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The famous Sliabh Luachra fiddle player and travelling fiddle-master Pádraig O’Keeffe (1887–1963) from Glountane, near Castleisland, Co Kerry, at first followed in his father’s footsteps as the principal teacher in the local national school, but in 1920 abandoned conventional school-teaching for a more bohemian lifestyle.

He had inherited music from his O’Callaghan mother’s side of the family, and over the next four decades he taught hundreds of pupils, fiddle especially but also accordion and other instruments, moving in a wide circuit within striking distance of his home. An eccentric and notably witty character with a gift for musical variation, he left an indelible stamp on the music and folklore of the region, and is an example of how an individual musician may almost create a local music style.

In his teacher-training, O’Keeffe would have learned the rudiments of staff notation and tonic solfa, but for his own teaching purposes he devised more intuitive tablature systems. For the fiddle he employed the four spaces of the music staff to correspond with the strings of the instrument, and with numerals indicating which fingers were to be pressed down. For the accordion he used numerals for the keys to be pressed and in- and out-symbols to indicate the direction of the bellows. Hundreds of the notations he left with pupils have been preserved in private hands, and two volumes of facsimiles have been published (Dan Herlihy, Sliabh Luachra Music Masters vols 1 & 2, Herlihy, Killarney, 2003 & 2007).

Roscommon-born Larry Redican (1908–1975) joined flute players John McKenna and Eddie Meehan, and pianist Frank Fallon on a few 1937 recordings by the “Rosaleen Quartet.” Most of Redican’s music making, however, was heard in private sessions, at Gaelic League céilidhe or step dancing feiseanna.

While he enjoyed a brief career as a 78 rpm recording artist before the war, his real heyday was in the 1950s and 1960s. Redican was particularly in demand to play for dancers. The world of New York step dancing was upended in the 1950s with the arrival from Belfast of teachers Peter and Cyril McNiff, who introduced a new style that radically slowed the tempo to allow for more fancy footwork. To play for this kind of dancing required rock-solid tempo and precision, and Larry Redican was the one recruited by the McNiffs (along with Louis and Sean Quinn) to play with them on a 1961 tour of Ireland. He also joined Andy McGann to play for the McNiff dancers on St. Patrick’s Day-themed television programs hosted by Arthur Godfrey or Ed Sullivan. Redican also played the tenor banjo. He delighted in unearthing old tunes from printed collections and composed a few himself that are still popular with today’s traditional players. He passed away doing what he loved best, playing the fiddle, at the Irish American Society in Mineola, Long Island.