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MP3 Jim Crawford - Matured to Perfection
21 MP3 Songs
WORLD: Celtic, FOLK: Traditional Folk
Details:
It is the 1920s . . . the event a harvest home. A boy sits beside the fiddler, his father, and takes a turn on the melodeon.
Jim Crawford has been playing Scottish music ever since. After a career as a dance band leader from the 1940s through the 1970s, he has returned to the melodeon, the instrument he held on his knee at that harvest home.
The melodeon is a small, light instrument. Two sets of reeds, two rows of buttons, a thumb strap to connect the right hand to the box. But Jim says that you can play all of Scottish music on it, and the distinctive sound is what he likes to hear himself.
For this CD, Jim has selected tunes that suit the melodeon. Jim has included sets that will be new to you. His own composition "The July Fair" conveys his childhood memories of the annual Milnathort market fair, . Listen for the sounds and sights of the fair - German bands and carousels. Other sets are old, of the era when young men took pride in ploughing a good rig. Two of the tunes are old waltzes Jim remembers his father playing. When you listen to them, picture the young boy beside his father, nine decades ago, at the harvest home.
"In my young time, amongst the country folk, if you could plough a good rig and be a good player o'' a melodeon, well you were somebody kind o'' special." - Jim Crawford
Born on 14 April 1914, Jim Crawford grew up in a farming family, the oldest of nine children. Jim recalls hearing Scottish music ever since he was a small boy. Most especially Jim remembers the ploughmen going about their work singing and whistling tunes. His head is still full of those tunes, and the many others that he has heard throughout his life.
Jim first went to work as a ploughman. By the time he was 18, he was also playing regularly at local concerts. Forming bands to play for country dances naturally developed from there.
The wars years saw Jim leave the land to work for the railway, marry his wife Ella in 1939, and move to Edentown, Fife, where he still lives. During these years Jim and Ella ran weekly Saturday night dances. Jim won the solo Scottish championship in the Perth National Accordion competition in 1954. Shortly after this, he acquired a Shand Morino button key accordion from Jimmy Shand, which he played for over thirty years in his own broadcasting dance band. During the 1950s and 1960s he appeared regularly, live, on BBC Radio Scotland.
Jim has returned to the melodeon in later life, intrigued by the sound it produces and by the skill of those early players. He says that ''you can play all the Scottish tunes ever written, with the two row melodeon''. In this collection of tunes, we hear the ''old traditional sound'' given new life. With the sensitive accompaniment provided by Graham Berry, you will hear why the ''wee melodeon'' that Jim is so fond of playing is worth carrying into the future.
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