Although
born and raised in Chicago, Liz Carroll has found a stunning amount
of success in her ancestral homeland of Ireland. In 1975, at the age
of 18, the fiddler won the Senior All-Ireland Championship - the
first American to win that title in nine years, she recalled in an
interview last week.
And a quarter-century later, in 2001, Irish Echo named her traditional musician of the year - its highest honor.
Carroll will be one of nine main-stage acts at this weekend's Midwest Folk Festival in Bishop Hill, about 30 miles southeast of the Quad Cities. The free two-day event focuses on Midwestern talent but has an international flavor because of artists such as Carroll, who still lives in the Chicago area.
Carroll is one of most respected fiddlers in the world today, and is an acclaimed tunesmith to boot. The Living Tradition Web site (http://www.folkmusic.net) called her "the original female Irish-American fiddle prodigy," and she was awarded a National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
It's important to note that none of this would have happened if her immigrant parents didn't live in an apartment building with narrow doorways on Chicago's South Side.
Formal music lessons at Carroll's Catholic school started at age nine, and she chose piano. Her parents "did buy me a piano," she said, "and they could not get it into the house. It was an old upright; we were in a second-floor apartment."
So she picked the violin instead. "I was bummed," she said. "Until I got it. And when I got it, I liked it right away. It just basically never went in its case." It was also fortuitous that Carroll's school was one of the few on the South Side with a violin instructor.
"It's just like immediate understanding," she said of her kinship with the fiddle. "You just get how it works. I don't think I ever made a scratchy sound out of it. ... I never was horrifying anybody at home."
And that's more than she can say for her piano skills. "I don't think I ever would have made a good piano player," she said. "I'm still really bad at it. My hands miss the ones [keys] I'm headed for, or they don't know where to go."
Carroll
got some hints that she was good with the fiddle in the form of
awards at Irish dance and music competitions in the Midwest. But the
trophies weren't much of an
accomplishment, she admitted. "I rarely had anybody to compete
against at all," she said. "I wasn't a very good dancer, so I'd
come home with a medal in something."
In her first two years at the All-Ireland Championship, she took second and first places, respectively, in the under-18 division. And in her third year of competition, she took home the adult crown.
Carroll said that she starting composing at about the time she started playing, and she now has roughly 200 tunes to her credit, nearly all of which stand comfortably next to traditional Celtic music. "Everything that I write, it has an Irish feel to it," she said. "It's just in my bones. I can kind of make anything sound Irish. Anything."
Anything? "Rolling Stones, Beatles songs, commercials on television, Mozart," she said. "My big dream would be to do the national anthem during a Bulls game, for St. Patrick's Day, specifically. It's totally got rolls, and cuts, and grace notes, and everything that would make it sound Irish-y."
Although she's a prolific composer, her recorded output has been sparse. She released albums in 1979 and 1988, and her next solo effort - Lost in the Loop - came out in 2000. The reason, she said, was that as a musician who didn't tour much, she didn't need to have new material. "I was on the 10-year plan," she said.
But Lost in the Loop sparked a love affair with recording, and she followed that with Lake Effect in 2002 and last year's In Play, recorded with guitarist John Doyle.
"I just had so many tunes that I felt like it was time to throw them out there in the world," she said. For the first time, she hired a producer, and emphasized creating musical accents in the studio rather than just recording the melody.
But don't expect a crossover attempt by Carroll. Rather than trying to meld genres, she prefers to work within the parameters of Irish music. "What I like to do is to mess around with the tunes themselves," she said, "and within themselves, and to find new notes."
About the closest she came to mainstream success was a tour with Don Henley roughly four years ago. It wasn't the breakthrough moment you might expect - her role was minimal, to put it mildly - but Carroll sounds as if she wouldn't trade the experience for anything.
"We went [on the tour] for one song that was in the encore," she said.
"You'd just be out there, us Irish musicians, have a beer, go backstage, play a few tunes, then say, ‘Well, I guess we'd better get dressed.' And we'd get dressed, and then we'd go out and do our tune, come back, change, and go, ‘Where are we going tonight?' It was brilliant, because every town we went to was a big town, and every town has Irish music sessions. ... Just go and meet all our friends from town to town."
And with refreshing honesty, she added: "It was just really easy."
For more information on Liz Carroll, visit (http://www.lizcarroll.com).
To listen to the Reader interview with Liz Carroll, visit (http://www.qcspan.com).
