[BEGIN: SAM DILLON PART 01—Filename: A1001a EML Mmtc]

Sam Dillon Interview

Narrator: Sam Dillon

Interviewer: Dáithí Sproule

Date: 8 September, 2017

DS: Dáithí Sproule SD: Sam Dillon

[BEGIN: SAM DILLON PART 01—filename: A1001a_EML_mmtc] DS: Hello, this is September the 8th, 2017, and we are on Cherokee Avenue, my home in West Saint Paul, and chatting to Sam Dillon. This is the first of our oral history efforts. Sam used to live in the Twin Cities years ago and was part of the music scene, and then he left, and so we will get his perspective and memories.

I am going to start in a mechanical way about where you're from. Where were you born?

SD: I was born in Mount Vernon, Ohio. Mount Vernon is a small town north of Columbus. I was born on a farm outside of Mount Vernon, Ohio.

DS: On a farm?

SD: Yes.

DS: So, on a practicing farm?

SD: We practiced a lot, but we never got very good at it. My dad got a job in Mount Vernon for the Continental Can Company. He was born on a farm in Michigan, so he had farming in his background, but at the time that we bought this farm, Ohio was just a place to live and raise his kids. We always had a cow or two. We had a horse, and we had a Great Dane dog and about eighteen cats and a garden and stuff like that. It was kind of like the farms you see in Vermont, so we were not producing income from the farm.

DS: He had the job with the canning company as well?

SD: He was a chemist. His specialty had become quality control. He was a manager at this factory. I think they canned things, but eventually he got into what they call flexible packaging, which was like putting vegetables in plastic bags.

DS: We were chatting the other day, and we are going to focus on the Irish angle. You were saying that anyone would assume that Dillon was Irish, and you said you're not sure whether it's an Irish name.

SD: Yes, that's true. When I started learning Irish music and hanging around with Martin McHugh and so on, actually the whole concept that I was Irish was something that dawned on me -- it had never actually occurred to me before. And I was delighted to learn that I was Irish. Sometime early on, people started to tell me that there were a lot of people in County Roscommon that have the Dillon last name. Right away it occurred to me that there was something funny about this this because we were Protestants. My father came from Quaker and Baptist forbears, and my mother was a Presbyterian. There's not a Catholic on the landscape in our family. Actually, there is somewhere back, and unfortunately the Catholic cousin was treated badly by the Protestants -- they didn't like her because she was Catholic. I knew that all of my friends in St. Paul and Minneapolis that had grown up Irish-American were Catholics, so I just sort of down-played the fact that I was Protestant. Never really sorted that out.

DS: You hadn't thought much about the Irish thing until you got to Minnesota, had you not? -- the possible Irish angle?

SD: It had never occurred to me that I was Irish until I started hearing the music. I was the boyfriend of Mary MacEachron then, and she understood that Irish music was a rich tradition and knew a lot more about it than I did. So then I began thinking, "Oh, I'm Irish and there's an Irish tradition." Later on, cousins in our family did a lot more extensive research into our background. My sisters also, through their own routes, got into the idea that they were Irish. They went to Ireland. They went on pilgrimages. Then our cousin did a bunch of research. He concluded on the basis of genealogical investigations that our family is actually Huguenots from France. He announced this at a family reunion, and it fell like a lead balloon among my sisters, who would much rather be Irish than French. I'm not actually convinced to this day that he knows what he is talking about, so maybe we'll get that sorted out one day.

DS: Yes, my sister has done a lot of research now, and it's amazing what you can discover. And, of course, a lot of the records were lost in Ireland, so the amount that she has discovered is astounding.

But to go back another wee bit, to youth and so on, you were raised there and then you went to college?

SD: No, I was raised in Ohio till I was ten. Then the company my dad was working for transferred him to southern California, so when I was ten the whole family got in a Buick and drove out to the west coast and settled in Whittier, California.

DS: Was that a small place or a big place?

SD: We actually settled in a place called East Whittier. Whittier was originally named for John Greenleaf Whittier, and I think it was a Quaker settlement. It's in Orange County, and it's right along the edge of a series of hills. It kind of nestles in the hills and is quite fashionable. But East Whittier was a settlement, like a subdivision at the base of the hills and the flatlands that were once just orange groves. When we got there, it had all been turned into sort of tract houses and we were burning orange wood in the fire-place.

DS: Did it have a nice smell?

SD: Yes, but it was like suburban Orange County life, and anyway to make a long story short I lived there for about three years, really liked California, got into the whole surfing thing, I was like a little kid, and I dyed my hair with peroxide. I began wearing huarache sandals and skateboarding and going to the beach. Then they fired my dad when I was thirteen or twelve and a half, something like that, halfway through seventh grade, and we moved back to the suburbs of Chicago, a place called Cary, Illinois, and went to high school there. There were twelve hundred kids, all of whom were white. There were no Mexicans, there were no blacks, there were a lot of white ethnics. To my memory there weren't any Irish people there either to speak of.

DS: Was that noticeable to you that it was all white, or do you just think of that in retrospect?

SD: No, I thought of that in retrospect. I grew up in Ohio, the first school I went to had a hundred students, and it was K-12 and that was totally white. And I went to California, and that was totally white too, except for there were some Mexican kids. So it was unremarkable when we moved back that it was all white, but I look back on my parents making all these kinds of

crazy choices about where they took us. I went to high school there and went for two years to the University of Chicago, and then for a variety of reasons dropped out. By that time I had met Mary MacEachron at the University of Chicago in my second year. She had dropped out and was hitch-hiking around Europe. She came back from Greece and we re-met, and one thing led to another. Then she moved back to Minnesota and was living with her parents. I decided that when I dropped out of the University of Chicago I would move to Minnesota. That was how I got up here. That was about like -- I must have been eighteen or nineteen years old.

