I've been a Pratie Head for many's the long year... (Celtic Music)

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How I came to play "More-or-less Traditional Music of the British Isles" and make it my livelihood.

I'd been living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, singing Balkan music with the acappella women's ensemble Laduvane,and singing American folksongs in a band called "Rank Strangers." In 1981 I married and my husband moved us to Chapel Hill, NC. This lens is about my further musical adventures...

Bob Vasile was a founding member of the Pratie Heads in the late 1970s. When I moved to Durham in 1981 and met him, the previous incarnation of the band had broken up and he was looking to revive it...

It all started when my husband threw me out of the house... 

... saying, "You're driving me crazy. You've got to find some musicians to play with."

I'd been living in Durham, NC for three or four months, and I hated it. I cried every day. When we married and left Cambridge, MA, I had to leave my musical life behind. I found a job in Durham, as a typesetter, but I missed performing and was very lonely...

... so when my husband complained about my moping, I obediently went out to a jam session at Salaam's, organized by the Nee Ningy Band.

That's where I met Bob and his girlfriend. They had just gotten back from overseas. They had sold everything they owned and had gone to Ireland for as long as their money held up. This was a good plan while they were in Ireland, playing in pubs and learning tunes and having a grand time. It wasn't so great, though, when they came back with nothing but their instruments and the clothes in their suitcases...

So they had come to Salaam's that night. They heard me sing and asked me to join them. That night, we also all met Chuck Jones, a wonderful singer and guitar-player. He joined up too, and with Rob Van Veld on bodhran, that was the new incarnation of the Pratie Heads.

Our first gig was St. Patrick's Day, March 17 1982, at the Station in Carrboro, NC. In this picture, we were busking on Franklin Street (during the Apple Chill Festival) in downtown Chapel Hill.

Every band should have a group therapist. (Part one) 

First Bob broke up with his girlfriend and she left the band. Then the bodhran player left because he was bored with all the slow pretty songs we were singing (not suitable for enthusiastic drum-banging). Then Chuck left, I think because his wife didn't like us.

So then there were just two of us. And I got pregnant and had a baby and Bob thought we would probably quit playing. Instead, we made our first recording.

"Flowers of the Forest" - recorded in 1984 

This song is available on "Early Fare," our double-cd reissue of the four earliest Pratie Heads recordings: see Skylark Productions site to order (PayPal).

And we started playing at weddings... 

Ah, we all looked like such hippy country yokels back then!

I guess we still do, sometimes...

This wedding happened in the Lockridge Community in Durham NC. A bunch of people had purchased a turkey farm (on Turkey Farm Road) and a lot of land and were gradually building homes together - they shared a well, a community park, and a tractor.

Irish and Scottish music was very popular around here back then - Triona Ni Dhomnaill's band Touchstone and the Red Clay Ramblers had made it quite the rage!

We met the band "Mad Sweeney" at CityStage Festival and we all became friends. 

Sonny Thomas, head honcho of the Fiddle and Bow Society in Winston-Salem, was guitarist with the band Mad Sweeney when we were all performing in Greensboro NC early in the 1980s. Peter and Susan Kostenko were in the band, wonderful musicians, and we started getting together for some jam sessions. They were so good to us.

Peter grew ill very suddenly and died when his son was barely born. Susan became a doctor and we never see her any more. We see Sonny from time to time, not nearly often enough.

Every band should have a group therapist (Part Two) 

After we made "Flowers of the Forest," we were playing at Pyewacket Restaurant one night and the music booker said he'd like to try playing with us. So bassist Robbie Link joined us and we made another recording, "Todlin' Home."

The high point of that version of the band: we were hired to play at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC for a St. Patrick's Day concert. The tickets were very expensive, the hall was packed, the audience cried at the sad songs, and we were on the Diane Rehm show with some Sandanistas!

We made another recording with Robbie. Called "Kiss Quick, Mother's Coming," it was Scottish Country Dances, some of which we composed, most of which were from the 18th century. We did it for Carl Wittman, a Royal Scottish Country Dance master whom we adored. Carl was dying of AIDS while we were making the album for him. Sometimes I just busted out crying in the recording studio.

Then Robbie quit the band and we were a duo again.

We started getting a lot of work from the North Carolina Arts Council Touring Program. 

Those were the days!

