Fiddle Studio: The Story of My Violin (Chief O'Neill's Favorite)

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Welcome to the Fiddle Studio Podcast featuring tunes and stories from the world of traditional music and fiddling. I'm Megan Beller and today I'll be bringing you a setting of Chief O'Neill's Favorite from a session at the Bru House in Dublin, Ireland.

Hello, everyone. I hope you're well. Today I'm going to be talking about my own fiddle, my violin that I purchased at The String House in Rochester, New York. This was about 2004, I was replacing the violin I had in college, which was stolen actually out of our car, along with a banjo that my husband still mourns to this day. And after our instruments were stolen, I went into The String House and they had some great instruments there.

This one was made by a female luthier named Ivy Rimmer Owen in 1905. There aren't a lot of instruments from that time made by women. I did recently hear about, about a female luthier in Cincinnati. I think somebody posted about that on Facebook. But Ivy Rimmer Owen was the oldest daughter of a violin maker named John Owen who lived in Leeds, England at the time.

My understanding is that John didn't have any sons, which is how his oldest daughter kind of got pulled into the shop to help make violins. She ended up also taking lessons with another luthier. And I found this story about her in an old issue of the Strad Magazine, where they called her the first woman violin maker. They described an argument she had with John Dunn, who was a prominent English violinist at the time. And they quoted Dunn as saying that no woman could make a violin as well as a man could.

It was apparently this discussion that led Ivy to kind of set out to make the very best violin that she could. She described it as being modeled after a Stradivarius, but not an exact copy, had her own spin on it. Then she later brought it back to Dunn and forced him to admit it was just as good as the violins that were made by men. Now was this my violin that the story is about? I do not know. I wish I knew, that that would be a great story.

But that's a little bit about Ivy Rimmer Owen. There is one more fun fact about my violin. I had it taken apart actually to have a crack repaired. That was done by Michael Weller, great luthier in Alexandria, Virginia. I believe he's retired now, but Weller violins are great if you come across one.

When he was repairing my violin, and he had kind of taken the whole thing apart, he found some writing on the inside of it that was not visible. Initially, the maker had written her name, and the place and the year and then she had also written the word "Esmillina" in quotation marks. So we think that Esmillina is the name of my instrument. So that's a little bit about my fiddle that I play.

Our tune today is the last tune I'm bringing you from Dublin. This is Chief O'Neill's favorite, and it's an Irish hornpipe in D. Chief O'Neill, of course, refers to Francis O'Neill, who published O'Neill's Music of Ireland. Basically the bible of Irish music. Francis O'Neill was a flute player from County Cork who traveled different places around the world and ended up as the police chief in Chicago.

In addition to his day job, spent his entire lifetime collecting and transcribing Irish tunes. His book has been reprinted quite a few times, it's usually printed with more than 1000 Irish tunes. So that kind of tells you the scale of his obsession.

This is a nice hornpipe we've enjoyed learning it. I did see some controversy on the session in the comments on this tune about whether people play the B part with F naturals or with F sharps. There was somebody who wrote that nobody in Ireland plays this tune with the F naturals in the B part. That was about 10 years ago, we were just in Ireland. So when we were there, they were playing it with the F naturals so we're gonna play it for you the way that we recorded it and transcribed it. I hope you enjoy Charley and I are just gonna play it here.