Al Murphy: Transcript

Old-time fiddler
Close Window

Alan Murphy is my name, and I'm from Iowa City. We had a little toy ukulele at home, a little plastic Arthur Godfrey uke. It had one string left on it. And one day I was fooling around with that and discovered that by moving your finger up and down the neck on that string, you could change the pitch— of the string, and it would make notes, different notes. After I'd been—after I played that for a while, my uncle, Leo, who had played the fiddle in the ’30s, got his fiddle fixed up again. And we started playing music together at my grandparents' house. And then eventually that led me to want to play the fiddle, too. So that's pretty much been my main instrument ever since. (Music)

I had a paper route in high school, and I was delivering the paper to this one house. Two older brothers lived there by the name of McKray. So I was delivering their paper one day. And uh, it was in the summer, and I heard somebody playing a fiddle in the house, and it was great, real old-time sounding fiddle, which really caught my ear immediately. So I just walked up to the door and knocked on it. And this old man came to the door. And I said, "Was that you fiddling?" And he kind of cackled and laughed and said, "Yeah, it sure was." And his name was Otis McKray. And I think he was about 82 at that time. So then we became acquainted, became friends. Well, I only lived about a block away and started to come down to his house. And as he said, "We'll have music tonight, we'll have a musicale." And he looked—he looked kind of like the man in Grant Woods's painting, “American Gothic,” if you can feature that. (Music)

The music scene in Iowa City—it was very unusual when I first started playing the fiddle to have a young man playing old time fiddle. In fact, I was the only young person anywhere around, as far as I know, that played the fiddle. So there was some older people—Guy Drollinger’s grandpa, Charlie, he was around. I didn't know him then, of course, but, and Otis McKray, and people like that.

I was able to join some bands, and some of them were country bands, and some of them were kind of bluegrass folk-type groups. And it seemed like that kind of music was more popular with the students at that time, like we're talking about middle to late ’60s, and early ’70s. And there was a time when I played bluegrass in the clubs in Iowa City four nights a week. (Music)

We still get together weekly at The Mill [restaurant] for the Tuesday night jam session. And that encompasses, you know, all kinds of different—as well as acoustic string music. And that's, I guess, been going on for 20 years, I think, maybe. So I hope that continues at least.