Terence Winch: Craic-Head Poetry

  The FFV in Adelphie, Maryland, in the early 1970s. Jesse Winch, Terence Winch, Doug Pell, Alan Oresky, Joe Stork. A long time ago, in late 1971, one of the strangest string-bands in American musical history was  formed, and I was there at the beginning. The Fast Flying Vestibule (named after a train  celebrated in a song) did a little bit of everything, from Charlie Poole to Carl Perkins to doo- wop to Kerry polkas. We lived to have a good time. We were not purists like The New Lost City Ramblers, preserving the sacred traditions of the past, or the Red Clay Ramblers, the brilliant North Carolina group that stayed pretty close to the approved text. We did whatever felt good.      I remember a conversation I had some years ago in McGinty’s pub in downtown Silver Spring,  Maryland, near where I live. I told a friend that my old string-band was planning its first reunion in  decades. “Oh, I love old-timey music,” she said. “What did ...

                                                                               Beginish Some time ago, I was contemplating this medley of tunes from an album called Stormy Weather by the excellent traditional band Beginish: I'm Waiting for You Touch Me If You Dare The Gooseberry Bush And I thought: there's almost a narrative contained in the names of these three reels, an abbreviated sexual story whose climax takes place in a gooseberry bush. And, musically, the tunes seems to belong together. It must have been intentional­—Beginish seems like a witty and mischievous collection of people. "The Moving Cloud," "The Flowing Tide," "Banish Misfortune," "Paddy Gone to France," "The Girl That Broke My Heart," "The Pope's Toe," "We Were Drinking and Kissing the Ladies," "I Have No Money," "Money...