. . . and put up a parking lot.

Curiously, I thought of these Joni Mitchell lyrics not when driving by the latest big box store in what used to be a cornfield, but during a concert of Irish fiddle music. The performer was Denis Liddy, a renown fiddler and teacher from County Clare who, with pianist and accordion player Elvie Miller, recently did a concert in the Nelson Town Hall. It’s customary for Irish fiddlers to either forget or not know the names of the tunes they are playing (and understand\able, since there are so many), but they usually go to great lengths to say who they learned the tunes from, where (what town and county) they were from, and possibly the circumstances (i.e. pub locale) of the transfer of knowledge. Denis did a nice job with this, and in the course of the evenings narrations he also told us that during the 1950s, the traditional Irish music nearly died out there. It was a difficult time, economically (as has often been the case in Irish history), and so many musicians had emigrated to America, that there were simply neither the resources or the energy to keep it going. Meanwhile, over here, some Irish fiddlers had been recorded, and those records were selling! After a while some of these recordings drifted back over the ocean, and the Irish pride was awakened: “Well, if it’s good enough to record, and these fiddlers can make a go of it, then there must be something to it.”

A similar thing could have happened here with New England fiddle music, most commonly used for contra dancing. Both the music and the dance have waxed and waned over the last couple centuries, and while it may not have been in total danger of dying out, the popularity that eventually developed outside New England caused a focus back to the source, and musicians who were still here felt both a sense of pride, and perhaps responsibility to keep things going.

In spite of the fact that New England fiddle music is alive and well, it still has a relatively small audience. It includes Irish music (though it tends to be rendered somewhat differently to accommodate the dancing), as well as French Canadian, Scottish, and Cape Breton music, and there is a lot of history and musicology for each genre, as well as the mixed genres that are emerging, with jazz, rock, and African influences.

But my point here is neither scholarly, nor confined to music.
“Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone”, can take on a somewhat different meaning. Sometimes we loose the things that are important to us, but when they become important to other people who are seeing them from a different perspective, our interest can be renewed. If we do things just because they are a tradition, it can eventually be a dry experience. But if we rediscover why something became a tradition in the first place, then it becomes, simply, fun and satisfying.