Beginnings
My passion for Irish Traditional Music began around 1970. My close friends, Davie Wylde, Davy Graham, Charlie Gray, Dick Hogg, and I were all raised in Bangor, County Down. Our mentor Johnny Johnston, had also been raised in Bangor, but spent much of his childhood in the Mourne Mountains. He was a keen hill walker, so whilst he and his wife Anne lived in Bangor, they also had a small cottage in the Mournes. As a result, Davie, Davy, Charlie, Dick, and I rented a derelict house up the lane from Johnny’s.​​​​​​​​​​​​​
Above
Johnny Johnston by the fire in his cottage down a long lane from the Kinnahalla Road, Stang 1976.
Denis Reynolds is on the right.
Above
Wood's Yard, Kinnahalla Road, Stang 1973.
Dick Hogg, Des Finlay, Mark Lomas, Davy Graham, Davie Wylde, Charlie Gray & Nigel Boullier.
​​​​​​​​​​​​​Johnny was a keen ballad singer and Irish dancer. He played the guitar and regularly invited his friend Ernie Swain down to his cottage at weekends. Ernie initially played the banjo, however he quickly moved to the fiddle. In the Mourne environment we all started playing traditional music – Davie the mandolin then the fiddle, Davy the guitar then the mandola, Charlie the guitar, Dick the tin whistle and I the tenor banjo. We started playing in the Saturday night session in Peter Doran’s, the Mourne View Bar, a couple of miles east of Hilltown and later in Tommy John McKay’s Bar beside the Square in Hilltown.​
Right;
Stang, Clonduff 1976
Top Row - Denise Russel, George Russell, Davie Wylde, Charlie Gray
Sitting - Dianna Skillen, Nigel Boullier, Ernie Swain, Davy Graham, Julian Friers.
Back in Bangor, Davie, Davy and I played regularly in local sessions; Fealty’s Bar in Bangor and Finnegan’s Bar in Kircubbin. The sessions were a mixture of ballads and a few well-known tunes. Around Easter 1974 we were playing in a session in Finnegan’s with Joe Mullan (singer and banjo player), Stevie Egan (fiddle player) and Johnny Muir (singer, harmonica and bones player) when we met Geordie McAdam and Stanley Mooney. Geordie and Stanley had been playing regularly as a duet (fiddle and B/C accordion) and suggested that, since we were primarily interested in Irish Traditional dance tunes, we should go to the predominantly fiddle sessions in the Castle Inn, Comber and Balloo House.
The many reels, jigs and hornpipes that we learned in Margaret’s (the Castle Inn) and Balloo stood us in good stead when we started going to the fleadhs in forthcoming years.
In July 1975 we met up with four musicians in Fealty’s; Dianna and Norman Skillen, siblings who played tin whistles (Norman is also a singer), Julian Friers played whistle and flute, and George Russell the bodhran. Although they hailed from Bangor we had never met. We started meeting weekly on Friday evenings; the Fealty’s session commenced and although the session has changed over the decades it continued for 47 years. Dianna started playing fiddle soon after our all meeting up.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​
Right
Charlie Ferguson (flute), Davie Wylde (fiddle),
Nigel Boullier (banjo), George Russell (bodhran), Davy Graham (guitar),
Dianna Skillen (fiddle), Julian Friers (whistle/flute)
Bangor - New Year's Eve 1975
​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​By 1976 I had realised that the Comber and Balloo sessions were unique; many of the dance tunes played, such as various types of schottisches, polkas, quadrille tunes, strathspeys and mazurkas, had been long lost from the mainstream repertoire in Irish Traditional Music sessions. These tunes had been introduced by the mainstay of the session, Jackie Donnan. Jackie, from Shrigley outside Killyleagh, had learned much of his music locally in the late 1940’s and 1950’s from dance music fiddle players such as Toye William Savage and Willie McCloy. From this point I started collecting any information relating to the local style of fiddle playing; fiddlers’ lore, fiddle tunes and the crucial relationship (in terms of County Down) between the fiddle playing and the local dancing culture.
On New Year’s Day 1993 Gerry O’Connor and I spent a quiet afternoon playing tunes with Jackie at his home in Shrigley. It was then that I decided to play the fiddle. So after playing the banjo with Jackie for 19 years, we then started playing the fiddles together at least once a week until his death in 2007. We travelled locally, meeting and playing tunes with fiddlers. This refreshed my interest in the fiddle culture and opened up more avenues for research. In 1996 Jackie and I started playing for the weekly dance in Greyabbey Village Hall; this finally stopped in 2016. In the period after Jackie's death in 2007 Willie Lindsay joined me at the dance in an effort to keep the twin fiddle tradition alive.​​​​​​​​​
Nigel Boullier & Jackie Donnan, Greyabbey Village Hall, 2002
Right;
Jim Moore, Moybrick, 2004
​​​​​​​​​​​Around 1998 I called in with Jim Moore, a fiddle player from Dromara. Whereas Jackie had played with Willie Savage and Willie McCloy in the late 1940s and early 1950s around Killyleagh, Jim had learnt his music from Sammy Thompson and Robbie Chambers in the 1930s around Dromara. Although the two districts were less than twenty miles apart Jim had, to large extent, a different repertoire of tunes for largely the same dances. Jim and I played fiddles together weekly for about 10 years.