BERNIE & EDDY INVITE YOU TO ENJOY THE CUP OF TEA.
A picture on a CD, from Moncton, ten years ago I would have been sure was trick photography!
It’s a picture of New Brunswick’s veteran king of the bluegrass fiddle, Eddy Poirier, sitting across a circular table from a leading senior folk and Irish music interpreter, Bernie Houlahan, little tea cups raised. Eddy, on the left, a saucer in front of him and Bernie,on the right, an orange and black cat perched. Between them is a teapot….a Brown Betty, no less…objects I would never have associated with either.
Yet, I must admit years ago, whenever I’d meet Eddy at a festival he’s always invite me to: “Come over to my camper and have a cup of tea, We need to talk.”
Funny thing it never was tea. But it was served in mugs. Mugs! Not dainty little china cups!
Here’s another rub, too! They even named this album of six instrumental Irish fiddling tracks… each a medley of two tunes…and six Irish songs The Cup Of Tea- Irish Traditional Music.
It shouldn’t have been a surprise though. Eddy and Bernie have been getting together for years and have played the odd Moncton venue together. And each has always had a great admiration for the other’s musical talents. The surprise should have been that it took so long!
I have listened all night long to Eddy’s fiddle and banjo around campfires at early NB festivals that his Bluegrass 4 staged on the old Shediac Road! And on more nights until near daylight listening to Bernie sing dozens of songs from the inexhaustible repertoire he’s filed in memory during a lifetime dedicated to learning all the beautiful songs and melodies, he’d find, through ceaseless searching.
They’re two of my favourite musicians and people. But, so different in the perception of many who know them. Both driven, however, by the same unquenchable thirst to learn both old or new-to-them music and perform it for audiences in an effort to give such discoveries a deserved new life, the appreciation such treasures deserve!
‘Two veterans of the Maritime music scene,’ this CD’s back notes read, ‘have collaborated on a collection of their favourite Irish music. Although they’ve pursued somewhat different musical paths they’ve always enjoyed getting together to ‘play a few tunes’ around a kitchen table or to appear together in public performance.’
Well, in their words, “ it’s nothing fancy”, but to most of us who have known them since the 1970s this CD is a treasure. A wealth of Irish fiddle tunes…12 on six tracks… with six of the loveliest, and perhaps most enduring, Irish ballads thrown in to sweeten the pot… brew, that is!
The fiddle tunes played by Eddy, Bernie’s guitar backing him, include: Toss The Feathers, Woman of the House, Cup Of Tea (the title theme), Tarbolton Lodge, Home Ruler, Cross The Fence, Jackson’s Morning Brush, Tongs By The Fire, Cooley’s Reel, The Wise Maid, The Peeler’s Jacket and Love At The Endings.
Eddy Poirier has been featured on nearly a hundred albums…lps, cassettes, CDs and, I think, maybe an 8-track or two, over at least four decades. Many of those were as one of the Blue Diamonds during the decade that that quartet of singing musicians were Toronto’s leading country club band. Then he did a few with Smiley Bates, and with his wife Rose and Smiley. Then back home with various alliances of top NB performers called The Bluegrass 4, a number of solo recordings and an unknown number with performers Moncton to Toronto he’s backed at recording sessions in those years.
I first met Bernie Houlahan when he joined our Saint John Folk club in the late 1970’s.. By then he had belonged to several Moncton music groups and during at least one bluegrass flirtation was part of an alliance that brought in such legendary acts as Flatts & Scruggs, Mac Wiseman and others. At that time he was hosting a weekly Moncton radio folk music show that had a long run of nearly 18 years. And Bernie was a part of the Hal ‘n Tow folk trio, from the early 1980s until this past September, with composer, multi-instrumentalist James Stewart and the late, lamented great musican and vocalist John Murphy. For the last twenty he has been a member of the Miramichi’s Comhaltas Irish Chapter, too,
Some of the most treasured evenings of my life have been listening to Bernie and Portland, Maine’s Kendall Morse taking turns dredging up old songs from memory and performing them thrillingly downstairs at a club in Belfast, Maine during folk gatherings yearly .
On The Cup of Tea Bernie sings: The Blarney Roses, Welcome Paddy Home, Lord of the Dance, Bridget Flynn, Galway City and Far Away In Australia.
This great CD was recorded at E.J.P. Studio in Moncton, mi
xed and mastered by Eddy Poirier. For copies, phone Bernie at (506) 389-2042 or Eddy at (506) 384-8655.
Guitarist Mark Hill’s Up Home Tonight audition in the mid-80’s probably still exists in the dark recesses of some ATV film vault. What is not recorded on it is went on behind the camera such as that query by producer/ director Barry Bramhill.
It’s that rare dexterity of mind and hand that Mark exhibits playing his interpretation of Moulin Rouge, its fingered melody with the thumb picking that sounds like an overdub so exquisite I nearly forget how beautiful Zsa Zsa Gabor looked singing it in the original 1954 movie of the same name. It’s one of twelve instrumentals on his new CD A Mark In Time he took copies of to the Chet Atkins Appreciation Society (CAAS) Convention at Sheraton Music City Hotel near Opryland this week, July 9-12.