Brendan Taaffe: Pete Sutherland




Pete Sutherland: The Last House on the Street

Pete Sutherland, to my mind, is the quintessential American fiddler. Unlike an Irish fiddler born into an established tradition, and more—I suspect—like most of us, Pete came to traditional music in his nascent adult life, and had to make conscious choices about what he wanted to do. Out of a stew of early influences, he’s created a compelling and unique personal style, one that is grounded in traditions and pushes at the boundaries with improvisational leaps. Multi-instrumentalist, solo performer, band member, producer—Pete’s the renaissance man of the music world. We spoke at his home in Monkton, on a chill Vermont winter day.

How do you classify yourself as a fiddle player?

Jack of all trades, but my first language is old-time. Old-time’s nuances are most apparent to me, and easiest to reproduce from listening. But I think if I was starting now I’d be playing more local Vermont music, which is a hybrid of Yankee, whatever that means, and Irish and French-Canadian. There were some lucky accidents that made me go southern. I was living in Vermont, where I’m from, and there was hardly anybody playing anything recognizably Appalachian. This was 1972, and there were these chance encounters with the right people— an old-time banjo player named Tom Azarian, going to the Fox Hollow festival and hearing the campground jams—that gave me a critical mass of repertoire and a jump start on the style.

What happened once you had that initial start?

Well, within a year I met some people who were at the same level I was, and we started up the Arm and Hammer String Band. And in the middle of that was David Green, who had just moved here to work for Philo records as a producer. He had been playing with Bertram Levy in California; so he had the whole repertoire that Bertram played with Alan Jabbour, which came from Henry Reed and a lot of those older West Virginia players. David sat down one evening on his porch and played about a hundred tunes into this tape recorder, literally. So the lineage was passing along from Henry Reed to Alan Jabbour to Bertram Levy to David to me. The impact of that wasn’t totally apparent, but I knew I was on to something.

So that was one thing – I got excited about that. The other was having heard the Boys of the Lough for the first time and getting turned on by Irish music. We wore out the records we could find of those guys. And the third thing was meeting Louis Beaudoin, who lived here in Burlington. Louis was a French Canadian fiddler of great ability, and the patriarch of his family. Louis was in his early fifties and lived about a mile from me, so I’d walk there after dinner and play tunes. So I had these three worlds, all coming in different ways— the old-time this lucky accident of meeting the right people; the French-Canadian was right there in my back yard; and the Irish was this exotic thing that was turning everybody on.

Did you manage to keep them separate?

I probably didn’t because I was learning the fiddle at the same time. In the beginning I was just a tune-sucker and trying to spit them all out, and David Green said to me, “You just have to pick one style and do that— I don’t care what it is, but you have to pick one. You’re never going to get anywhere if you try to play all of these styles.” And I’m sort of a stubborn guy and I said to myself, “No, I really want to get into all of them.” But I did take to heart that I would have to be careful if I didn’t want to make a hash of the whole thing. I think I was as careful as I could be, and it paid off because those first few years are so important. It’s like being a kid; you set a lot of your patterns for your learning life right there. I learned to recognize the difference in bowing styles, even though I couldn’t necessarily replicate them. I tried to create all these files in my brain for the different ways that people use the bow. I didn’t spend as much time on the Quebecois thing, but I had that front-row seat in Louis’ kitchen to watch. I think the visual thing is really underrated; I learned to play guitar by watching as much as listening.

So that’s the opening chapter, which was a lot of grist for the mill. I was just getting out of college, and was trained as a teacher but I knew I didn’t want to do that. I was living in an apartment with a bunch of guys and eating rice and trying to get by on a hundred dollars a month, so I had some time on my hands.

When did Metamora come into the picture?

Oh, it was later; Arm and Hammer—which was Joel Eckhaus on mandolin, Sid Blum on guitar and banjo, Hillary Dirlam on bass and piano, and myself— played through the seventies and did some traveling down south, and got known for this blend of Southern music and Vermont music. We made this package for schools of Vermont folk songs, which is still a template for me.

In looking for material, did you find a distinguishable Vermont style of playing fiddle?

I’m not sure— now I would say its Scots-Irish without any of the ornamentation characteristically associated with that style. Occasionally someone will play a grace note, or a non-bowed triplet. I think the Yankee repertoire is half Scots/Irish and half French- or Anglo-Canadian— and Anglo-Canadian tunes are also derivative of Scots-Irish music. Some of it was square and contra dance repertoire, when they were doing traditional contra dancing here, which died out before WWII. And as soon as they encountered it, there was a great interest in country music.

While Arm and Hammer was traveling around, was the dance scene starting to come back?

Yes. I went to my first contra dance up here, which Charles Woodard called, in 1972— about the same time I started playing. We started the first dances in Burlington in ‘73 or ‘74, with our band and whoever we could browbeat into learning to call. There was definitely interest in doing it, and the live music propelled the events. It took many, many years to get it going—the modern day contra scene looks really healthy now, but we had to work really hard to make it happen. It was flourishing already down south, in southern New Hampshire and the Tri-State area, but we’re a long way from there.

That went through ‘79 and the band disbanded, and in the summer of 1980 I took off in my Volkswagen and went south to all these fiddler conventions. During that time I met Grey Larsen, who was living in Chapel Hill, NC. We hung out a lot and had a good bond, and he called me within about a year and a half to say that he and Malcolm Dalglish were looking to expand their duo. I went out and spent a week with them in Indiana and was invited to join. We played throughout the 80’s, and I moved out there in ‘83. That was the first time I had ever played full-time— we went for a model that included Grey and I playing pretty much every instrument that we felt competent enough to play on stage— so I wasn’t just a fiddle player. Grey played fiddle too, and we both played keyboard and we both played guitar, I even played banjo some, and worked on a lot of original music. Our hallmark was taking different traditional styles and composing in them. We felt our instrumental pieces were pushing the envelope structurally and harmonically.

Structurally in terms of being crooked?

Yep, they weren’t a 32 bar, AABB tune anymore. It was like a piece, a composition – and I think it holds up when I listen to that music occasionally now. The kind reviewers would say that we were like Aaron Copeland, taking traditional bread and making our own bread pudding. We were using traditional sound as the template for composition; we really tried to work as a group, and invested a lot of blood, sweat, and tears in the studio, hashing out stuff and trying to be democratic about it.

How many instruments do you play?

Do you mean play well? I dabble in a lot of things. With Metamora it was fiddle, banjo, guitar, and keyboard. Not a lot of banjo. I play a little mandolin, a little harmonica, a little accordion, some bass.

Are they separate in your mind, or do the different instruments influence one another?

They definitely influence each other. I was playing old-time banjo a bit before I took up fiddle at all so I had a head start in terms of rhythm. The banjo is what led me to get my first fiddle. I had a record with fiddle and banjo; I had been listening to the banjo and all of a sudden I flipped and started listening to the fiddle instead. They definitely influence each other. Sometimes I’ll intentionally learn a tune on one instrument and immediately go to another instrument, to work it out in its own idiomatic way. I don’t know why. Sometimes there’s the right tool for the job and sometimes almost any tool will do.

With your background in various traditions, has playing for contra dances changed your playing of those styles?

I've done equal parts of staying within the style of whatever tune I’m playing and messing around with it— it’s really probably about 50/50. Now I intentionally do that most of the time; if I start playing old-time music and the back-up is suitable then I’ll just stay in that groove. But I really play off of other people and if someone starts doing something rhythmically I’ll just go with it and before you know it I’ve hybridized the tune. I guess I’ve gotten known for being a bit chameleon-like; I can play Billy in the Lowground today pretty much like the Skillet Lickers played it, and then later on in the day go somewhere else with it. Either one would sound fine to me, and it would be the context that tells me where to go. I feel lucky that I can do that, and that it’s the gravy for having spent all these years learning. I’m able to do that, and people seem to get off on it. But dance playing has been the greatest thing for honing my chops, I’m sure it is for anybody. Just because of the sheer stamina you have to develop to do it well. If you’re the only melody instrument, you’re standing up there sawing away for three hours, sometimes fifteen minutes at a time— it’s made a lot of grown men cry.

Do you think that contra dance music is it’s own tradition and own music at this point, or do you think it’s still derivative of other traditions?

It’s really parallel universes. You can go to the Montpelier dance one week and hear very traditional contra dance music, right out of southwest New Hampshire circa 1970, and then the next week you can hear the funk-Irish thing and then the next week you can hear someone whose repertoire is strictly Cape Breton, and these are all people who live within 150 miles. And then you can go hear someone like me, who within one evening’s time plays tunes from five different styles. It’s not really to show off, because I enjoy all those things, but I try to marry the sound to the dance. The dance repertoire has developed eclectically, parallel to the music, so a lot of the callers are calling dances that come from as many different kinds of backgrounds. And a lot of them are recent compositions, because dancers demand more active dances. They don’t want to do those old fuddy-duddy things where the inactives stand around looking at the active couple. That energy, which is much more frenetic, demands a little more consciousness about the music.

If it’s a complicated dance I’ll play a simpler tune, because I think people have to be mental about the dance. If it’s a simpler dance they could get into something either quite notey and caffeinated or something funky. That’s where the Clayfoot Strutters come in—a band whose whole purpose is to be experimental. To me the experimental stuff has more of a home with dances that are easily learned, where the caller stops calling after three or four times, where people are doing well and open to responding to the funkier grooves coming off the stage.

When the Strutters play the dances need to be simple?

We have more fun, for sure. We made a lot of mistakes early on, when we were just into it for our own self-interest in developing these grooves, and to hell with whatever was going on on the dance floor. It somehow had to be between 104 and 120 beats a minute, and that’s about it. It was totally open season.

The Strutters started with jam sessions in 1989, which is when I moved back from Indiana. There had been a few people playing Irish music with drums and there was a little bit of energy around Montpelier. Jeremiah McLane and Lee Blackwell were looking to do something. Other people came and went, but the three of us got together and started messing around; we were playing anything, not just contra dance music. One of the early people who had a big influence was Seleshe Demasse, an Ethiopian musician who was living here at the time. Seleshe taught us a lot of traditional Ethiopian tunes, which are generally pentatonic, on the kraar, a nine-stringed pentatonically tuned lyre. When we started playing out he was still around and played out with us, and we still play some of his tunes that we’ve molded to contra-danceability. Later on, Sam Bartlett and Peter Davis played with us quite a bit. Of the current crop, Mark Roberts is the most recent to come on board. Almost everybody in the Strutters plays in other bands so it’s necessarily a very part-time thing, but it’s become a very high profile, part-time band in the contra dance scene.

Last time I heard the Strutters there was almost no melody on some of the sets.

Nope, we’re trying to figure out how to dispense with melody. Our early goal was deconstructing melodies to the point of absolute minimalism. We try to maintain the basic structure, AABB, so that a dancer can find their way through and the caller won’t start pulling their hair out, but the melody isn’t to be played the way fiddle tune melodies have traditionally been played, which is all melody, all the time. This is the antithesis of that. Really the goal is to see how far we can get away from that and still get hired.

What’s the melody person’s role when the melody is gone?

It’s to join the rhythm section. The way I see my role as a fiddler is to sketch the melody in the most primitive way possible. And there’s a lot of improv, so it’s sort of like jazz based on fiddle music. But we’ll mess with the chords too and improv jazz will usually leave the chord structure alone. So I’m not sure what to call it, except deconstruction is the mode and various dance music traditions are the fodder – old-time, Irish, French-Canadian, Scandinavian, other kinds of things. The groove element we’ve borrowed from afro-pop, Latin, and zydeco. Sometimes we’ll strip it down and do what we call ‘strutters unplugged’ which is where Lee gets off the drums and plays acoustic guitar and we play very traditional old-time music. It’s a change-up and we all love it. If we go to a dance camp or one of these contra-dance retreats around the country we’ll set aside one workshop and just play old-time music the way it’s been played, cause we enjoy that, but it’s not the reason the band is there—there’s a zillion bands that do that.

The first I ever became aware of your playing was Eight Miles from Town, and I’ve heard this as a somewhat common experience— I was just starting to get interested in the stuff and just starting to play. Someone had played the Camp Creek Boys for me and it was inaccessible; too rough, too scratchy, and I didn’t like it, and then they said, “Here, you might like this.”

Hah - Old time music for people that can’t handle old-time music.

It was a way to ease into it, because it was in-tune, melodic and sweet.

Yeh, there was a lilt to it. I was actively interested in playing Irish music, this parallel kind of path that couldn’t help but influence what I was doing, plus that was the kind of old time music that I was interested in at that time- the more melodic stuff, that to me sounds structurally something like celtic tunes.

Is that the stuff you got from Alan Jabbour?

Some of it, but for eight miles from town I had met and played a bunch with Bruce Greene, the collector of Kentucky tunes, and a lot of that music sounds very Irish to me. As I listen back to that tape, which is out of print, it was definitely trying to be of a piece, trying to be very melodic and sweet, and— I guess— accessible. I just made it for myself because a neighbor had a four-track recorder and it grew into this little tape that started getting around. I got invited to Fiddle Tunes out in Port Townsend because of that tape – it made its way to the west coast, because there were all these tunes that no one had heard, a whole tape of tunes that no one had heard and for tune-suckers that’s such a great thing.

Did you approach your bowing in a specific way to get that sweet, slippery sound?

That was my playing at the time – that was my style. There’s a big subject, but in as much as anybody tries to be multilingual and keep the styles straight, eventually you’re just going to wake up one day and you have a style that is distinct and identifiably yours. I don’t think I’d have the ability to keep the styles completely pure. I can try my damnedest to play exactly like Tommy Jarrell and probably there’ll be some Irish in there unintentionally. When I’m not in that head and not trying to be pure, and just play my way, I think it’s a hybrid of all the things that I like. To people that know Irish music I’ll play Irish and they’ll invariably say it sounds southern, and they always did, and to people that like hard-driving old-time music my playing sounds really northern. I’m sitting with my butt on the Mason Dixon line forever.

Lately I’ve been wondering why people now are so interested in this old stuff? Why are these old traditions still relevant?

I think it’s the honesty. The music projects honesty. Some people are into it more for the historical aspect, because they want to make a connection with something real as opposed to the cultural entropy that’s going on now. It could be music, or it could be an old house, or growing chickens or potatoes or whatever. But I think for a lot of people the music sounds pure— the emotions are easy to get, easy to latch onto, not covered up. We’ve become culturally conditioned by listening to anything that’s mass-produced now. It’s like being presented with a cake that’s totally frosted and totally decorated and it’s got the candle holders in and the candles are already on it and they’re burning and your name is already in script and if you just want like a little piece of cake— that’s what you get. And a lot of people don’t want that, they just want a piece of homemade gingerbread, so they’re going to search around for that. It’s a great watershed when something like O brother, where art thou comes along. During the course of the movie a lot of people are going to hear some pretty primitive stuff; they’re going to hear some glitzy versions too, but they’re going to hear John Hartford play solo fiddle and hear some pretty archaic versions of things. For people that don’t like old-time music it’s not necessarily going to change their mind— they’ll still see it as all hee-haw, but people who were on the fence or have just never thought about it at all might find something new. I’ve had those moments, and I bet you have too, where you’re playing out in public, somewhere accessible where people could just walk by, and every once in a while you get someone who stops and gives you this look, and you know that they’re having a moment of discovery.

The people I get first are usually kids. It’s as if they less stuff to clear out of the way before they can appreciate the music.

Sure, I’ve seen a lot of kids invent clogging on the spot. I lead a contra dance band at my son’s school, a Waldorf school. They all play strings and they’re in 3rd or 4th grade so they’re ripe for the picking. I have a dozen and they just soak it up. And like you said, there are no inhibitions or judgements. You could play something dorky and they wouldn’t say, “Well, that’s a dorky tune.” The sound of the fiddle is appealing to them for its own sake, and they respond positively to everything, and learn it instantly because their ears are wide open.

Thinking about the image of the cake being so frosted over—you’re sitting on the line there in your role as a producer. How are you trying to walk that line as a producer?

That’s a great question. I do the production thing for money, but I’m generally getting an idea of what the artist is trying to say and what their desired market is. If they want to present themselves as a frosted cake then we can go in that direction. If they’d rather be homemade gingerbread with some really good homemade whipped cream from your cow, then we can do that too. A lot of people see it as a very competitive market, and it is difficult to get anybody’s attention. The market is totally flooded. So people are just trying to find a way to get somebody’s attention, and the artistic answer is going to be different for everybody. A lot of people don’t think about it, and just model it on their favorite. My job is to try to steer people back to some question that they haven’t necessarily posed to themselves. What do you have to say? What do you feel like your strengths are? What’s your thesis for doing this, and who do you want to hear you in what light, and production falls into place from the answers.

Talk about some of the albums you made after “Eight miles from town.”

The record that I made in ‘84, Poor Man’s Dream, was my attempt to adopt the model of mixing songs and tune sets too, about 50/50. On Mountain Hornpipe there are fewer songs, but my thesis was all traditional material. There’s nothing original on there at all. The style that I play is definitely the child of Eight miles from town, kind of a mid-western and celticky sound, plus I used some fairly unorthodox mixes. Indian drums and flutes and Martin Simpson playing electric guitar. There’s some wild stuff on there, and I’ve taken a lot of flak from old-time people—some of them friends that I made in those early years with Arm and Hammer—for being experimental at all. For one, playing Irish music is kind of considered this fey thing to do by some of these purists, and in a parallel way I’ve taken flak for being experimental. Mountain Hornpipe epitomizes that, taking a bunch of good old-time tunes and doing different things to them.

And the flak is that you are damaging or weakening the music?

Damaging the music, I suppose. I’m not sure what, exactly—it’s not a substantive criticism to my ear. It’s just, “We wish the hell you wouldn’t do that. Why did you have to do that to a good tune?”

Have you come up with any kind of defense against that?

No. It’s just I gotta be me. I have a lot of good tunes that are still kind of under-known or under-recorded, and I’ve thought that somewhere along the line I should just put out a project that’s totally straight, just fiddle, banjo, guitar and no messing around at all, and call it ‘So There’. And it would be fun to do, because I love playing that music. But I see cds coming out by really competent players that have been studious about keeping their chops going with pure old-time music, putting out great cds of exactly what I would do.

I’ve got a lot of things I would like to do. I have a ballad project seven-eighths done that traditional and original Vermont ballads, played live in the studio, no fixes, no overdubs. That’s really a connoisseur kind of thing but I just had to do it cause it’s a nice little collection of stuff. I’ve got a fiddle project in mind that is just starting to take shape, and it might end up being as unadorned as I was just projecting. It wouldn’t necessarily be all old-timey; so I’m wondering if that would fly, putting out a cd of good traditional tunes that are not all one style, with something like the appropriate back-up. It would have to hang together, but the repertoire itself would be drawn from various wells that I’ve gotten water from. You know, I’m fifty years old; it might be time to do it.

The book, The Neighborhood Waltz, is new— my little effort at desktop publishing. It’s mostly original waltzes but there are some traditional styles there too. I’ve been writing them slowly over the years. I don’t write that many tunes, but over twenty years I’ve written this many that I like.

Fiddle players who are part of a continuous lineage are concerned about maintaining their tradition and passing it along, seeing themselves as tradition-bearers. As someone who straddles the fence in a lot of different styles and who does some teaching, how do you see your role?

That’s a great question. When I’m teaching a tradition, or maybe interpreting is a better word, I absolve myself of any lingering sins from messing around with tradition in my real life verbally, right off the bat. Like my political science teacher used to say, declare your biases up front and get that out of the way. Right now I’m teaching a five-week survey of traditional styles, so we spend one week on each style and zip on to the next – like one of those bus tours of Europe. To me it's no way to develop the long view about becoming dedicated to one thing, but I say that up front and hope that in five weeks the students will know what they like. When it’s appropriate to be a tradition-bearer— or interpreter, as I can’t be a bearer really— then I do my best to do that. As a player I separate myself from that so that I can be myself, now especially. I was angst-ridden about it for a long time, because I was aware of the subtleties of all these different styles and how important it was to try and be pure, and I still try to teach that as an attitude in a more intensive class. Old-time music is like this river; there’s never been that many people who play it, there’s fewer that play it well, there’s even fewer that understand it and fewer that are going to get to a position of some prominence or as a teacher where you’re going to be asked, as I am, to interpret for someone else, so that puts a lot of responsibility on you to be as savvy about the tradition as you can, and usually it boils down to a matter of listening. We often don’t take the time to listen—we hear something and just want to play, but if you keep listening to your old scratchy tapes or whatever it was that turned you on in the first place, and really key into the subtleties of the style that you are the next generation of, then you’ll always dig something else out and deepen your respect and make you a better player.

And I’ve found that as I’ve become a better player I’ve become better able to listen.

Exactly— I always find something that I’ve missed. No matter how many times I’ve gone over a tune, there’s still something there or something wrong. I feel like I get to a point, I'm sure you do too, that if you’ve listened to something enough that you can play that tape in your head, you can just hear the fiddler playing and play along with it. That’s how I maintain my connection with those great old fiddlers, but then you go back and realize that some part of it you’ve already processed. It’s your filter; you’ve filtered it through your own playing.

One other thing to sum up where I am now is that I enjoy the back-up role in a session now as much as playing fiddle. I’ve been playing a lot of piano; for one thing it’s a way to interact with some great fiddlers, by playing back up. It’s great fun, my chops are getting pretty good, and it’s another window on the music. Somehow physically it’s as much fun for me, and it’s a lot less work to play piano than play fiddle.

Emotionally the fiddle is still my main thing, even though I’m really into singing now. One area we haven’t talked about is the improvisational aspect of my playing, which is something that a lot of people point out, and that I’m aware of. My favorite early models were traditional fiddlers who also had that element. I wasn’t that I was listening to jazz or anything like that— though I did listen to Stephane Grappelli early on and Stuff Smith, and they have fed my playing. But if you listen to Clayton Mcmichen he’s improvising, Tommy Jarrell improvised.

When you improvise are you primarily thinking of arpeggiated chords?

Well it starts there, because I have a good working applied theory of chords in my head all the time. I'm never not aware of what chord I’m playing. The other side of that would be blissful ignorance, and sometimes I think that would be a nice place to be. Arpeggios is one way, but really I think like a jazz player, playing off the chords and the melody itself, but in a very narrow, very tightly structured way. I really do try to stay within some recognizable bound of tradition.

So you’re going to stay within major chord tones and not wander too far out of the key?

Exactly. In playing traditional music in a traditional setting, for a dance say, I’m improvising constantly. Sometimes it goes beyond the bounds that I’ve attempted to describe here, but most often not. I do think that my boundaries are bigger than almost anybody else that’s playing traditional old-time music, from what I can hear. I don’t think it’s hubris to say that, but playing for now thirty years, I just can’t think of another old-time player that sounds like they’re drawn to doing this to the degree that I am. Other people stay much closer to the melody. The downside is that I probably get bored listening more easily, because the improvisation carries a lot of the emotional weight for me. A lot of my attachment to the music is the tension between staying on this melody, which is very simple, and being adventurous.

How is your improvisation different from, say, someone like Bruce Molsky?

He would defend it by saying it has a basis in some traditional player that he had heard along the line. He doesn’t feel like he’s going very far afield from the sum total of all his old time experience. Where I’m aware of doing that all the time; it’s like I’m out there constantly dancing on the edge of what would be considered traditional old-time playing, or Irish or French- Canadian. Any of them, it’s like I’ve transplanted myself to the border of whichever country—immediately, as soon as I’ve played the first two bars of the tune. It’s a default thing, I'm immediately on the border, with one foot hovering over the border, ready to take that major step. It’s not a moral thing at all, but it is a conscious choice. It depends on the mood, taking that step across the border.

But even when you anchor your feet, you’re still near the border.

Very near the border, always right there. That’s the way I feel. It’s not even that I want to be there, it’s that that’s where I live. My house is right there, the last house on the street. It’s great to be able to make friends with people in the different worlds. It’s a gas getting to play piano with an Irish fiddler and then go down the hall and sing shape note music and play a little banjo with these people – they’re all great people and that what it’s about.

What He Plays

I’m about the least tekked up fiddler you’re ever going to meet. I’m playing the same fiddle I’ve been playing for twenty-two years, and I got it in a bar in Charlotte, Vermont, from the bartender, playing there on New Year’s Eve. He said, “You want to buy a fiddle?” So we went out back— I remember it was really cold and we were standing outside of the kitchen door of this Quonset hut, this bar we were playing at, looking at this fiddle. I went to his house the next day and played it; he didn’t play, he was just trying to unload it. I liked it so I bought it for 200 bucks. It’s a Steiner, a German fiddle, about 1840. It’s not the greatest fiddle in the world, but after a certain amount of years you get used to the sound and the molecules that are in you and in the instrument are bonded. I keep the bridge not terribly flat because I play so many different styles, and it’s a little higher than a lot of people like it. It’s not a loud fiddle so I need a little more volume that way, with the action a little high. I generally use steel strings – Prims or Jargars. I get a bit more volume out of them, and a quicker response. But I’m not that fussy; if I can play someone else’s fiddle I’m often happy to do that, so I think I come from that tradition of itinerant musicians. I happen to not be homeless, but in my mind maybe I am.

Pete Sutherland: The Last House on the Street

What He Plays