DS: And had there been any sign of music before that for you? Were you playing music at all?

SD: Well, I took piano lessons when I was young, but I never would practice, so that went nowhere. And then, when I was a teenager in Chicago, in the suburbs of Chicago, I went through the whole clawhammer banjo course with Pete Seeger's book. I wanted to play the banjo.

DS: What put that in your head? Was there some particular reason, or had you heard some person playing, or what? Or was it just the era?

SD: You know, I can't remember what got me interested in it. But I liked the idea of playing the banjo. Maybe I was an admirer of Pete Seeger -- I can't remember what it was. But that was difficult too -- I was completely isolated. It wasn't me in a folk music scene. It was just me, and I'd probably read about it some place. I got a banjo, and I started taking lessons from this kind of jerk -- he did not play the banjo. He played the guitar, and he said, "Oh, I can teach you the banjo." I tried and tried, but I never really made much progress with it. And I wasn't fitting it into any framework other than that Pete Seeger was, you know…it didn't go anywhere. That was pretty much the extent of it. And then when I got here and was living with Mary, she was friends with Bill Hinkley and Judy Larson, so I right away started taking banjo lessons from Bill Hinkley. He was also not a big banjo player, but he could play a few tunes in the clawhammer style. So that actually worked out -- then I began to progress.

DS: I want to keep the chronology clear in my own mind: what year would that have been that you came here?

SD: Well, I came up here -- I probably arrived here in about November of 1971, I think. There was an interlude there because -- it's another sort of detour -- but at that time I was really interested in becoming a beekeeper because my dad, before he'd become a chemist, had actually

been a beekeeper, and at that time in Minnesota there were all these… I digress. I wanted to become a beekeeper, and so I took a correspondence course from the University of Minnesota and learned the basics of beekeeping by correspondence. Then I got a job with a beekeeper who was out in Wheaton, Minnesota, out by the South Dakota border. This is, like, a big commercial beekeeper with, I think he had five thousand colonies, something like that. So there was a year in which Mary and I moved out there, had nothing to do with the Twin Cities scene, and then when we moved back, I still was aspiring to be a beekeeper, and I imagined myself having my own bee outfit with fleets of trucks and...

DS: Seriously? you were thinking of the business side?

SD: At that time, I was still thinking I could. I worked for the next probably about four years with that in mind, and I made a couple of trips down south cos I got a job at one point down in east Texas, and then I learned to raise queen bees. Anyway, I was mixed up in the bee business sort of half time while living in the Twin Cities. And the whole thing about Irish music it came to me because -- so the early phase of my involvement with music in Minnesota was in country music, old timey music. I was playing the banjo. Mary was playing the fiddle, old timey fiddle music. We were learning fiddle tunes together: I'd play the banjo, she'd play the fiddle, and hang around with Bill and Judy. Her parents of course had a sort of big folk music salon at their farm, the old hobby farm they had in Arden Hills. They would put up musicians who would come into town, people that were touring -- Doc Watson, all sorts of amazing people would come.

DS: You met Doc Watson, people like that?

SD: He stayed at their farm.

DS: It must have been inspiring.

SD: Totally!

DS: I would love to have met Doc Watson.

SD: He came with Merle. They had bluegrass bands, they had Cajun bands, that would stay at their house. And when they would do this, they would have big parties -- Bill and Judy, and pretty soon Garrison Keillor, would start hanging round that scene. There were a lot of people that would come out. It became a music scene, and I began to see what the folk music scene was

like. Eventually this all kind of merged with an Irish scene -- the Irish musicians started coming there too. And probably you --

DS: Visitors.

SD: Yea, visitors. I think they put up some of the Comhaltas people that would tour later on.

DS: But you didn't notice at this point…were you noticing any local people at all?

SD: Playing Irish music?

DS: Yea.

SD: Oh, I was telling you about how I first heard about Irish music. There really dawned on me, oh, there's Irish music. It's Irish tradition that's different from American folk music, and different than Irish or English ballads sung in the Appalachians -- I had been aware of that. In any event I went off to east Texas to do beekeeping, and I was gone for much of a spring. The Dayhills emerged on the scene in my absence, and Mary started hanging around with them. They were playing all Irish music. I came back, and the area of our house in south Minneapolis that had been all about Charlie Poole and the Skillet Lickers and all that stuff was now… She had “O'Neill's Music of Ireland”, and she had Seán Ó Riada, and she had Sean McGuire playing on the fancy fiddle. I began to hear it for the first time. That's when I began to hear and get kind of entranced by it. And I started going to see the Dayhills. It set up a big personal choice about what I was going to do, because my bee endeavor had got to the point where I was going to have to either get really involved in it and move out of the city, because I had beehives at this point. At one point I went from twenty hives to having a hundred hives, and I was going to have to go out, move to the suburbs basically, to keep track of them. I would have had to break up with Mary because she would never have done that, and the music scene just seemed so cool. Personally, it was very difficult for me because my father was trying to retire. He was retiring, and he was kind of looking to me to maybe go into business with him. And I had to have this difficult conversation on the phone where I told my dad that, no, I wasn't going to do it, I was going to sell all the beehives -- I just couldn't move to the country, and I liked living in the city, and I wasn't going to do it. And he understood. He was actually very gentle about the whole thing and said, “That's fine, you know, you need to make your own decisions.” That freed me up. I'd been playing a lot of music, but I really got into to it then, began pursuing Irish music in my own way.

DS: You haven't mentioned playing the fiddle yet. Is that when you started? Or were you playing something else? You weren't playing the mandolin before that, were you?

SD: Yes, I think I fiddled round with the mandolin a little bit. But pretty early on, yea, I decided I would try to learn the fiddle, and I stopped playing the banjo.

DS: One thing when we were preparing to do the whole project, we were concerned to keep track of where things were happening. Was there a session starting up or was there a session? Where were the Dayhills playing, for example? When they were performing, where were they performing?

SD: They were playing at MacCafferty's. And Marty McHugh was somebody that I heard about right away and I met. In retrospect, it's so funny that back then we thought of Marty McHugh as the guy who's so much older than us.

DS: That's right! That old boy Marty McHugh!

SD: And now we're twice the age he was then. He was such a great guy. I loved talking to him and hanging around with him.

I started to play the fiddle and I was just terrible. But I was trying and, you know, he had his tunes, so we started to learn his tunes. He was so nice about letting us scrape along with him as he played, and I got the feeling of what it was like to be part of a session with a great musician and how much fun that is.

DS: Were there sessions in MacCafferty's or was it more for gigs?

SD: Well, the Dayhills would play there and Marty would come. They would ask Marty to come up and play on the stage with them. Then after that we would go to wherever they were staying, and Marty would go over there and there would be a session. Yea, Marty would play, and we would play along with him and the Dayhills would play tunes. Barb Dahill was playing the flute and the tin whistle. Tom Dahill wasn't playing the fiddle then -- I think he played the mandolin.

DS: And were there a few others when you think back?

SD: Judy and Bill came around too. It was playing Irish music and half just having a lot of fun. And then who else started coming? That was probably about 1974 -- '73 or '74. Somewhere in that period, sooner or later, we met Laura McKenzie and Jamie Gans. I think for some reason

they'd been in Beloit -- I don't know if they went to Beloit College -- they met at Beloit College. He was from the east coast and she was from Northfield. They showed up here and were playing music. We heard about them and liked them and started playing with them. The Dayhills would leave, for they were touring, so a nucleus began to form that wasn't based around the Dayhills then. The four of us began to play with each other -- with Marty.

DS: And did you have gigs? Were there any gigs at all?

SD: There would have been a period of a year, maybe six months, some period of time, where we were just hanging around with each other and playing and we weren't a group -- we were just playing Irish music. You know who used to come? -- you know Bob Douglas, he'd play the mandolin. He liked to play some Irish tunes. But Marty was really the center of it. We all had fun, but at least for me it was a lot more fun if he was around -- that was the heart of it. Jamie and Laura were very good musicians right from the beginning because they had a backing in other types of music. I think both of them had played the pipes. And Laura, she's a polyglot musician. Jamie just had a lot of talent. Mary had a lot of talent too. I had less talent, but I had drive and ambition, and I was focused on it, so I was learning. But in the early stages the music sounded a lot better when Marty was around, so I just enjoyed it, playing with him.

DS: Well, we know that you eventually had a céilí band, but by the time the four of you were playing together was there any sign of dancing? I'm curious -- there's a kind of a gap in the history. There's whatever was going on when Marty first arrived, and then there's the period with the Dayhills and Marty and you, but was there any sign of the previous generation at all?

SD: You know, Marty is going to be key on that. I think Marty came to the Twin Cities sometime in the 1950s. He was not inactive in the '50s and '60s because -- now we're into the '70s -- he'd been playing the accordion, and he wasn't playing alone in that decade or maybe more, and I've never gotten a clear picture of who he was playing with. I think maybe there was talk of a fiddle player. Later on, once we were playing as a group and going round to various places outside of the Twin Cities, we ended up playing for instance in a place we used to go to in western Wisconsin that had an Irish community, and they knew Marty. He had played there on a Saint Patrick's Day in some previous year with some other Irish musicians, so there's a whole chapter or multiple chapters of this before we appeared. Like I say, in my opinion that would have been kind of a more organic connection to what you might think of as a true Irish music

tradition that would have originated out of Ireland with Irish people and players. Once I heard about Irish music, began reading about it, I realized that it was a living tradition of music, people teaching each other in communities and people that played with each other, and it wasn't originally professional -- all the things that go along with being a living tradition. So that was kind of an education for me because I'm not an ethnomusicologist or anything. Reading about it, it was a people's art, but because we were young and imagining who we were in the world in our early twenties, I think all of us began to talk about how we were carrying on a tradition, we wanted to contribute to the tradition. Looking back on this from years later, I think there was just a heavy dose of egotism and subjectivity and kind of silliness because we were just American teenagers, people in our early twenties who were trying to figure out how we would lead our lives. It was a pastime that we saw was very attractive, like someone would pick up Asian cooking, at least in my view. I stopped playing Irish music as you know. I played it for a while. I was in the process of defining who I was, and I chose a different life-path and went off and became a journalist and moved away from St. Paul, which is a big part of why I quit. But the people that stayed with it with it and still play it I don't speak for because in a certain way they've grafted themselves on to a musical tradition and they are certainly part of it now. But at that time we talked in very highfaluting terms, and I did too -- I just want to make that distinction. What we were doing at that time, at least what I was doing, I was having a lot of fun with it, but I was probably more a consumer of the Irish musical tradition than I was a carrier-on of it.

