File: wilsonteresa-oh-jigging_M.mp3
Speakers:
TW – Teresa MacPhee Wilson
JM – Jenny O'Hanlon McQuaid
TW I heard my mother sayin' that, before her time, when she was younger growin' up, they had two - They called them "tuners," two women or a man and a woman - They'd sit on each side of the fiddler and they "tuned" the tune with the fiddler.
KP Really?
TW Ya, Mom's mother was one of those.
KP Oh, really.
TW She was very, very good. And Mom was the same; she knew every tune really well, actually very, very well.
JM In Mom's day at dances, that sometimes was their only music. And at all public dances the only music they had was that tuning or jigging. That would be the only music they would have. Tthey would sit down, and if they didn't have a fiddler, they would just do that and dance to that.
TW There was a family of MacKinnons, lived down in Goose River, and every one in that family were very very good step dancers, but none of them could play a musical instrument, but they could really what they call, "tune.'" Mary Kay and Dolphus MacKinnon they used to tune and dance at the same time, which is difficult because you get out of breath. They could really do it well. And I remember this Janie Mackinnon coming home from Boston. This was probably in 1941 or '42, around that or '39 - '39 I guess, because his sister died in that same year. And in the evening after her work would be done she would take a chair out on the piazza, on the varanda: over here, the house is not there now but a couple houses from here. And she would [demonstrates tapping], and she'd just do one tune after the other. She'd take probably an hour, an hour and a half. We could – There were no trees around here then, eh. It was all clear land, and we could hear her tuning from here.
KP Are you able to do it? Do you tune much?
TW I used to be able to do it. I'm out of practice.
Teresa Wilson and Jenny McQuaid tune The Old Man and Old Woman
TW And you tapped your foot like this: [demonstrates]
Teresa Wilson and Jenny McQuaid tune Lord MacDonald's Reel
JM Then you can get real good ones like that too. I like it, that's very musical, you get going like that and you don't stay sitting very long when you hear that.
KP Yes.
TW Apparently, yeah. Another thing we used to do was we used to imitate people tuning. Everybody'd tune different, eh. They said whatever tongue twister you had. My father always said:
Sings: Da Rappa daddle dit / rappa raddle diddle ah/
TW: And Mom was:
Sings: Dom diddulul eydle addie/ diddle diddle die dull-lah/ dih-vey nada diddle daddle/ diddle dat...
TW: It's different, eh? The sounds come out different. And there was another lady, and she used to tune…
Di / die-nee diddle doidle [intake] doin[intake] doin[intake] diddle um/
TW: We'd be imitating them doing it [laughs]. There was words to a lot of the tunes. There was a Gaelic piece she sang.
Teresa Wilson sings Gaelic song
[Note: It might make sense to have a Gaelic speaker transcribe these lyrics properly]
TW Stuff like that.