in Scottish Culture (published by Birlinn’s John Donald imprint).

Geikie, famous for his droll but perceptive etchings of Edinburgh street life in the early 19th century, captures the moment as a weel kent blind fiddler, Alexander MacDonald, leans forward and is not only bowing but evidently singing, as bystanders look on.

The image features in Campbell’s chapter on blind fiddlers, of which there were once many, roaming the highways and byways of 18th- and 19th-century Scotland, but it also illustrates a phenomenon dealt with in another chapter: “The Lost Art of Singing While Playing”.

When was the last time you heard a fiddler sing while playing? Campbell cites a rare example in the Aberdeen balladeer Tom Spiers, formerly of The Gaugers, and the current young star of the English folk scene, Seth Lakeman.

She suggests that for “distant echoes” of this lost art, you have to cross the Atlantic, and indeed a living, singing and fiddling example is heading this way in the shape of Bruce Molsky, the Bronx-born exponent of Appalachian music and much else besides. Molsky, whose high and lonesome holler over his own stark fiddle strains can raise the hairs on the back of the neck, is just one of a formidable international collective, Fiddle Rendezvous, embarking on a Scottish tour on 14 May.

Fiddle Rendezvous comprises Molsky, along with the highly regarded north-east Irish fiddler Gerry O’Connor and the French guitarist Gilles le Bigot, while from Scotland come the exuberant young fiddle and piano duo of twins Mike and Ali Vass, and Gaelic singer and harpist Mary Ann Kennedy (who has collaborated with Molsky in the past).

This Scottish Arts Council Tune Up tour, with its origins in a one-off performance at January’s Celtic Connections, kicks off at CatStrand, the Glenkens Community & Arts Trust’s centre in New Galloway, on 14 May, jigging its way on subsequent nights through The Bridge at Easterhouse, Glasgow (15), Edinburgh Queen’s Hall (16), the Tolbooth, Stirling (17), the Music Hall, Aberdeen (18) and further points west and north until 23 May (for full itinerary, see www.tuneup.org.uk/tours/fiddle_rendezvous).

The concept of an arts council sponsoring a tour of fiddlers playing largely to sit-down audiences would perplex the musicians’ forebears, whose well-delineated social roles at dances and weddings, fairs and processions is recounted by Campbell, a lecturer in ethnomusicology at Edinburgh University’s Department of Celtic and Scottish Studies.

Whether or not the Fiddle Rendezvous minstrels will be subject to any untoward supernatural intervention remains to be seen, but Campbell devotes an engaging chapter to “trowie tunes” – those from the fiddle-rich Shetland tradition which are ascribed to the fairy folk, or trows, who weren’t averse to making off with any fiddler who caught their fancy – an early form of alien abduction, perhaps.

But to return to that etching of the blind fiddler, so redolent of its time and moment. Its executor, Geikie, was both profoundly deaf and mute, but went on to become an established artist and member of the Royal Academy.

As an intriguing aside, Campbell writes that the etcher’s brother, James Stewart Geikie, was a composer, conductor… and early music critic of this newspaper. Perhaps it was being brought up in a musical household that gave the artist – who produced other fine images of itinerant musicians such as pipers – such a sharp eye for the music he could not hear.