I come from Kanturk in North Cork which they say is the biggest town in the biggest barony in the biggest county in Ireland. I suppose the first musical influence I had was my father who used to play an old ten-key melodeon. Every Sunday he would take it down from the dresser and play for a couple of hours for his own amusement, mostly polkas and waltzes and the odd jig. I began playing myself at the age of ten, around 1953, starting on the harmonica and tin whistle and then moving on to the melodeon. I learned most of my father's tunes fairly quickly and had to move further afield. At that time there was an open air platform for dancing at Knocknacolan - about a mile outside Kanturk by a crossroads. Bill Sullivan was the name of the man who used to run it and a great dancer himself. Usually there were three musicians playing at it: Sean Lynch on the fiddle, Patrick Cashman, a box player and Jim Keefe, another fiddle player. The dancers were mostly polka and jig sets with maybe a few waltzes in between and most of the tunes came from Jim Keefe. Jim was from Ballydesmond and was a former pupil of Padraig O'Keefe, the great fiddle player from Glauntane, Co. Kerry. I started going to the 'stage', as it was called, on Sunday evenings and by arriving early before the crowd I would get Jim to teach me a few tunes. There were very few tape recorders around the locality at the time, so it was a case of keeping the tunes going in your head on the way home so as not to forget them. After a while I became a member of the group and we played together for a couple of years until we went our separate ways. I then went to Holland to work and for about five years I didn't play music. It wasn't until about 1973 that I started playing melodeon again and the following year I won the all-Ireland accordion competition in Listowel, Co. Kerry. Since then I've played a lot with Seamus Creagh, a fiddle player living in Carrigrohane, which is just outside Cork. I play in the old press and draw manner on a C# D accordeon which I tune myself and I get most of my tunes from the Newmarket area of North-west Cork. The musical tradition there seems to fall somewhere between that of Brosna and Ballydesmond, and most of the slides and polkas are known by the name of the musician who played them a lot rather than by a title of their own.