Drawing from the Well
Following on from last year’s successful All-Fiddle Festival, this year Sean Abeyta and his pals presented a two-day festival of North Kerry music over in Kilflynn, a few miles north of Tralee. Nicky McAuliffe and Ciaran Dalton gave a lecture on the music and musicians of the area. There were also workshops on fiddle and accordion, by Máire O’Keeffe and Graham Guerin respectively, and an exhibition of photos.
As part of the effort to spread some knowledge of North Kerry related tunes, the material taught at the workshops and some of that played at the sessions came from a booklet called “Drawing from the Well”, produced as part of the festival enterprise. It contains 25 tunes; most of these come from the Rice-Walsh manuscript collection, which was compiled by a pupil of the 19th century North Kerry fiddle master, Jeremiah Breen, and which eventually was given to Francis O’Neill. O’Neill published over forty of these tunes in “Waifs and Strays” in 1922, as well as several tunes from the donor, fiddler Patrick Stack, from near Listowel. The “Drawing from the Well” booklet adds some history on these tunes, and in addition there are several tunes that have not appeared in print before.

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The booklet follows on from the publication last year of Ciaran Dalton’s “Ardfert by the Sea: A memoir of music, musicians and dance from Ardfert, County Kerry”. It sells for €10, plus p&p.