DS: It's an interesting subject, but the thing is that even though you had a certain attitude then and now you've a different attitude, in the real world you did carry on the tradition. Whatever attitude you might adopt to it now, or whatever reassessment you have, in actual fact you were part of that stream as much as anybody. Then coming to it from our point of view -- I came here in 1978 with James Kelly and Paddy O'Brien, and James and Paddy of course were the real deal, and we arrived here, and we saw the people playing here -- yourselves -- we thought, these guys have it -- you were playing Irish music and that was it. We thought about it too because there some people around who were saying you have to be Irish to play Irish music. We totally rejected that instinctively. We didn't have to think about it. And to us strangely enough -- and this isn't about me -- to put what you're saying in context, it was of no importance to us, and is still of no importance to us, whether people are Irish or not in relation to the music -- you really

had the music. Your situation is interesting in that you played that part, and then you left it. But, of course, you never lost your affection for it, or your interest in it.

SD: The other thing is that Marty has got to be seen as a pivotal figure in all this. Since the tradition is not a solo tradition, in other words it thrives in a community of people who are playing with each other and teaching each other tunes, Marty was doing that, and I'm pretty sure he was doing that with other people here whose names were lost -- he probably remembers some of them. But then when we got to know him, I don't think he had musical partners. And so he definitely liked us. He enjoyed the fact that we wanted to play music, he enjoyed playing music with us, and so even in our fledgling state as would-be musicians scraping along with him, it was helping him to keep playing, and then gradually it all strengthened. It is definitely true with him at the heart of it, a lot of people got involved. There were many other people that started to play the music, and a lot of the dancing started happening. Then we began to be part of a dance scene, a dance scene in the sense that people were renting halls, and we'd play and people would dance. Mike Whalen became a dance teacher -- there was a lot of stuff happening.

DS: Where did the dancing start, or who do you think were the people who started it? How did that come about?

SD: I don't know the origins of it all. But one thing that was happening that we can't ignore is that Irish Northern Aid existed here. Leah Curtin would quite regularly put on Irish Northern Aid benefit dances. Early on, Marty would play at those, and that's where we began to meet older Irish-American people or older Irish immigrants. We started playing at Saint Mark's Church and a lot of different venues around. Originally they were Irish Northern Aid, then the people who were really into the dancing founded the Moincoin Dancers and other dance groups, and they began to have their own life and to perform at the Minnesota Festival of Nations -- stuff like that. It was a whole dance thing that developed kind of independently, but there was a symbiotic relationship between the music that was happening and the dancing.

There was a session scene that developed too, based at O'Gara's when it was still just that one room. Now it's got that big wing on it that's made it a lot bigger.

DS: O'Gara's was the place when me and James and Paddy arrived in September 1978 and we went to the session in O'Gara's. I don't suppose you remember what night the session was? I think it might have been a Wednesday.

SD: Yes, it was a Wednesday night session.

DS: I think we arrived on a Tuesday or a Wednesday -- we might actually have arrived on a Wednesday, and we went to the session and we met you all there immediately. One thing about the dancing that we talk about and comment on is that what was nice about the scene then, which isn't true any more, is that you had the musicians and you had the dancers who used to come to the sessions and hang out and chat, and they were part of the social scene, and maybe other people who weren't playing, whereas now it tends to be only the musicians who are at the sessions. There's a wee bit of a change now that we have young people, teenagers, who might be at the session and their parents would be there. I felt that was a lovely time from that point of view because you will keep playing for yourself, but it's really nice if there are other people around who are half enjoying it, but chatting.

SD: Yea, that was totally true. The Mooncoins and a bunch of other people who enjoyed the dancing would come to sessions. It was a big social gathering -- we all had such a blast. Half of it was the music and the dance, and half of it was just seeing each other and making friendships.

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[BEGIN: SAM DILLON PART 02—filename: A1001b_EML_mmtc] That's an interesting thing you bring up—your arrival. In that early stage where we were just playing with Marty, I'd never been to Ireland, and I don't think Mary had been to Ireland either, and I don't think Laura or Jamie had been to Ireland. Laura might have been to Scotland, he might have been to Scotland too. So we were all just listening to records and hearing about stuff. Then, at least for me, the Comhaltas thing started, i.e. the tours would come through, there'd be concerts. And maybe the first one I ever saw James Kelly was one of the players...

DS: Was that about 75ish? ‘76? What year do you think that would have been?

SD: I think that was '76. Because James met people, he especially met Mary. Then Mary went back, went to Ireland in the summer and probably met you, and was hanging around for the summer with James. I'm sure she met Paddy. She went to all those sessions and then came back totally entranced with the music and with all kinds of great tapes. Then we all resolved that we

would go. I mean, each of us individually, but not as a group, decided we've got to go to Ireland. So I went to Ireland, probably in 1977 for the first time, and I think I met you. And I think that's when I first loaned you money. (laughter)

DS: And the interest on that! it's got to be paid back plus interest. I would have met you in the Four Seasons then, would I?

SD: Yea, probably.

DS: Did you spend much time in the Four Seasons?

