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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? 1 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. 2 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 3 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.

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