How did you develop your musical skills?
By the time I regarded myself as a serious student, the form of music that I wanted to play was very specific.
As primarily a slide guitarist, I played both electric and acoustic instruments, often opting for the more challenging acoustic. I also tried many slide alternatives before embarking on my own glass slides. These are very specific. I played with many tuning options before settling on one and I settled on specific string gauge choices for different scales, as well as specific set ups at nut and saddle. At this time there was precious little footage of the original source music and as videos eventually came about the actual technique on offer was not appealing.
In many musical journeys there is a shift from imitating and learning someone else’s voice to developing one’s own. When that begins, the real joy of creating music comes about. I currently practice for at least two hours daily. I regard myself as a perpetual student and there are always improvements to bring to old and new material.
As with Hi-Fi, there are choices to be made in creating a musical chain both for practice and performance. I know precisely how I want my instruments to sound and I exhaustively panel the many tools that might help.
Which musicians influenced you?
I began with the British R&B musicians, particularly the early Rolling Stones, but it was a range of early Blues musicians that defined how I wanted to play music.
Top of this list is Blind Willie Johnson and from there the list includes Blind Willie McTell, Fred McDowell, Charley Patton, Washington Phillips and a few others.
A more contemporary player is, of course, Ry Cooder. He drew hugely for the early Blues, but he has his own distinctive signature, creating space between notes and reformatting and re-voicing the material into something very different and almost as beautiful.
Did you play professionally and if so how did your career begin and what were the highlights?
My first professional outings began in the late 1980s and early 1990s. I worked with local musician Glenn Simpson and he had an idea to bring music into Belfast bars again as the ‘troubles’ had largely killed off local entertainment. He wanted to bring poetry and music together and make it entertaining.
Emerging local poet, Adrian Rice, handled the poetry and I looked after the music. Michael Longley came down. Patrick Faic, John Campbell of the Sailortown Poets, Moyra Donaldson of the Hammer Poets, Martin Lynch and Gabriel Carney were among the contributors. Various Traditional musicians were provided by Eamon Maguire and I anchored the Blues contribution with some wonderful players contributing over the years.
We called it the Belfast Balladeers and thanks to the support of people like Geoff Harding, it grew into a very successful phenomenon. It became a mainstay of the Queens Festival and I put the Balladeers show on for the official launch of Belfast’s City of Culture bid for 2008. At its very peak Glenn decided that he’d had enough and no more events were organised.
I played a number of events and festivals for Geoff Harding and did a recording for him of the music that influenced my playing. It was an hour long show with a number of pieces played live and I introduced some of the great early Blues artists through their CDs.
I had a residency with the Sunday Blues Night at the Rotterdam Bar for a period and then joined what was a Blues festival circuit managed by the late Larry Roddy.
I played with various singers and other singer/players before touring Sean Nos Meets the Blues with Mary Ryan. There were truly wonderful highlights within that format, playing great venues to great audiences including The Pavilion, Aras Cronin, Blanchardstown and Inis Oírr, when the whole island came out.
The Irish Times music critic gave us a wonderful review and paid what was a humbling series of tributes to my music and playing. What impressed me so much at the time was her own level of knowledge and understanding of so much of the material.
The collaboration with Alison McGuinness has been wonderful and it is at an interesting stage. It is always good to play the Sunflower and it was great to be the first Blues/ Gospel band to play the Bluegrass festival this last two years.