SD: A few times. That was a great scene -- that was another thing that happened. Mary had been over and made some connections, and somehow Laura had met Fintan Vallely some place -- she had a name and a number for him. I don't think he would have come on a Comhaltas thing -- maybe she met him at some gathering in the US. So she had a name, and we went together, Laura and I travelled over there at that time. We went to the place two blocks from the Four Seasons where he was living in a squatters’ apartment.

DS: What do you call that street?

SD: Is it Henry Street?

DS: I don't know if it's Henry Street...

SD: Capel Street...?

DS: Capel Street's where the Four Seasons was.

SD: I'm pretty sure it was Henry Street. He wasn't home when we got there, so we rang the bell and an upper window opened, and a guy who I later learned was Pat Bracken opened the window and asked what we were up to...

DS: Henrietta Street!

SD: Yes, Henrietta Street. Pat Bracken heard we were looking for Fintan Vallely, and Pat said, “Come on up, you can stay with me.” I ended up staying with Pat Bracken, oh, I was in and out the whole summer, for free, and it was such a great thing. Fintan lived upstairs. Yes, so we were camped there, and if we weren't travelling, we would go to that session at the Four Seasons and met people -- so much fun. I'm getting it a little mixed up because I went to Ireland in two consecutive summers, and it might have been the second summer. Then there were personal

connections that had been forged. So when you guys showed up to go to that session at O'Gara's, there's been that background too. James and Mary had a connection for a couple of years anyway, and Laura knew a lot of people by then, and Jamie had played around in Ireland.

DS: You were well integrated really -- that's one of the points we want to hit -- what were the direct connections with Ireland? -- people who went to Ireland? -- and who did you meet? I was wondering was there any particular fiddler that inspired you or you were trying to copy, that you listened to with special care.

SD: We were buying records like crazy, so we had a big collection, but to be honest I was still trying just to play the tunes and get through them without screwing them up and to play them at a speed that was at least reasonable, so you keep up in the sessions. I admired James immediately, James's music, but to say that I was trying to be like James would be totally crazy. And Frankie Gavin's record had come out then.

DS: With Alec Finn?

SD: Yes, that was such a great album. And then Martin Hayes's dad had a record with...I don't know what it was called...

DS: With Paddy Canny?

SD: That one, yea. We played that a lot.

DS: There weren't that many recordings at that time. That's another thing we comment on, so one album had a huge significance. You got one album, say the Frankie Gavin one, and you had it on repeat for months and months and months, and you knew every tune on it, and you knew which track it was, whereas now we're inundated with great players. At that specific period there would be an interest in the Shanachie things coming out -- Tommy Peoples, Andy McGann...

SD: All those Shanachie recordings, they were huge. Actually, I disagree with you to a degree in the sense that even then, before Shanachie, they were recording things, but they were also selling things that had been recorded earlier, and there was a lot of recorded Irish music. So, instantly, overnight, we had thirty or forty records of Irish fiddle playing -- I'm sure we did -- of varying quality. Because they were recording stuff in the 50s and 60s and obviously even earlier.

The other thing that happened was that we heard about Liz Carroll in Chicago -- that she was a great fiddle player and that she'd learned from -- I'm losing track of his name -- 13

DS: Johnny McGreevy.

SD: Johnny McGreevy, when she was a young teen she had learnt a lot of his tunes. So somewhere along the line we learnt that there was going to be a fleadh or something, went down there, saw her play, and then within a year or two the scene was getting developed enough so that we could rent halls ourselves and produce concerts. There were a couple of times when she came up here with other Chicago musicians and played at the hall that we'd rented -- I think, maybe, Saint Mark's Church or something like that, so we were getting to know her. She'd stay around in people's homes, she and her musicians. That thing got going, which was also a lot of fun -- they were so much fun.

DS: Yes, she's a livewire. Did you meet Seamus Cooley? Is he somebody you met then? A flute player? And Marty Fahey?

SD: Marty Fahey was playing. He was an accordion player, right?

DS: And pianist. He recorded with Liz.

SD: They put out a record together. That was kind of a funny thing because he just disappeared, right?

DS: He's still around, but he found a career. One of the things was he became an interior designer -- he discovered a gift for design and did it. And I don't know what other things he has done. I still see him in Chicago.

SD: This was an issue because we were all in our 20s and basically didn't have any money, and we were trying to figure out how to survive economically and pay the rent and pursue the music. In my case I was struggling with the issue of finding what I was good at. At first I thought it might be the music. I was hoping that I would be a really great musician, and so I worked really hard at it, but somewhere along the line I began to realize that I didn't really have a lot of musical talent compared to other people that I was playing with, because I could see that they were able to get things so much quicker, and it troubled me greatly. One of the things that happened was that I began to think a lot about what is talent, because if talent doesn't count for anything -- originally I sort of came with that idea -- that all people are created equal, therefore it's just a question of hard work. If you just work hard at what you want to do, eventually you'll all end up at the same place. I worked really hard, but I sensed I wasn't progressing as well as I should be.

Then we went to the Weiser old time fiddle contest, and I saw the twelve-year-old Mark O'Connor, who was just obviously a genius musician and had this ability to play the violin. He was one or two years into playing the violin and could play all these double stops way up the neck, and it was deeply emotional music. He played these western waltzes that just sent chills up your spine. Watching him, I realized that talent is something that is another category. It wasn't that Mark O'Connor had just worked very hard for a few years: there had been no barrier between him and music. I began to incorporate that idea into my sense of who I was, and I came to the realization that I had other talents that were more suited to me, and I began to struggle with how much time should I spend at the music. I think everybody was going through that. Somebody like Laura MacKenzie, she is somebody that has immense talent and immense love for the music, and she just devoted her life to it. I know a few people like that -- she stands out as somebody that has been willing to make many sacrifices because she wants to play the music. She is willing to endure very difficult economic circumstances in order to be a professional musician, that isn't playing in New York, say, so more power to her.

