Traditional music does not grow up in a vacuum. It develops within a particular social organization and set of beliefs, and is shaped by both logistical and aesthetic considerations. The tradition pages offer a sense of the social, cultural and aesthetic milieu that Island fiddlers inhabited. Get an overall sense of each tradition from the text, then click on the embedded links to hear the fiddlers themselves colorfully hold forth on related topics.
The traditions pages were prepared by curator Ken Perlman, based on nearly twenty-five years of collecting and analyzing Island fiddle music and oral histories. For more detail on Island fiddling traditions, see his book, Couldn't Have a Wedding Without the Fiddler: the Story of Traditional Fiddling on Prince Edward Island (University of Tennessee Press, 2015).