File: bernardalvin-oh-decline.mp3
Speakers:
ES — Edwin Simmons
AB — Alvin Bernard
KP — Curator Ken Perlman
KP: Why did it start goin down? What would happen if a young fellow ... Let's say it was the 1950s, what would happen if a young fellow wanted to take up the fiddle, would his friends give him a hard time about ?
ES: I don't know if they would have in the 50s, but it wouldn't be too much later than that it wouldn't really be the in thing to be playing. It was all kind of centered on more modern music.
KP: So by the 1960s, there might have been a lot of pressure to stop.
ES: I would say.
AB: I think perhaps too, the young people probably thought fiddling was for the older people.
ES: The old folks — the fiddler was generally an older person
AB: An older person, and they had no place in it. Then when they started with the notes then everybody'd get into it.
ES: It was certainly a little more civilized when the TV came along. Back in that time there was a lot of the Island that didn't have the hydro to it — in the early 50s.
KP: The hydro? Hydro-electricity?
ES: Yeah. My community didn't have it till...
AB: '55, '56, was when we got it
ES: ... '57, '58 it came to my community . We used to go I don't know how many miles across the fields, walked, to see TV one night a week. That was the big thing. Once you'd see TV, you get all the lifestyle and bobby socker and all this, and here's some old feller in a beard sittin' back and playin the fiddle, well what are they goin to relate to. But that's changin' now. For whatever reason.