DS: It's something that I think about a lot, now particularly with the teaching because we're involved with the Center for Irish Music. I think about this exact subject. Your way of phrasing it is indicative of the difference between us. You've got work versus talent, and I've got talent versus desire, so to me I think of the desire as the most important thing, in other words the enjoyment, and if I had to measure up which is the most important, the love of it and the enjoyment and desire, or the talent, I would say the more important of the two ingredients is the enjoyment and the desire, not the talent. But you're quite right that talent cannot be learnt. Some people are just more talented. Then also speaking for myself, I couldn't stop playing. I have to keep playing because I enjoy it. I have to do it, it's almost like an addiction as well, or an obsession. So there's no choice. And if I think about talent, compared to the people I play with, I would have stopped -- when you stopped! It's kind of dramatic really. We've often talked about it -- the fact that you played so intensely and then you stopped. It's quite a dramatic change from the outside anyhow. You're saying that it was more gradual?

SD: No, I eventually made an abrupt choice. I had to make a very difficult decision at a certain point. I committed myself at a certain point later to a new goal, and once I had the new goal, then it came into conflict with the amount of time I'd been devoting to Irish music, to any kind of music. So that was the new framework in which I began to confront my decisions. But in our 15

back and forth about the weighing of talent versus effort, versus desire, the goal that we haven't stated is the goal of being able to express ideas and emotions musically. Because you listen to music played well by somebody that you admire and you say, “That is so gorgeous, I'd love to express myself in some way like that.” Then the issue is, how do you develop the techniques, the musical techniques to be able to express those musical ideas, those emotions. That's the love... I found that I could hear music and want to play it, and I could listen to it very, very closely -- I got one of those big reel-to-reel tape recorders so I could listen to it at half speed and really analyze what was happening technically, and I think I understood what was happening technically. But learning to do it and developing the facility to do it was something that I made progress on, but it wasn't fast enough for me. I have to say -- and this is another thing about human nature -- when it was me and Laura and Jamie and Mary and a few other people playing with Marty McHugh in Minnesota, and maybe for a year or at most two years, and that was pretty much the extent of the Irish musical universe in Minnesota, there was a kind of a smug complacency that we could fall into. Because we were in that place at that time, we became slightly famous. Despite my minimal musical talents, I was suddenly a figure -- wow -- and I enjoyed that. And I didn't really deserve it, so when the real thing in the form of you and Paddy and James, and the other people -- Liz Carroll -- began to come on the scene and how amazing that you all played, that was daunting, in addition to being extremely exciting, and I loved hearing you all live -- there was a certain time you went wow, these guys are overwhelming.

DS: Well, I'm not talking about us, but to your point I would call that "the Coleman effect", because old John Kelly -- John Kelly Senior, who was the patriarch of the Four Seasons and James's father -- he told us long ago that when the records of the great virtuoso Michael Coleman came over to Ireland in the 20s and 30s and other people -- but Coleman was the king -- it was incredibly exciting, and it had a huge effect, but it put a lot of people off. Because there these people playing, and they were great, they thought they were great, in these local areas, and then they heard this guy Coleman, and they stopped playing. He claims a lot of people stopped playing. So it's sort of the effeCT: it can inspire you or otherwise.

But I love the point you made about feeling and emotion and the expression of emotion. Because people say it's all about X -- you know what I mean? So as far as the singing in particular -- and the tune playing as well -- the whole thing is about feeling and expressing and sharing these emotions. A very interesting thing to me was in a chat with James Kelly long ago. Again he was 16

talking about Coleman and these people who inspired him, and he is of a level of ability that he could imitate them, so the question is, do you want to be like Michael Coleman, as in play like Michael Coleman, and either he or I said it -- maybe he said it first -- it's not so much I want to play like Michael Coleman, but I want to be able to make other people feel the way Michael Coleman makes me feel. You know what I mean? That's what you want. And that would apply to any art of course by the way, including writing, whatever. When we're inspired, we don't want to be an imitation of somebody. If we loved reading Jane Austen, wouldn't it be wonderful if we could give some of that feeling to somebody else.

SD: Absolutely. Well, James has certainly achieved that.

DS: Yes, James, he's a giant. And, in fact, I phoned him today. This by the way is the day that Irma is arriving in, is approaching Florida, and James Kelly, the great fiddler we're talking about, is living in Miami Springs, and so I phoned this morning, and he was barricading up. He's not moving out. He said he would phone me back. He lived through Andrew, and he stayed his ground.

SD: Yes. I've seen his little house there. I wonder where that is in terms of sea level.

DS: I don't know -- there's not much high ground.

SD: No, there isn't a lot of high ground.

DS: I was saying -- we turned off the recording for a second there -- one thing that I was very interested in as a subject that you touched on at the very beginning and I wonder what your perspective is on it now is the business of Irishness or identity. I could be complacent and say I know I'm Irish: I'm from Ireland, I was raised in Ireland, there's no issue of identity. Well, that's almost completely true, and yet it's not 100% true, because I'm from Derry, which is in the north of Ireland. We did think about identity. It isn't a problem in the long term because I would still just say I'm Irish, I'm from Ireland, there's no mystery, but it's always a talking point in terms of Americans and America. How do you feel about your relationship with Irishness now? Either positive or negative or anything?

