Celtic Music Fans Are Island Impresarios

By NIS KILDEGAARD

A visitor to their woodworking shop near the ice arena finds Gregg
Harcourt and Mary Wolverton hard at work, wearing headphones and goggles
to protect them from the sounds and sawdust of power drills and planers.
When they turn off the machinery to greet their guest, another sound
becomes apparent. From speakers mounted throughout the shop come the
sweet strains of Irish music - reels and jigs and airs played
lightly on the fiddle, pipes and concertina.

When they're not minding their cabinetmaking, Gregg and Mary
are the Island's impresarios of Celtic music. It's a role
that crept up on them, spawned by their love for the music and nourished
by the friendships they've found in the music-making community.

When the Vallely brothers - Niall with his concertina and
Cillian with his uilleann pipes - come to play their Irish music
at the Katharine Cornell Hall this Thursday night, Gregg will be running
the sound system and Mary will be everywhere at once as stage manager.
She may even be on stage if the performers invite her to unpack her
fiddle and sit in for a song.

But Gregg and Mary's story is too good not to begin at the
beginning.

Gregg came to the Vineyard in 1980 and Mary in 1993; each had
planned only a short Island stint, but both of them stuck. Gregg came
with his brother from Utica, N.Y., to restore an Edgartown house, and
found there was plenty of work to keep a skilled carpenter busy. Mary
came fresh from college in Iowa, planning to spend a summer running the
Essence shop in Edgartown. It was their good fortune to share a
landlord, and that Mary's summer rental had a cantankerous pilot
light in its water heater.

"We met right here, at the shop," says Gregg with a
smile. "She came through that door - I can still remember
it. She came over to see if I'd been able to fix her hot water
heater yet."

After her gig with Essence, Mary stayed on, helping out more and
more in the wood shop. She's an Iowa farm girl; her father was a
professor of English literature and her mother ran the family farm, so
her upbringing was a mix of culture and hands-on practicality. At the
University of Iowa, she'd studied in the theatre department,
majoring in costume design. "But I did lots of set-building,
too," she says. "I worked in the scene shop for one whole
year. Plus I did a lot growing up on the farm."

In the shop they make an excellent team, turning out graceful and
sturdy custom work for their Island clients. "I'm the
cabinetmaker," says Gregg. "I do the cutting and preparing;
she does most of the finer finish work."

It wasn't long into their time together on the Island before
Mary and Gregg were drawn into the music scene. Gregg has always had an
interest - before moving to the Island, he built his own guitar
- but they agree that the main impetus has been Mary's
passion for Irish music.

She traces it back to her youth in Iowa.

"I used to listen to public radio stations in Iowa," she
says, "and I was drawn to their Celtic programs. When I heard this
music on the radio, I wanted to be able to play it."

Mary had studied flute in school, and found it easy to pick up the
pennywhistle and follow an Irish tune; soon she was making music with
friends. "After I'd moved out here," she says,
"I went to Iowa and brought back my mother's old
fiddle." The instrument, handed down from her mother's
uncle, hadn't been played in years. "It was sitting there in
our music room in Iowa, in its case with old gut strings on it and no
hair on the bow. I got the bow restrung, and Gregg worked on the fiddle
a little bit, and I started to teach myself to play."

Mary took some lessons from Becky Tinus to get started - that
was seven or eight years ago. For three of the last four summers,
she's made pilgrimages to Ireland to study the music at its
source.

On the Island, Mary and Gregg enjoyed the occasional programs of
Celtic music that Avi Lev used to put on at the Wintertide Coffeehouse.
Through Mr. Lev, they met Billy Kelly, a true star in the Irish music
scene, and from that friendship, other musical connections grew. Mary
and Gregg started out helping occasionally with concert arrangements,
and without ever really deciding to, they soon found themselves
organizing concerts down to the last poster and press release.

It's never been about the money, Gregg and Mary say. In fact,
they'd be ahead financially without this sideline. They work hard
to publicize each show, and they're happy if they get an audience
of 100 for a concert at the Cornell Theatre. "If we don't
get an audience, then we end up paying the musicians," says Gregg.
"That's okay if it happens, because we love the music, but
that's not the way it's supposed to happen. The way we want
to do it is to cover our expenses, and to pay the musicians well.
Because even the best of Irish musicians don't get paid well. You
can win the all-Island fiddle championship and still be doing all these
$200 gigs."

Mary and Gregg smile to remember that the first event they organized
themselves was actually their biggest - a 1996 concert featuring
Paddy Keenan, of Bothy Band fame, and a roster of other top-ranked Irish
musicians at the Old Whaling Church. They packed the hall and gave the
profits to the Vineyard Project for children with AIDS.

Since then, they've settled on the Cornell Hall as the venue
best suited to their audience. After this week's concert, they
plan to produce shows in November and December, making seven in all this
year. That's enough, they agree, especially since each event
consumes the better part of a week's work, and after all the bills
are paid they've usually spent more money than they brought in.

They're not complaining, mind you. "We've met a
lot of musicians," says Mary. "It seems like we've
gotten to know some of the best musicians in the Irish field.
We're so lucky."

Gregg feels the same connection. "Melody rules in Irish
music," he says. "For a tune to survive, the melody has to
have something special. And another thing I love about the Irish scene
is the way it embraces beginners. It's open to everyone."

Trying to articulate her passion for Irish music, Mary recalls the
scene in any Irish pub, where the generations have gathered on any
evening and the air is thick with music. "You've got these
kids, maybe eight years old, who can play like wizards, and their
grandparents are sitting there playing together with them in the pub.
It's such a family-oriented music. Then some guy standing up at
the bar, some farmer, will just break out into a song and everybody
hushes down and they all listen to him. And he doesn't have this
beautiful voice, but he's singing with such feeling that
everybody's almost in tears."