Annotation:Leddy from Cavan

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X:1 T:Leddy from Cavan M:2/2 L:1/8 C:Ed Reavy S:The Collected Compositions of Ed Reavy R:Reel N:John Leddy and Ed worked in the plumbing business N:together and became close friends over the years. John was proud of N:Ed's accomplishments, particularly because both were Cavanmen. His son N:John Jr. was a promising young fiddler who studied with Ed in the fortie N:John Sr. played the fiddle a bit himself and had a great love of traditional music. Z:Joseph Reavy K:D DE|:=FEDF EDCE|Dddc defd|[E2c2] cB cAFE|=FEDF EDCE| DE=FE DA,G,A,|FGAF G2 FG|Addc defd|1=cAGE D2 EG:|2 =cAGE DEFA|| d2 fd Adfd | c2 ec Gcec | d2 [df]d Adfa |gfge fddc| defd Adfd|cdef g2 fg|(3agf (3gfe A=cBd|1 ^cAGE DEFA:|2 ^cAGE D2 EG:||

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LEDDY FROM CAVAN. Irish, Reel. D Major/Mixolydian/Dorian. Standard tuning (fiddle). AA'BB'. Composed by Philadelphia, Pa./County Cavan fiddler Ed Reavy (1898-1988) in honor of his friend John Leddy who, like Reavy, was born in County Cavan. Leddy and Reavy worked in the same plumbing business for many years, according to Reavy's son Joseph.

Interviewed by musician and folklorist Mick Moloney in 1975, Reavy explained:

Yeah…well Leddy was a very good friend of mine…a wonderful gentleman… he was in the same business as I am…plumbing and heating contractors for …oh…a number of years. He was a wonderful Irish man and a great lover of Music too. He played a bit himself but not too much. He wanted to have a son that ws going to be a great player…which he would have been. He took music lessons off a professional teacher here for about a year. So then he used to come down to my place every Sunday for the traditional music. Well if I do say it myself that was the one boy that I really taught the Irish traditional music to that I could feel proud of. He was really almost at the top of the ladder as a great player…then he got married. He married a German girl… a wonderful wife, but they don’t have anything in common as far as traditional music is concerned and he dropped it like a hot potato as we used to say… dropped the music and stopped playing entirely. Now maybe it was the fault of the father driving him into it, I don’t know. You see sometimes if you force something on a person…if you happened to be my son and I want you to be a doctor and you don’t want to be a doctor you want to be a carpenter or you want to be an electrician or something else…well you see it’s the wrong thing to do. I think it’s always better to let the peron…the child or whoever it is decide for themselves in that matter…I think they would be more successful.

Mick: Leddy from Cavan…what happened to him eventually?

Ed: He died very suddenly.

Mick: When did you write the tune about him…before or after he died?

Ed: After he died.