SD: My relationship with Ireland? Well, I'm going to do a DNA test and find out where my forebears come from. I would be delighted to find that I had a bunch of Irish. If people say, "What are you?" I think I say. “I'm Irish,” as in, I have a Polish name, I'm Polish. So I sort of

identify that way, but I've really enjoyed seeing how the Irish music has embraced a lot of players who aren't Irish and get into it and excel at it. Somebody was telling me about… There's a guy called David Molk -- he's an American of some sort who got into playing Irish music back in that period in the 70s. And I think he's maybe still involved as a musician, but he was a hippy of some sort, and he had very long bleached hair, and he wore outlandish clothing, and he had amazing flare. But he was a very good player. I think his main thing was the flute, but he played a lot of different instruments. Anyway, he played somewhere where there were a bunch of older Irish men who were really good musicians from the old stock. They watched him play, play well on the flute, but he was such a weird-looking guy. And one of them said something like, "He's a credit to his race, whatever it is!" (laughter)

DS: Very good!

SD: There's a lot of people, especially in New York, there's a lot of Jewish people that have started playing fiddle and flute, and amazing musicians -- playing Irish music as opposed to all kinds of other stuff. All sorts of people of various ethnicities play Irish music, and the tradition seems to have embraced them. But I might be even more delighted to find out that I had a lot of African-American blood or Chippewa blood.

DS: Well, everybody would love that idea. And I'm also fascinated by the idea that people would be more delighted to be Irish than French. I wouldn't mind being French!

Well, maybe we'll leave it there unless you have another comment.

SD: One thing to add is that I don't think we were carrying on some sort of living tradition, though in Marty's case we helped him carry on his tradition. But a community formed in Minneapolis-St. Paul that had a lot to do with playing music and dancing and listening to music and enjoying it and admiring the people who played it before. And I'm so glad that I lived through that. And there were people who gave a lot of creative energy to it that got little credit for it at the time. Two or three people come to mind. There were all these dances that happened at venues -- at that time there was no internet -- and so the publicity was based on Nick Lethert's posters. He did beautiful posters, because he's a great artist, and he did all of those for free, and they just really contributed a lot. Another person that I think of is David Aronow, who was a big regular at all these sessions and the dances. He was taking photographs like crazy, and he would come around with these beautiful photographs and hand them out, give them away. And also just

be there. There were a lot of people who would just be there and be supportive. You were mentioning Sheila Jordan, who was an amazing dancer and always around, a bunch of other unsung heroes like that -- I haven't seen them for years and years, but I miss them, and they were great contributors at that time.

DS: The people who are just there and are listening, who are sharing in it and not necessarily playing, are so important, and sometimes where that comes up for me is where parents talk to me and maybe they're talking about should they send their child to lessons, and my basic reaction is a shrug in a sense -- if you want, if they're musical... But give them a musical atmosphere -- bring them to live music, have good music in the house...

SD: That's so important.

DS: Another thing is, they might say themselves, I wish I played and so on. And I always try and explain to them that everybody doesn't have to play. The crucial thing in the music, strangely enough, is not the player but the listener because the biggest listeners are the musicians. The musicians are the biggest listeners. And who are you playing for in a session? Well, I always imagine this figure at the bar, and it was very common in Ireland that there would be certain people at the bar, you know they know the music -- they're the aficionado at the bar as it were. And you're sort of playing for them. If you're playing for anybody apart from yourself, you're playing for the person who's listening and puffing the pipe, who really knows the music. So I try to explain something of that to people, though it's very hard to explain quickly and usually you're just drifting past.

It is a community thing and that's another thing that undoubtedly you were part of -- you and Laura and Jamie and Mary and so on. That was a community that didn't go away. I don't think there was ever a time when I thought the community was going to fade away -- that actually never happened. I just remember that there was one period when there were quite a lot of people out at sessions, but the standard seemed to be dipping, because a lot of the good players weren't coming out. But I never thought it would die out. Of course, part of the point of our oral history is to say, this a great scene and where did it come from.

SD: It's amazing to see now how many young musicians there are. That's a funny thing -- in that whole period there were a lot of good fiddle players that had emerged by the time that I was… I was gone by, say, 1980, and at that time there were accordion players, flute players, but not one

uilleann piper. And I think the last time I came to see you a couple of years ago, there were like five playing in a room at some session, all of them resident in Minnesota. And I think there's more than that -- it's just amazing to me.

DS: I'm trying to think is there a weak point -- I'm not sure. The flute scene is unbelievable in the Twin Cities. There's a lot of people playing flute, but the standard, the flute players we have, we have fantastic flute players. And we have great fiddlers as well. And then from my point of view the interest in singing is huge, traditional song. That's something there wasn't a vast amount of originally, and it's not that common in scenes in general. The proportion of musicians that are interested in song and sing is amazing. We're really happy about that.

SD: At that time, just a handful of people, mainly Laura.

DS: Yea, that's one of my memories from the very first party. It wasn't probably a party -- it might have been just after the event. That very first visit in September '78. And being at your place, your house, and Laura standing in a doorway and on the one side of her was James Kelly and on the other side, I don't know who, and an arm around Laura, and Laura in the middle, and she sang, maybe "A stór mo chroí.”

