Annotation:Walt the Fiddler
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WALT THE FIDDLER. Irish, Reel. D Major. Standard tuning (fiddle). AABB’. Composed by fiddle, flute and tin whistle player Brendan Tonra, born in 1935 in Gowland, County Mayo, but resident in Boston Massachusetts from 1959 to his death in 2014. His local Comhaltas chapter records [1] that he explianed: "My father played the fiddle and my mother knew all the tunes, but I didn’t learn the fiddle from my father. I just picked it up when I was seven or eight years old and my mother showed me how to get the notes. Then my grandfather, John Henry, left me his fiddle, so after that I learned to play, listening to recordings at my Aunt Peg Ryan’s house. She had a phonograph and there I heard recordings of Michael Coleman and Paddy Killoran. At about age 16, I started playing at porter sprees and dances, hearing the likes of Johnny ‘Watt’ Henry, Pack Spellamn, Mick Joe Ryan, Jim Durcan, Johnny Cawley, and others, playing in the local Sligo style."
Source for notated version:
Printed sources:
Black (Music's the Very Best Thing), 1996; No. 253, p. 135.
Recorded sources: