… For a couple of hours the younger players performed while Séamus sat in silence. Eventually he was asked to play. Slowly he took off his coat and rolled up his sleeves. He spent 20 minutes tuning up his 130-year-old pipes. He then asked the gathering whether all the tape recorders were ready and proceeded to play for over an hour. To everyone’s astonishment he then offered his precious pipes to Willie Clancy to play a set. Willie demurred but eventually gave in. Next Liam O’Flynn (Liam Og Ó Floinn) was asked to play them, and so on, round the room. …
What surprises me is the bit about Willie Clancy playing Ennis’s pipes. Wasn’t Clancy left-handed? Could he also play the pipes right-handed? Is the article accurate?
It is, Breandan Breathnach told me the story, Willie was left handed and had to play the pipes upside down, he was nervous and didn’t like it one bit.
I have played the set myself and the holespacings on the chanter were odd (Geooff Wooff was sitting next to me when I played it and said later he could see through the back D hole out through the C hole on the other side). Offcourse this may have come about when a certain piper re-reeded the chanter in 1970 (as has been suggested) and made ‘some modifications’. It was an Ennis party piece however to pass them around and let people work up a sweat.
Maybe Seamus was just having other pipers “blow in” his new reeds?
Or knocking them out of whack, more likely.
Then there’s the time I gave my C set to Paddy Keenan to play…and when I picked them up again.. I noticed an immediate improvment in the reed…
I am NOT making this up!
The chanter reed played better, even though Paddy commented that it was a rather weak reed…needed to be stiffened up, say, with a judicious tweak of the collar…Well I left it alone, and played it for another 4 to 5 years after!
Mr.Ennis never offered his set to me to play! I think He knew better!
I did call all the cows in the field over to his caravan windows and door, by playing the E flat Kennedy set. As we went outside to go to the pub ,he started “Shoo-ing” them away, commenting that he should have stopped me from playing a “concert pitch” set inside the trailer, as the Cows were very curious, and liked the higher pitch, and that I should have played them at the pub instead.
Sean Folsom
Not till July, probably. I’ll probably be having my engagement party there with the future in-laws (and future in-cows).
I’ll have to hunt up some music while I’m there…I heard that Eamonn Curran lives in Monaghan so maybe I’ll try and get in a piping lesson.