It was really hard to go on without Robbie - we missed the bass so much, and all these years later, we still do - but we were holding about eight contracts and had to revamp the music quickly so we could manage without him.

In those days, the North Carolina Arts Council Touring Program was a pretty great thing. They had a pot of money for their "approved" artists roster. Libraries, festivals, schools, local arts centers could apply for us to do a concert for them and the fee would be subsidized. In rural counties, the subsidy was 50 percent! That's a lot of help!

We traveled all over the state and played at wonderful festivals and a lot of schools (this pictures shows us in our Colonial garb, for our early America - early North Carolina - Revolutionary war gigs).

It's too bad people stopped thinking the arts were worth supporting. NCAC pulled the plug on the program, or at least on the money. Now, they have an online list of performers and that's all. We don't really get any work that way at all any more.

Every band should have a group therapist (part three) 

Bob and I had many good years together, but things changed. When we met, we both had families and he was raising his daughters. Later, they went back to live with their mother and he got itchy to find out what life on the road was like. But I couldn't go, because I had kids.

I had an amazing dream one night. I was in a beautiful crystal palace and there was a beautiful tree in it - but somebody cut it down. It was Bob who cut it down. He explained to me: "it got too tall, there was nowhere left for it to grow."

He left to go on the road with Freyda Epstein. They did go all the places he wanted to go and made a very well-received album on Red House.

For the eighteen years we didn't play together, I did gigs with Pat Sky, and pianist Stephen Smith, and I started the Solstice Assembly and put on winter shows, and in 1994 Beth Holmgren and I started Mappamundi, a world music band, with Robbie (who had come back).

In 2004 or so Bob's girlfriend nagged him into calling me. We got together and amazingly still liked playing together...

Our first gig together in 18 years: the Festival for the Eno 

What a blast it was to play together again! We did some of our old stuff (and when I say old, I mean things we learned 20 years before!) and some new things and decided it was just too much fun - we couldn't stop - so we're still going.

We decide to make "Rag Faire." 

Bob had a recording engineer living in his house in Oxford so we sort of traded recording time for rent. Our friend Paul took the photo, I painted the picture, and it was like falling off a log. So much fun.

The album is named after one of my favorite Peter Bellamy songs, "Rag Fair," about a poor guy just off the boat who meets a girl and gets robbed and loses his clothes and probably gets an STD and drowns his sorrows in a bottle of wine. We put the "e" on the end of the album title because there was a famous Japanese band by the name of Rag Fair and we didn't want to get buried by them in Google - in case anybody was ever looking for us...

Our first "new" cd, 2006: "Rag Faire." 

Click the picture and you'll hear samples from the mp3s available at Amazon.com

Into the West, Berayna, Monymusk x 4, Sea Duck/Thirty Year Jig, Frozen Girl, Jamestown Homeward Bound, Bagira's Walk, Mayn Shvester Khaye, Strings in the Earth and Air, New Land/Toda Una Vida, Boutros the Cat, Daichovo Horo, Rag Fair, Siete modos de guisar las berenjenas, Old Songs/John Roy Lyall's Air, Bonny Ship the Diamond/Willafjord, Rosehill Reel, Lord Franklin

From Rag Faire: Bob Vasile sings "Into the West." 

I can relate to this - my daughter lives on the other side of the continent, and that's a long way.

So then we did it again - murder ballads this time... 

What a very un-sellable and almost un-performable subject!

Boy, we had a great time recording this album, but we knew perfectly well it was going to be hard to sell. For one thing, there are only some places where you can sing songs like "Lamkin," in which a rich guy doesn't pay his mason, so the mason sneaks into the house at night and kills the guy's wife and baby. Or like "Jesuitmont" (Justamont), in which a stepmother has her stepdaughter cooked into a pie. Some of the songs are light and funny but as a whole, this one is a bit of a white elephant. Still, I personally love it to pieces. Listen and see what you think...

Around the same time, we decided to clean up a bit and try to get more wedding gigs. That hasn't gone so well yet, but maybe when the economy improves a bit...

Our 2008 cd: "We Did It: Songs of People Behaving Badly." 

Click the picture to hear samples of the mp3s available for download from Amazon.com

The head of the Triangle Folk Music Society had asked for a murder ballad at our previous concert for the, and added, "It isn't folk music if there isn't a murder ballad." So we did a whole album of them. Actually, we started with death-only but later branched out into some of the other deadly sins.

