Julia Clifford: The Surviving Tradition Of The Kerry Fiddler

In 1984, whilst studying at Colchester Institute, I visited the Irish fiddler Julia Clifford at her home in Thetford, England as part of a research project into the traditional music of Sliabh Luachra. This video documents the recording and interview from our meeting.

Since this video has been published, the two unnamed jigs have been identified by Katie Howson, folk musician and researcher:
The Cullen Slide (also known as Mick Mahoney’s No.1 / Johnny O’Leary’s / If I Had a Wife) followed by Kishkeam Lasses (published as Rural Felicity).

Acknowledgements:
It is thanks to Eileen and George Monger that I was introduced to Julia Clifford. Alan Ward's booklet, published by Topic Records, on the music of Sliabh Luachra provided useful biographical information on Julia Clifford and her family. Photographs in this video were retrieved from www.rushymountain.com. This video was created by Matthew Crisp (my eldest son) who brought these recordings into the 21st century and filled in some factual gaps thanks to new online sources of information

A note by Katie Howson:
On moving to Thetford in 1978, Julia and her husband John lost no time finding new musical outlets. This included a circle of friends from the Hageneth Morris team, based in Haughley in Suffolk. Someone would go and pick up Julia and John when the morris were dancing out nearby – Elveden for example, and they would play in a session after the dancing with the morris musicians.

So Julia would have played along with some of the English tunes (which actually were often not the morris tunes themselves) in the session and her own tunes were in turn picked up by some of the local musicians from outside their more usual ambit of Irish musical circles.

Julia’s answers to a direct question were often rather vague and open to (mis)interpretation: in reply to Linda’s enquiry – “Do they use different tunes” She replies “No … mostly polkas …” – but they are different polkas, not the same individual tunes!

To go into it in even finer detail, yes there are some shared tunes between the Morris/English traditional and Sliabh Luachra repertoires – e.g. Jenny Lind/Ginny Ling (polka); but not as many as might be inferred from Julia’s comment. Also, Julia had a much wider repertoire than just the Sliabh Luachra tunes, having spent over thirty years living in London where there were very few Cork and Kerry musicians. She and John played in Irish dance halls in the 1940s where many reels and other tune types would have been necessary too.