I'm new here, and I thought this might be a fun way to introduce myself and to get to know other people on this board (and what a wonderful board it is! If you'd have told me 10 years ago that I'd find even ONE other person who loved whistles...let alone a whole on-line community of fellow whistlemaniacs...I'd have seriously questioned your sanity!)
I saw my first whistle the summer I turned 13, though I didn't know what to call it. I was working as a volunteer at the Expo '74 folklife festival in Spokane, WA, and I was sooo jealous of the people who were walking around with these nice little wooden "flutes" (end-blown, and thus actually whistles, though I didn't know the difference at the time) they'd paid $10 to learn to make at the instrument maker's kiosk. I'd just learned to play a few simple tunes on a bagpipe chanter, courtesy of another of the festival exhibiters, and I yearned for a little pipe of my own to play. It was 1974, however, and $10 was a lot of babysitting (and who had time to babysit when there was a World's Fair in one's back yard?).
Flash forward to 1975. The World's Fair was over, and my family had just gotten cable TV (yes children, there was a time when most of us only had a couple of channels to choose from). Somehow, while surfing the incredible riches of 10 channels, I stumbled across The Irish Rovers Show on CBC...and there was Will Millar, playing an instrument very like the little "flute" I'd coveted at Expo (which he called a "tin whistle"). And man...he could really PLAY it! I'd figured something like that would be fun to play around with, but I'd never realized you could get such lively and complex music out of such a simple instrument! I didn't realize it then, but a beginner's case of WhOA had been kindled....
Shortly thereafter, when I was walking home from school, I happened to pass a music store...and there, in the window, was a whistle just like Will Millar's! Actually, there was a whole rack of them, nickel and brass, in different keys. I'd finally succumbed to the necessity of babysitting, and I had a whole $10 in my pocket, so I went right in and bought the biggest one in my price range (a brass-plated Generation E-flat), took it home and, with the help of the fingering chart it came with, started picking out tunes. Every Wednesday night at 7:00, I'd be glued to the TV, watching The Irish Rovers and picking up new tunes to try on my whistle.
All good things come to an end and, while I mourned when the Rovers went off the air, I quickly figured out that not only they, but also most of the guests they'd had on their program (The Clancy Brothers, The Dubliners, etc.) had produced record albums (remember those?) Three guesses as to where most of my babysitting money went after that?
That whistle became my constant companion. It rode in my backpack to school, where it kept me and a few friends company during lunch breaks and at the bus stop. It rode in my bedroll to summer camp, where it once ended up at the bottom of Lake Coeur d'Alene. When I went off to college, it came along, and together we fought off my dorm mates' late night heavy metal fests with "The Rakes of Mallow" and "The Rocky Road to Dublin." When I moved to San Francisco to "find myself" it rode along in my jeans pocket, and occasionally earned me a little coffee money ("Honestly officer, I'm not panhandling. I was just sitting here, playing for my own pleasure, and it got hot so I took my hat off. Can I help it if people keep tossing coins in it?")
The whistle came along with me when I married and moved to North Carolina. I'm afraid it spent a few years gathering dust on a shelf after my daughter was born (when you have a colicky baby, your life revolves around two things...getting the baby to sleep and keeping the baby asleep and, sadly, whistling was conducive to neither). One long, dark night after Hurricane Fran, however, as I was looking for a flashlight, my fingers found the whistle's familiar shape instead. We were all grouchy, after days of cabin fever (you couldn't go anywhere for a couple of weeks after the hurricane because of downed trees and power lines), so I took it out back, under the incredibly bright stars (no power, no ambient light) and started picking out a slow air (I later heard one neighbor nervously telling another about the "eerie noise" she'd heard that night..."almost like music" (I did mention it had been a while since I'd played, yes?), and thus the legend of the Mad Piper of Trotter Ridge was born
.Times have changed, as they always do. I'm back in California. I now have a couple of hundred TV channels, but rarely watch the thing. The colicky baby is now nine years old, and plays the recorder...and I have a lot more time to play my whistle. Well, make that whistles...I've acquired a few more in the interim ("A FEW more?" my husband grumbles. "If you get anymore, we're going to have to build them a room of their own!" My favorite, however, is still that battered old Generation E-flat (it's so battered, in fact, that I had to hold it up to one of my other Generation whistles to confirm that it's an E-flat...I've never had perfect pitch, or a particularly good memory!). I know Generations are supposed to be "iffy," but I guess I got a good one...it has a lovely, sweet tone and a lively response, and it fits my hands like it was made for them. Who says first loves aren't the best?
I mostly just play for fun, but my daughter just told me that one of the parents at her school is trying to get a kids Morris troup going "If some of the parents will volunteer to be musicians," so it looks like my old faithful friend may soon have a second career as a Morris pipe (or maybe one of the Ds or the C...depends on what other folks are playing, I guess)!So, how 'bout you? Who are you, and why do you whistle?
Redwolf