We named it after after O. J. Simpson's book on the suggestion of my friend Paul.

What a Shocking World This Is for Scandal, Lucy Wan, Punch and Judy, Marrowbones, The Death of Piracy, Cat in the Cradle medley, Bowie Bowerie (The Two Sisters), Rubberman medley, Gypsen Davy, Jesuitmont (Justamont), Lamkin, Slip Jigs and Reels, David's tunes (Flying Home to Shelley, Paddy on the Landfill, Music for a Found Harmonium), The Creel, The Laily Worm, The Wizard's medley (Tamlin, Napoleon's, The Wizard's Walk), Fear No More the Heat of the Sun

It seems like people don't really notice the difference between real music and canned music any more... 

So I fiddle for my own pleasure.

Being a musician isn't easy if you aren't doing "radio friendly" music. Sadly, Americans have become so tied to their computers, iPods, etc. that they've kind of forgotten the joys of actually getting up off their chairs, putting on their coats and going to a pub or a small concert hall to hear some live music. It's so much easier to make another bowl of popcorn and watch a dvd.

There was a time when I really hoped I'd "make it" some day. However, now I realize the real gift is - that I can still do it, I can still make people laugh and cry with my music, my fingers still work. And as another under-employed musician friend of mine says - a fabulous fiddler who makes his living as an electrician - "Every day above ground is a good day." So I can't complain.

Bob and I branch out into international music 

Here:

This gorgeous song in Yiddish, with words by Binem Heller and music by Chava Alberstein is on our album Rag Faire. In fall of 2009 we did a series of two-hour concerts of international music including French, Spanish, Latin American, Italian, German/Austrian, and American folk music. What a challenge! Learn more about this song (in English, "My Sister Khaye") on my lens called I love Yiddish music! (See below)

Learn more about "Mayn Shvester Khaye..." 

featured lens I love Yiddish music!

First, I fell in love with Yiddish folk and theater songs I've been singing music in Yiddish since the early 1980s, when I heard one of the first concerts given at the New England Conservatory by Hankus Netsky and his Klezmer Conservatory Band. ...

Below, lenses which feature single songs and the stories behind them...

Homelessness and workhouses in England 

"Tuppence on the Rope"

featured lens "Tuppence on the Rope:" living between workhouses

Taken from reminiscences of a man who had lived life on the road, traveling from workhouse to workhouse, cracking stones in exchange for a night's lodging, the song was recorded in 1975 by Gary and Vera Gary Aspey. Ten years later Bob and I learned t...

A Sephardic song: seven recipes for cooking eggplant 

"Siete modos de guisar las berenjenas"

featured lens Seven ways to cook eggplant: a Sephardic song and sephardic recipes

I'm a wedding musician and we often play for Jewish weddings. One time a bride asked us: "Could you sing some Sephardic songs, but I don't like the sad ones." Hmmph! Most Sephardic songs I know are sad. So I did some research and still didn't come u...

Why you should pay your contractors promptly and tip your nanny generously... 

"Lamkin"

featured lens Lamkin, a musical news flash of the 16th century: artisan gets stiffed, gets even.

Over the years a lot of people have asked me where my bands (the Pratie Heads and Mappamundi) get new material, and how we get it concert-ready. In this lens I can give you an example of how I arrange a complicated song. I fell in love with "Lamkin...

What to do when a dragon says he'd eat you if you weren't his father... 

"The Laily Worm"

featured lens The Laily Worm and other evil stepmother stories

This peculiar ballad was collected by Francis James Child and was published in his compendium called The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, published in 1802. He wrote: There is only one version of this ballad, which was recorded in the north of...

What do you mean, "That's the Way to Do It?" Bloodthirsty little puppet kills the devil... 

"Punch and Judy" - not just a puppet how-to, but also a fabulous song!

featured lens Punch and Judy

I decided to create some Punch pages because I love the song John Pole wrote about the show. Bob Vasile and I sang it on our recent album We Did It! Songs of People Behaving Badly." You can hear our version, and read Pole's lyrics, below. Pole is, hi...

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Come on, say hi! 

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by ChapelHillFiddler

Here are the cds we have for sale at Skylark Productions and (as mp3 downloads) from Amazon.com:


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