SD: Good for her. And did it well.

DS: it was great! So she might have been the first person that we heard sing in a traditional style around here. That was great.

SD: She was a good example of that whole thing of... She had a lot of stuff hidden, talents and musical experiences that she had before I met her, so she would one by one pull these things out when she just started singing this stuff -- it was astonishing. Where did she learn to do that?

DS: Do you remember the Blackthorn Band? So hang on, there's something we haven't done. The céilí band was called the Plough and the Stars at first? Who thought of the name or how did that come about? Do you remember?

SD: I think Marty came up with that name actually. Or it might have been Tom Dahill. Because that's a play, right? and it's kind of a political?

DS: It’s political, associated with the Starry Plough, with the workers' movement in Ireland. What was the first line-up of the Plough and the Stars? Was Tom Dahill in the Plough and the Stars? 20

SD: No.

DS: The ones I would know were you and Marty and Jamie and Laura...

Bob Douglas was in there.

SD: Bob Douglas was in it, yea. We didn't yet have the tattoos. (laughter) Various different things people would play. Bill Hinkley would sometimes play too. But at a certain point we began to think of ourselves as a céilí band and listening to céilí bands and looking at the names of céilí bands and realized that the Plough and the Stars was not really a very good name for a céilí band, so that's when we decided to change it to the Northern Star Céilí Band.

DS: Then of course it got to the point where it was a concert band and a céilí band, the Northern Stars, you could do songs and the whole thing.

SD: Yea, right.

DS: It got to the point where you were writing scripts for the Northern Star Céilí Band as far as I remember.

SD: Sort of, yea. I remember that too. That was because Garrison Keillor was starting, and there were a lot of crazy things happening.

DS: Were the Northern Stars or the Plough and the Stars on the Keillor show?

SD: Once maybe early on.

DS: Where was it at that time? Where did it happen?

SD: Downtown St. Paul.

DS: The World Theater? What is now the Fitz?

SD: Yea, I guess, I think so. That was really early in his show. He still had a lot of Minnesota musicians on. He was kind of spotlighting Minnesota musicians. And then within a year or so it was still possible that he had not become such a great star that through personal connections you could recommend that they have people on, so I remember that Liz Carroll and her friends were going to come up and play at something that we were sponsoring here. So to help make that work out, we reached out to Garrison Keillor and maybe Margaret Moos and arranged for Liz to play on the show and for money -- they paid people. So she did and then they cut the check, and

the check was half of what they'd said they were going to do, so we had to go back to Margaret Moos and say, “Hey, what's going on here?” Margaret Moos was really rude and...

DS: Now we're getting the juicy stuff!

SD: He was getting too big for his britches. It was very disappointing. Our view of him was beginning to change.

DS: You said that Comhaltas came through. Were there any other acts or individual musicians that you remember that came through? The Boys of the Lough, you must have had them a few times? They always came here, and they always were on the show, the Keillor show.

SD: Yea, and they would have stayed out at the MacEachron's farm. I remember them, yea. They were out there. That was a lot of fun.

DS: Yea, they're characters, and of course fantastic music.

SD: Do they still exist?

DS: They still exist. I can't remember the last time they would have toured. They have toured up till recent times. They still have Cathal, but Aly Bain isn't with them any more. So it would be Dave Richardson and Cathal and a younger fiddler, and Brendan Begley was playing accordion with them, and so on. But Cathal is one of the great figures of the music.

SD: You know, there was another guy, Sean McGlynn -- an accordion player, yea?

DS: There was the Green Fields of America too -- did you have them up here? With Mick Moloney and Sean McGlynn.

SD: And Liz was part of that too.

DS: There was a big party -- there was a photo -- do you have the famous photo? There's a photo of a party one of those first years -- '78, '79, '80 -- and the Green Fields must have been here. Liz is in it and Sean McGlynn and Father Charlie Coen and so on, and Myron Bretholz.

SD: Yea, Myron Bretholz -- what did he do?

DS: He played the bodhrán.

SD: Were you part of that? No, you were living here.

DS: I was here by then, so it might have been '81, and there's this fantastic group photo taken at the party. I don't know whose house it was. The photo returned some time -- I saw it many years later. I don't have it any more. It's really great -- you're in it.

SD: Yea? I'd love to see that. I remember a party that I think was on that tour at my house, a session, that went really late, till three in the morning or something. And about that time we heard all these fire engines in St. Paul and went out in the middle of the night, and there was a house down the street that was burning to the ground. It was in deep flames. We all stood out on the street watching this amazing bonfire in the middle of that session, and then we all went back and collapsed into bed.

DS: You know what happened to Sean McGlynn? He was murdered. And, of course, he was a teacher of Billy McComiskey and very close to Billy.

SD: So sad.

DS: Some sort of random murder.

SD: He came for that tour, and MacCafferty was having people in to play at his bar. And Joe Burke and Andy McGann would have come for a gig like that. I'm pretty sure it was MacCafferty's.

DS: Yea, I remember them playing at MacCafferty's. Did you have much dealings with Raymond MacCafferty yourself?

SD: No.

DS: He was from Derry. I didn't know him at all.

SD: I met him. I would say hello to him. So, you going to cut a record out of this?

DS: Yea, so will we say farewell to the recording?

SD: Yes.

DS: Thanks very much, Sam -- brilliant!

[END: SAM DILLON PART 02—filename: A1001b_EML_mmtc]