A great thing if he could play

File: quinnmerlin-oh-gettingstarted_M.mp3

Speaker:

MQ – Merlin Quinn

MQ: It was the thing. It just simply seemed to me to be the thing to be able to do. It was so great! I could whistle and I could jig, and I could sing and so could my father, as I said, was a good singer but he couldn't play and I thought if you could only put one of them tunes on here [points to fiddle] what a great thing it would be. That was my attitude when I was younger. Just to be able to - Even if it was a song or two, it would be so great. In fact, I remember the song I learned to play first was a song called The Wreck of the Number 9. And it wasn't much, eh, it was just a song. But I thought it would be so great even to get that one tune. And of course once you get that one, well all the other tunes that are in that same key, say G and round about, the songs, that type of songs - And once you've learned that one you've learned the others, in a sense, because they were just the same pretty well fingerin', only just a little different. So, once I got that one tune, then I went on to play a dozen songs that were the same. Of course, going into reels and jigs was another thing.