Tensioning the bow with a wine cork?

Trad Irish Music
1

I have a picture of Padraig O’Keefe, taken in the late 50s, with a wine cork stuck lengthwise under the horsehair at the tip of his bow. I assumed it was a temporary fix, it certainly had that look; maybe he’d stripped the thread off the tensioning screw earlier in the evening.

Then I saw a picture of Michael Gorman at the Keele Folk Festival in 1965, with a wine cork in the same position, only this time the length lay along the bow. There did not look to be anything broken about Michael’s bow.

Was this a technique used, maybe to give higher bow tension, to add more space between the bow and the hair, or maybe to add a little weight to the end of the bow? Or just a co-incidence that they’d both damaged their bows? I’m sure that these guys did not earn much from their playing, and would not be able to immediately buy a new bow if they broke one..

Does anyone know any other examples of using a wine cork in this way?

2

O’Keeffe was a drunkard, and was known to hock his kit from time to time. Someone would have to buy it back and give it to him to get him to play.

I would guess in both cases that money for a new bow was not available, and the players did what they could to keep the old bow going.

djm

3

Peter Browne in his article on O Keeffe in Ceol na h Eirreann, no 2(1994), p.
70:

Owning a fiddle
For much of his life O Keefe had no fiddle, except one which he left out in the rain during a session. When he remembered where he left it, it was much damaged and in keeping with his habit of referring to the fiddle as his ‘wife’, he remarked on this instrument that as a result of the damage done by the rain ‘she got rheumatics and was never any good to me after that’.
He seldom brought a fiddle on his long walks around Sliabh Luachra. He would use pupils’ fiddles in the houses where he called at night, and there were fiddles hanging on the walls of the various pubs where he visited.[…]

And somehow I don’t quite picture the pubs of Sliabh Luachra at the time serving wine as a source for corks. :laughing: Cork/Kerry fiddle styles indeed.

4

:laughing: A corker, for sure. Actually, I was unsure about the “wine cork”. I seem to remember being told he used a bobbin from a spool of thread.

djm

5

It might be a bobbin at that (in Padraig O’Keefe’s picture), it’s not 100% clear. In the Michael Gorman picture I can’t see that it can be anything but a wine cork.

So, temporary fix, not some secret nuance of style? :smiley:

6

I’ve seen good bows, that were too light for the player, weighted down by injecting lead or silver in a drilled hole at the tip. Thought to keep the bow from bouncing so much. If the nut was screwed up all the way, and the hair was still loose, the cork may have been to take up the slack. When rehairing a bow, the hair has to be wet and the tension just right while it dries tight. Otherwise, in the end it ain’t going to tighten, or it will be too tight.