Some Tune History

Equally important to finding out titles of many untitled tunes that we have in our collection, is finding out about where they came from especially those that Erskine learned from local Douglastown and area fiddlers. This past summer while visiting with Ernest Drody, a Douglastown fiddler from the musical Drody family, I played the Untitled D Tune for him that we posted here on the blog on April 1st, 2010.

Here this tune again from the 1978 Tape

He remembers being a kid and hearing that tune when a couple of french fiddlers from the north shore of the Gaspé would come down and learn tunes from his father Charlie. He remembers them playing this tune and reckons his father picked it up from them. As he put it, "that was a long time ago, and I was terrible young".

Here is another version of this that Erskine recorded on the reel-to-reel machine in the 1960's.

Hear the Untitled D Tune from the north coast of the Gaspé