Ah, but that was recorded in Rufus’ elder years just outside a WoolWorth’s on a corner in downtown Chicago, around the late 50’s or early 60’s, on a “drugstore” wax disk recorder. His playing was not at his prime and conditions not ideal for recording.
Rufus started piping when he discovered his grandfather’s pipes wasting away in a bottom drawer on his 15th birthday, about 1929. Though that was a particularly bad year in many quarters, for some reason the O’Reilly farm seemed to begin to do better than usual soon after this.
The boy’s father did so well in fact, his operation was bought out at good profit by his “investors” and he was rewarded by his “Chicago associates” for his excellent supply of “potatoes” grown and “processed” on his farm in Belle Plaine Minnesota with something of a promotion, so in the later 30’s the family moved off the farm to Chicago, where John O’Reilly was given a good job on the police force, through the good influence of his agricultural partners.
Harley, a couple of years younger than Rufus, started in his early teens on fiddle, not long after Rufus took up the pipes. Harley also picked up guitar when he moved to Chicago, inspired by it’s common use in blues there and is probably the first to routinely incorporate it in Irish Traditional music. He was however, routinely beaten senseless with it by ranting old Irish codgers who’d come to hear Rufus pipe, so he shied away from it in public until much later in his career.
Rufus never used regulators at all on the farm. The only use they got at all, was the bass, in possession of the only working reed in the set, and that mainly by Harley, essentially an “Idiot Savant,” while interrupting Rufus in practice sessions, as he tried to immitate cows and other barnyard animals at inappropriate times.
Of course the most famous use of Rufus’ regulators in his early years, was that session at O’Hara’s, in St. Paul Minnesota, around St. Paddy’s Day in 1934, where a well-known flute player not too long off the boat, up from Chicago dropped his flute in disgust as Harley picked up his guitar and joined in. For five minutes the character rehearsed a wide range of distainful glares and gestures, but being basically autistic, Harley probably wasn’t even aware of him and kept gleefully twanging away. The flutist poked Harley two or three times with his flute, calling him a “thick pillock” and “bloody imbecile” until Rufus pulled out his baritone regulator and poked the man back with it so hard he and his chair fell backwards, and Rufus waddled over him, pipes and all danging off his body, still ramming the thing in the man’s chest, saying, “You leave little brother alone and let him strum along or you’ll be playing harmony out your bog-Paddy arse every time you fart pally…”
Rufus had no one to teach him regulators for many years, until the Chicago move was made and he tied up with a great immigrant player named Shamus Innes–no relation to the other gentleman. (Shamus is rumored to be the grandfather of Neil Innes, sometimes known as the 5th Python. Well, 6 if you count Terry Gilliam.) Shamus got Rufus’ entire set in working order, especially the regulators, which was Shamus’ genius. Shamus had a vigorous, almost cruel style that Rufus quickly emulated, and that combined with the fact that he learned to play almost literally on the streets of Chicago via busking during peak occupancy, the general flow of automotive traffic and his often proximity to the curb or open windows in those days of no air conditioning, is usually given as the main influence on his final regulator style.
Royce
Set me up for the day it did!!
The car horn thing at the end of the Coppers and Brass set was a bit disturbing though 
