File: chaissonjj06-oh-fiddlingsurvival_M.mp3
Speakers
JC – JJ Chaisson
KP – Curator Ken Perlman
JC: There's an awful lot of people playing fiddle now, than there was five or ten years ago, 15 years ago. There's an awful lot of young people that have shown interest, fiddle lessons. I'm not sure of the number this year in Rollo Bay but I know there's an awful lot of young players around, and they all have CDs now. At one time, it scared me because there was [only] a handfull of young fiddlers around and you don't want the tradition to die. And you're always scared that maybe the fiddlin' tradition is going to go downhill like it was years ago. But now there's an awful lot of young players, and they seem to enjoy it. And there's a big following B Like with their friends, their friends follow them around. If they're young kids they take it up. If there's kids out there that love playing the fiddle and they have a close friend or a girlfriend or a boy friend that tag along with them long enough, they love it and their kids take it up. And I think we have no worries about keeping the tradition of fiddle music alive. I hope not anyways.
KP: The next issue is, will younger people begin becoming part of the audience?
JC: Yeah. That's something that I notice. Like I play every Sunday night in Monticello with Timothy [Chaisson] and it's the same crowd all the time. And if you look at it that way, if somebody was to come in and say, "OK I'm lookin' at – To see if the tradition's goin' to stay alive." Well if they walk into a room like Monticello on Sunday night, they're gonna say, "Wow, we're in trouble!" It's not so much ceilidhs that you see younger audiences. You see them at – Like now if I went to a – If somebody was having a party in Charlottetown, if there's a bunch going out to a bar before a rock concert, it's not abnormal to go in and see a fiddle and a guitar and people loving hearing it. And they tell you that they love it, and sometimes bows can do strange things. But my cousins all live together in Charlottetown, and last night I was talkin' to a couple of them and I heard fiddle and guitar in the background. I just see – Like a lot of my age group whenever I was growing up didn't show interest in the fiddle, but now that they've grown up and I've kept playing the fiddle, now they love it and they say, "Why didn't I take fiddle lessons whenever I could have?" And I tell >em, it's never too late and none of us are gonna get rich doin' it. I tell >em to take lessons, and they do. I get calls quite often of people wondering where they could get a fiddle to take fiddle lessons, because they love listenin' to fiddle music and they love dancing to it. And it's mostly people that grew up with me and that are around my age group.