Interview Techniques

The majority of my interviews have been the standard ‘one-on-one’ folklore interview in which I make contact in advance and arrange a time to meet. I have found that the vast majority of people wish to be interviewed in their home. When I arrived at the interviewee’s house, we’d sit, discuss and play music for a few hours. We were usually left alone by family members who did not wish to disturb us despite my invitation to participate if they so wished. Just as often wives or children filtered in, and out, of the interview space naturally. My approach to interviewing is a quasi-structured but informal

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one, in which I have an outline of the material I would like to cover but no obvious list in front of me. This approach allows room for interviewees to diverge from my line of questioning and focus on what they think is most important. The few times I did have a list of questions I found them restrictive, because the interviewee, in an effort to be helpful, went through the list answering the questions and did not feel free enough to expand into other areas. A list was useful in at least one instance in which the interviewee’s health was poor and having the list in advance allowed him time to consider his answers and be precise with the limited time we had.

Most interviews were between 90 minutes and two hours with quite a few running towards three hours and only a handful being under an hour. The conversations of less than an hour were usually conducted by phone or involved non-musicians such as the administrator Kristy Clarke of the Ireland-Newfoundland Partnership or television producer Manny Pittson (Clarke 2008; Pittson 2010c). I took notes during several non- recorded telephone conversations including: folklorist Wilf Wareham regarding his role in the Ryan’s Fancy show; David Maunder, producer of the Big 6 radio show; and Liam Reiss, head of Newfoundland Studies and the Festival of the Sea at WIT.

I conducted some group interviews, in relation to the Island to Island CD, in which I interviewed the Irish and Newfoundland musicians in groups in their respective communities (Creagh et al. 2007; Sutton et al. 2008). I also interviewed some husband and wife pairs (H. Oliver and S. Oliver 2001; G. Quinton and H. Quinton 2001; D. Randell and F. Randell 2001). In one case, when I went to interview Brendan Devine (1915-2010) about his family’s connection to the McNulty Family, both his wife and daughter were present as part of the interview and helped correct Mr. Devine’s

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sometimes faulty memory (B. Devine et al. 2010). Unfortunately, about six months after our interview Mr. Devine passed away at age 95.

The interviews I conducted changed in both content and demographics over the years. For the most part my master’s and the early PhD research included older

musicians who had been a part of the dance tradition and lived outside of urban St. John’s. These interviews involved travelling to their location with an introduction before I arrived. Once in the region I asked for more introductions and attempted to connect with other musicians. I always phoned (and increasingly emailed) ahead to introduce myself and explain my work. I never showed up on someone’s doorstep to ask for an interview on the spot. I do not recall ever being turned down for an interview when I was able to communicate with a musician personally. In one case, I had hoped to speak with Wilf Doyle, the first Newfoundland accordion recording artist, but his daughter to whom I spoke felt he was not well enough to be interviewed. For the most part, everyone seemed quite interested in what I was doing. A few times musicians modestly thought they did not have much to offer, but after some reassurances that their experiences were important they willingly participated. Near the end of my research, I attempted sometimes

unsuccessfully to get in touch with busy musicians in St. John’s by email. It is unclear in these instances if the messages went astray or if the person was uninterested.

Outside of St. John’s, amongst the older dance fiddler generation there was a desire both to discuss and trade tunes; however in the majority of my urban interviews the instruments were left in their cases and we talked the entire time. I attribute this to

personal taste of the musician but also the means of welcoming a visiting musician. In smaller communities, where there are not many traditional musicians, it was a treat to

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meet a new musician with whom to share tunes and to learn new ones. Often, I had the sense that the chance to talk about music with an interested person was welcomed. In some of these cases, my versions of tunes were seen as being correct because it was assumed I had learnt them from an authoritative source such as a music book, recording or prominent musician. In one case, John Drover of Whitbourne wished for me to commit his entire repertoire to memory before I left (2001, 2002). It was very

informative to hear Drover’s commentary regarding what was musically important to him.

For professional musicians, most of whom lived in St. John’s, the emphasis on playing and sharing tunes was not as strong as it was in the outports. These musicians were more interested in conveying their own thoughts and ideas about music and used their instrument to demonstrate. I suggest there are a number of reasons for this tendency. These musicians were more likely to have gone to university, particularly in folklore, and assumed I was seeking ideas rather than tunes, which were available on their recordings. It is also possible that they did not see themselves as tradition bearers in the same way as they might have considered the older dance musicians from whom both they and I wished to collect “dying” tunes. I had also played with many of them in the past and would have the opportunity to do so again, so there was no rush to play tunes during an interview. These interviews often ended with the agreement to play together at another time in the future. Over the course of my ten years of cumulative research I have moved from interviewing the local dance musician to professional traditional musicians in the wider public eye.

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As my work progressed the nature of my questions changed. During my masters work I was seeking to collect old dance tunes and reconstruct oral history surrounding the music of the dance tradition in a given region. I did not discourage tunes learned from media, but I did actively encourage the memory retrieval of local dance tunes which may have fallen out of a musician’s active repertoire. I also concentrated on asking musicians about technique and their thoughts about Newfoundland musical style. Sometimes the questions extended into a comparison between Newfoundland and Irish music and sometimes not. For my PhD work, I moved towards asking about interviewees’ current experiences as Newfoundland musicians and their perceptions of how Newfoundland music has changed in the past few decades. I also asked how they compared

Newfoundland and Irish music. This line of questioning began by trying to elicit responses about “Celtic” music, a term that did not resonate with many musicians. I found that these musicians were far more interested in regionalizing and localizing music than whitewashing it with a transnational term. I then tried to re-position the question by asking about specific Irish musicians who have had an influence in Newfoundland which led to examining the McNulty Family, Ryan’s Fancy and Séamus Creagh for this

dissertation.