Cape Breton fiddler, Jerry Holland - who has been lured to Kintyre before, is playing at the Cape Breton Connection in Glasgow on Friday in the opening concert of the Celtic Connections programme. Then on Friday he comes to Campbeltown to take workshops and do a public concert for the Kintyre Music and Arts Tuition Group. The Group’s resourceful Iain Johnstone made sure of it.
Holland has recently had an accident that’s a bit close to home for a fiddler. He slammed a garage door on his hand and lost the tip of his little finger. So for the past few weeks he’s been unable to play - for the first time in nearly fifty years. For a man who has dealt with a 2007 diagnosis of bone cancer, losing part of a finger, even for a fiddler, is not going to stop him delighting his audiences in Scotland.
Jerry is an adopted son of Cape Breton. His father, also Jerry and also a fiddler, came from New Brunswick to Boston in Massachusetts to find work in the settlement there of people from Cape Breton. These people had kept their musical traditions alive, which themselves were Scottish and Irish in origin.
So, born into a house always full of music, the young Jerry started on the fiddle under his father’s instruction at five and within a year had made his first audition tape. There’s precocious. Even at that age he was a good step dancer and, as is the Cape Breton tradition, he combined the fiddle with step dancing for his first television appearance - shortly after his sixth birthday.
Jerry says today that it’s this drive in Cape Breton music to get people’s feet tapping that makes it distinctive - although, wryly, he adds that ‘this playing dancing thing all stopped for me about 150 lbs ago’.
Being a full time musician was a precarious possibility so Holland played it safe by training as a carpenter so that he something to fall back on. This also meant that after his son was born he didn’t have to be away gigging or on the road but could work locally as a carpenter and see more of his family.
He made the move to live in Cape Breton in 1975 and provided the challenge and support for younger fiddlers there that older musicians had once given him. He believes that young musicians need to get to know the roots of their music if they are to catch the heart of it when they play.
Those who saw and heard him last time he was in Campbeltown and those who missed him then have another chance on Friday evening - and young musicians have the chance to learn from him in the afternoon workshops beforehand. This is not one to miss.
Phone Iain Johnstone on 01586 552034 or email
kmatg@hotmail.co.uk for information on whether there may still be a workshop places left. Tickets for the evening concert - at 8.00pm at The Heritage Centre in Campbeltown - cost £6 and are available from AP Taylors in Main Street and at the Volunteer Centre in Longrow.
