Other Sources
Here’s some other sources of tunes you might find useful. If you look at nothing else make sure you check out Charlie Montgomery’s tunes on this website.
Charlie Montgomery
Inishowen Traditional Music Project
Music from the Inishowen Peninsula, Donegal
The Northern Fiddler
Music and Musicians of Donegal and Tyrone
- The Northern Fiddler – Online
- The Northern Fiddler (PDF – 11M)- just the tunes!
- The Northern Fiddler, Allen Feldman & Eamonn O’Doherty (PDF – 34M) – complete book
In a discussion on The Session, Allen Feldman had this to say about PDF copies of the book:
A year after the opening of the Irish Traditional Music Archive Eamonn and I donated the recordings, photographs and drawings to the ITMA with the agreement that there would be total public access to the archive. That has always been our motivating ethos which is why as 50% rights holder of the book’s copyright I do not object to the PDF of the Northern Fiddler under discussion.
Paddy Fahey tunes
- Paddy Fahey tunes compiled by Maria Holohan (PDF – 3M) (just the tunes)
- The Tune Compositions of Paddy Fahey, Maria Holohon, MA Thesis, 1995 (PDF – 33M)
Sets of tunes put together by Paddy O’Brien
- O’Brien Tunes – Online
- Tune Sets Arranged by Paddy O’Brien, Co. Tipperary (PDF) – local copy
- Tune Sets Arranged by Paddy O’Brien, Co. Tipperary (PDF) – original
Tommy Potts
Audio of a set of twelve video clips of Tommie Potts being interviewed by Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin
Joe Scurfield’s Tunebank
I used to live in Newcastle upon Tyne before moving to Aotearoa New Zealand in 1989 and knew Joe back then. The Tunebank website has this introduction:
Joe Scurfield, the fiddler, left behind 12 C90 audio cassettes which contained rough recordings of him playing tunes that he’d learned from discs, people at sessions, or ‘off the dots’. This bunch of cassettes he called his ‘Tune Bank’ and he tried to play along with all the tapes at least once a year to refresh his memory. It must have worked as he was never short of a tune to play. We haven’t got names for all of the 600+ tunes yet but we are working on it. Let us know if you have names for any of them.
Out of the box: the Blackie family collection
There’s a set of three music manuscript books in this collection. The tunes are Scottish fiddle(?) tunes brought to New Zealand in the early 1800s. There’s a nice digitizing project there for someone!
Further Listening
Dunedin Fiddle Orchestra
Miscellaneous Tune Books
Begged Borrowed and Stolen
Some other tunebooks from early days of ABC i.e. the 1990s
Sean Manning’s Sets (Dunedin)
You can also get copies of the ABC files that were used to generate some of these PDFs: