TARA BRADYtalks to Liz Carroll, Chicago-born Irish musician and Grammy award winner
THERE HAS TObe a trick to it, but we're damned if we can work out what it is. How is Liz Carroll getting that big, surround sound out of a fiddle with such delicate little bowing motions? Shouldn't her music require the same sort of momentum the grim reaper might put into a scythe?
“There’s no trick, it’s all pressure,” she says. “It’s conserving energy. I had problems in my right shoulder a few years ago. Just the usual kind of strains you get from playing for hours and hours. I don’t get hurt any more in any way since I started looking at the Cape Breton style of fiddling. The first few times I saw those short bows I used to wonder about it too. It’s a very contained energy. It means you can hold on and burst through for emphasis.”
April marks a sort of homecoming for Chicago-born Liz Carroll. She’s making her way to the Wexford Opera House for the TG4 Gradam Ceoil 2011 (Traditional Music Awards), where she will be adding the Traditional Composer of the Year award she receives at that ceremony to a glittering tally of accolades. In 1994, Hillary Clinton presented Carroll with a National Heritage Fellowship. Last year, she performed for president Barack Obama at the annual St Patrick’s Day lunch in Washington DC. Did he tap his toes, we wonder? “You know, I don’t think he did,” she says. “He’s very intense. Every time you looked up he was staring at you really intently. It was almost discombobulating. [Michelle Obama] was totally nice. Such a lovely smile. But nothing distracts him.”
Although Carroll was neither born nor raised in the old country, her Irish parents ensured she became a lifelong transatlantic commuter. “Growing up we’d go home to Tullamore, where dad is from,” she says. “Or around different relatives in Ballyhahill. There were always letters going back and forth. I remember them because no matter what time of the year it was, my uncle began with the words ‘the weather is shocking’.”
Raised in Visitation Parish on Chicago’s Southside, Liz Carroll is not your traditional traditional fiddle player. She wasn’t even supposed to play fiddle; she was supposed to take piano, until the family couldn’t get the instrument into the house. Her grandpa introduced her to the violin and céilidh, and her dad played button accordion. Her skills were mostly honed at a time when such Illinois veterans as Johnny McGreevy, Joe Shannon, Seamus Cooley, Jimmy and Eleanor Neary plied their trade.
“Irish traditional music has always thrived,” she says. “You have that large Irish population going back to the 1800s. Francis O’Neill, who collected all that Irish music, lived here [in Chicago]. We had one particular very good Irish dancing school – the Dennehy School of Irish Dance – which would grab anyone who could play an instrument for live accompaniment. I spent many hours there.”
In 1974 she won the junior All-Ireland Fiddle Championships and took the senior title the following year. By 18 she was regarded as one the greatest ever fiddlers. “My brother Tom and myself were only a year apart and he had his rock records and I enjoyed them and would play little blues riffs or licks,” she recalls. “But I was always very focused on the Irish stuff. It was just satisfying and I still find it very satisfying. I loved it right from the start.
“Between myself and [accordionist] Marty Fahey and some of the others in Chicago, there’s always been an insatiable appetite for new tunes. We collected quite a lot. If we didn’t have it, we wanted it. Partly, we didn’t want to be left out. We were in Chicago but we wanted to be able to play and contribute.”
Her lust for new material kick-started a new career in composition. “There’s nothing like coming up with a little tune,” she says. “And when somebody actually likes it and plays it, it is so thrilling. And to know those compositions are actually being played in Ireland is the greatest thing.”
In 2010, 185 of her original tunes were printed in the book Collected. "I'm a little surprised when I was looking at the book and counting them up. But still that's pretty lazy when you add up all those years."
She has, to be fair, had other things to be getting along with. At home, she has her husband, cabinetmaker Charles Lacey, and two children, Patrick and Alison, to distract her. On the road, she alternates tours and recordings with Altan's Dáithí Sproule and Trian's Billy McComiskey. She was recently nominated for a Grammy for Double Play, her latest collaboration with John Doyle.
“I was three tables over from Taylor Swift on the night,” she recalls. “It was very unreal. You look around and there’s Mick Fleetwood and there’s Neil Simon and there’s Imogen Heap. It’s the first time I’ve walked into a room of musicians and not known anybody there.”
TG4 Gradam Ceoil 2011 will be broadcast on TG4 on Easter Sunday, April 24th at 9.30pm
