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I’ll take your question at face value. If you mean could be play it, then yes he could play almost anything he turned his mind to. He was one of the great Claire fiddlers. If you mean did he play it, I doubt he did. It was not popular in his time and not Claire style at all, which he loved. But if he did, he would have done something unique with it.

I was joking because I don’t like Tam Lin.

@@EvanWiederandersJazzagreed. A bit too Jazz like for my tastes.

Well in my early days we had what we called the country house dance, where all the neighbours accumulated on a Sunday night or a holiday night, and we had the cross road dance in the summertime. And then De Valera got into power and he kept the annuities that were supposed to be paid to the English government and they put a tarrif on everything that we sold, and prices fell down to the dirt. You might go to six fairs before you'd sell a cow or bullock. And then people had a lot of turkeys and geese and no-one to buy them. And there would be people going around with loads of meat trying to sell it. Twas an awful time. The money was very scarce. Well, they started to organise tournaments. There'd be (inaudible) played for three geese or three turkeys, or (inaudible), or a bull calf. And they'd play everything in the country house. Well if you made five pounds the night of that tournament you were lucky. To the shillng, a man. The girls were free in some places, and six pence in other houses. Well if you could call a five pound note your own you were lucky. And you had to make money somewhere. You had to pay the priest and rent and rates. And the fares were deadly. And there was an odd start of the IRA at the time. They wanted the 32 counties of Ireland united, and there was an odd organisation started, which failed. And the government thought that some of the money from farmer's houses was going to illegal organisations, and they passed a law forbidding all country house dances. And the country house was the place where we learned to play music, to sing and to dance. Twas our school. Well then the dancehall act passed about 1935 or 1936 and the clergy had charge of the dancehall. And there was threepence to every shilling tax paid to the government out of every ticket that was going into the dancehall. So it was the priest who made the money and so did the government, and our traditions were trampled on. We had nowhere to go to play music. We couldn't fit in with the hall where they had foreign stuff, jazz, foxtrots and things. And a lot the young boys, musicians and dancers, emigrated to England and America and there were very few people left to carry on the old traditions and the Irish culture. So music was almost gone when Comhaltas, Ceoltóiri Ireland, started an organisation and they brought whatever musicians were left together, and it started from there. And thank god it has come back again, better than ever. But our school was the country house dance, and if it was left alone there'd be no need for Comhaltas.