LOST FIDDLERS OF THE GRENADINES

The story started for me in 1972 with a book called ‘Black Music of Two Worlds’, by John Storm Roberts; I fantasised about the small bands of the small Caribbean islands ever since, using the information in theatre work and recordings, but never got to go there.

Jump forward thirty years to a dear friend, Joe Scurfield, of the Old Rope String Band. Fabulous fiddler, and performer, with a deep love for traditional folk music from wherever. Back in the late 90’s Joe went holidaying to Grenada, north of Trinidad in the West Indies. He heard rumours of fiddlers and string bands, failed to find any, but was pointed in the direction of the smaller islands of Carriacou and Petite Martinique to the north. He went to look and started wandering about clutching his fiddle. It worked; on Carriacou, a little island six miles long, he met numerous musicians: including Canute Calliste, fiddler and famous primitive painter. Joe went back a few times, met people, took photographs, made recordings, and wrote about it. Tragically, Joe died in an accident shortly after, and recently the fiddler Kate Barfield and I acquired a lot of his photographs, writings and recordings. Then fortuitously we ran into Dave Hennessey, legendary Cork accordion player with Any Old Time. Dave, with his wife the international flautist Katerina Emtage, were setting off to sail round the world. They knew our Boat Band background in the Scottish islands, and asked if we fancied a ride on one leg of the journey; we thought for nearly a minute and said “ Yes!”. So the plan was made, to see if any fiddlers were left in the Grenadine islands who hadn’t been squeezed out by reggae, hiphop and steel bands.

Six months on, Kate and I, clutching a book of Joe’s photos of musicians, took off from wet cold Manchester. We jetted to Barbados, boarded a tiny propeller plane and joined Dave and Kat on their boat Laragh on the island of Canouan. There followed a period of island hopping, odd sessions on Mayreau, Bequia and Union. We met no fiddlers or banjo players, though Robert Righteous in his wonderful Rasta bar on Mayreau played a mean scallop shell; Guldin the banjo player on Bequia was away on his boat; and Ishmael the cuatro player on Union had lent his instrument to someone at Christmas, and hadn’t seen it since. Ishmael sang us great songs, though, Nat King Cole favourites, and a very

plaintive “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny”, not a song you hear in England in these more correct times. So far, then, sessions but no string bands.

At the end of a relaxed Union Island afternoon with Ishmael in Jenny’s Restaurant we upped anchor and slipped over to Carriacou, put into Hillsborough, the only town, and set off on a music seeking stroll. Charlot the taxi driver and policeman asked us what we were looking for, looked at a photo of fiddler Harrison Fleary and took us round to his shop. Mrs Fleary explained that Harrison was playing at a funeral; she looked at Joe’s photos, identified lots of people (several now dead and gone), and said come back tomorrow. So into the little bar on the beach for a quiet night, and in the morning boated round the headland to Tyrrel Bay, a better anchorage, near where Canute Calliste used to live in Esterre.

In a nearby village over the hill we found a wooden boat under construction, and where the stem post met the keelson there were blood stains and chicken feathers. We thought ‘Funny!’, because we’d heard stories about there being old voodoo customs on Carriacou. It’s famous for keeping up the old ways, drumming and dances, and maybe this was part of it? Then back to Hillsborough on the bus, to seek Harrison Fleary. No luck. Gone to another funeral, with his band. “Try tomorrow at the cricket match in Hillsborough” .So we thought, ‘Fine, we’ll try it. Tonight, we’ll play some music ourselves’. There’s a bar called the Lambi Queen, very near our boat in Tyrrel Bay. There was a string band on that evening (sounded promising) so we arranged that we would play some tunes before the band. We played, and got some very rapt attention from young, local boys; Kale the dancer, in particular, who we were to meet later. Bongo, a leading drummer on the island, arrived; he played djembe with us and it fitted well, particularly with the Grand Hornpipe. That tune seemed to click wherever we played, a good bit of Anglo-Irish-Caribbean fusion. After we finished, Bongo and some local drummers played, punchy local styles. Kale did some rather fabulous stick-dancing. Then the string band came on, which oddly was not a string band at all: a steel pan as the lead, plus drum kit, electric bass and keyboards. “Bassie” Mattheson was the bass player, who also played cuatro and fiddle in Harrison Fleary’s band

The next day we went over to Hillsborough on the bus and finally managed to meet Harrison at the cricket match He said he would ring us the next day ,and arrange a session. We also mentioned we’d acquired a gig the following night at

the Lazy Turtle on Tyrrel Bay; we had been seen at the Lambi Queen and the word was getting around. Things were looking up.

The following day, the trail goes cold again. No phone call from Harrison, so we’re getting a bit worried that we’re totally failing to make any real musical connections. We’d met Bongo and Bassie back at the Lambi Queen, but we hadn’t actually seen a fiddle or a banjo and time was running out. Dave Hennessey was laughing: ‘These musicians are like leprechauns, people think that they exist but they don’t really.’ We smiled grimly.

In the evening we walk along the shore to the Lazy Turtle, past Bongo setting up for a drumming session in a tiny bar attached to a couple of trees right on the sea.. Which I was very sorry miss, having acquired a taste for Carriacou’s world famous drumming.

At the Turtle we started playing, enjoying ourselves; Irish tunes, Cajun tunes, whatever. Somerackety Marseille sailors were joining in, clapping and dancing, and the atmosphere was developing. Then we were playing Keswick Bonny Lasses and the Grand Hornpipe, two fine English hornpipes. We changed key into G for the Grand Hornpipe, and it started swinging in an efficient way. The Marseilles crowd cheers, and everybody is clattering and banging when suddenly, to our surprise, Harrison Fleary walks in clutching a loose cuatro and a violin case, followed by a string of other musician. We carried on playing the hornpipe and smiling and they just got their instruments out and joined in as we played on. It was a magical moment, we had a big band session going by the end of the tune. Dave Hennessey was playing with his eyes shut, and he didn’t even notice that anybody had come in until Harrison started playing the cuatro.

We had a fabulous evening, the music rough and very ready; the audience were claqping and stomping and we were doing our best to play together in time, over the racket. The musicians who turned up were: Harrison Fleary with his fiddle and cuatro; Godwin Moses with his banjo; Bassie was there, with guitar, and borrowing Harrison’s cuatro and fiddle from time to time; Lincoln Williams turned up, who had nothing with him, but Katrina had a small triangle on the ledge and he made a rush for that, (they call the triangle the ‘iron’ there); Vandi Adams had a guitar. They chose tunes, we chose tunes. We discovered they played loads of old tunes that were popular in the 50s: Jim Reeves’ Put Your Sweet Lips A Little Closer To The Phone, Red River Valley, and

Elizabethan Serenade, which I was amazed to hear played there: a popular thing you got on Family Favourites in my youth. They did a number called the Heel and Toe, which seemed an Englishy sort of polka; also Oh Suzanna and other minstrel numbers. It wasn’t always easy to pick out the tunes, with generally one fiddle on lead and loads of accompaniment and a very merry crowd. The most interesting, to us, were the local tunes. They call them breakaways, up-tempo syncopated tunes with only a couple of chords (normally G and D, 99% of the tunes we heard were in G). They seemed to involve extemporising verses(possibly about us?), but like the fiddle lead you couldn’t always hear what was going on. Kate stood next to Harrison or Bassie, whoever was playing lead fiddle. And Harrison would go over to Dave and play loudly in his ear, to get the accordion onside. So musically it was chaotic, but absolutely fabulous, and lovely to hear these old tunes.

We never did hear the English quadrilles that Joe Scurfield heard from Canute Calliste, as all the music we played on Carriacou was at quite raucous sessions; we never got to the one-to-one situation with a fiddler to really learn any complicated tunes. We’ll go back! We threw join-in type songs into the mix: Iko Iko, Putting on the Style, the Bahamian Run Come See Jerusalem We had a great night of considerable geniality. Suddenly, after ten days trying, we had actually located the string band tradition and we were suddenly inside it.

Two days on, we boated north about Carriacou round to Petite Martinique, the tiny neighbouring island with a population of 800,and loads of local boats about. They say that the local business is smuggling. Who knows? A notable feature of this island, we’d heard, is the appearance of the locals. Segregation two hundred years ago gradually gave way to intermarrying, but relics of the geographical division remain. So if you come off the quay onto the one road and turn left, the people are paler than if you turn right. As usual Dave and Kat went off getting provisions and boating information (turning right), but Kate and I stopped because there were three ladies having a yarn leaning on the fence outside a house. We asked “Anybody know Golden the fiddler?”, and showing his picture. They laughed, and pointed back long the road to where we’d find his shop. Information comes easily in small islands. Within five minutes we met Golden Bethel and arranged a get-together the following day.

He had a beautiful gazebo beside his shop, by the sea, looking across the narrow sound to the minuscule Petite Saint Vincent. We settled down to music

and beer, which was one of the few items Golden seemed to have for sale in his shop apart from flour. He played fiddle and cuatro, Mathias Roberts maraccas; Ricky Frank and Don Blair with guitars, Chester Belman with a drum. They played similar sorts of tunes to what we’d heard on Carriacou,and in the quiet afternoon we could hear things better. Yellow Bird, My Bonny Lies Over The Ocean, Jim Reeves, two or three local breakaways. Golden played the Tennessee Waltz (wherever we went we heard that tune). I borrowed a banjo and played Susanna; everybody sung. Golden had some Spanish sounding tunes, like Trinidad parang bands.

We talked, finding out what connections nearly everybody had with England. Back on Carriacou we met people who had spent decades working in Huddersfield and the Pennines. In Petite Martinique we discovered that many people had worked in Lewisham and Catford. Coaches, apparently, travel up the M1, taking Petite Martiniquans from London to play dominoes with Carriacouans in Lancashire and Yorkshire. Old colonial connections dominate lives, and help generate a common musical lingua franca.

It was warm, gentle, and civilised; sitting in the gazebo, looking across to Union and Petite St Vincent, playing old songs and learning new ones, and sipping Carib beer. There is still a lot of old music left in these islands, and we were only scratching the surface. We slipped away towards evening, cast off the ropes, sailed over to Union Island and flew home in the morning via Barbados, leaving Dave and Katrina to sail on round the world A good time was had by all, we arrived back in Stoke older and wiser; and more to the point, we had found the lost fiddlers of the Grenadines.

2064 words

Greg Stephens 2014