Caitlin Finley, center, with friends Emma Hinesly and Sean Earnest.
What do you do when your fiddle teachers are heading out of town a few weeks before you’re scheduled to compete in the all-Ireland Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann, the largest Irish music competition in the world, attracting more than 11,000 musicians?
If you’re Caitlin Finley, you get nervous. “Yeeessss, I’m really nervous right now,” says Caitlin, an incoming junior at Lower Merion High School. “I just picked my tunes and now I’ll have to do all the preparation on my own.”
Imagine Rocky without Mickey, Helen Keller without Annie Sullivan, the Notre Dame team without Knute Rockne. Caitlin is losing her teachers and coaches, New York fiddler Brian Conway, considered one of the best fiddlers in the US and an All-Ireland fiddle winner, and his sister, Rose Flanagan, a former member of the popular group, Cherish the Ladies. You’d be nervous too.
But there will be one thing she won’t need to worry about after Sunday–whether her fellow competitors in New York will be able to afford the trip. Electrifying fiddler Eileen Ivers and singer-instrumentalist Gabe Donohue will be headlining an all-star benefit on Sunday, August 5, from 1 PM to midnight at Rory Dolan’s,
890 Mclean Avenue, in Yonkers, NY.
“Last year everyone got a huge amount of money toward the trip which paid for a lot of the kids’ airfare,” says Caitlin, who will be traveling to Ireland with her parents. (This is her second trip to the Fleadh; last year, her ceili band, The Pride of Moyvane, earned the right to compete, which requires that you come in either first or second in the local Fleadh, held each year in Pearl River, NY.)
Caitlin and her current group (including flutist Emma Hinesly and guitarist Sean Earnest) have been burning up the local trad scene for more than a year: playing for the Irish ambassador Noel Fahy; entertaining at the Philadelphia Flower Show and at Kildare’s; sitting in with Mick Moloney and Tommy Sands at St. Malachy’s annual fundraising concert, and opening for premier button accordionist James Keane. You can also find Caitlin at sessions from here to Reading: Fergie’s, The Plough and the Stars; The Shanachie; Tir na NOg, and the Irish Center, where she often leads.
Though she’s been playing fiddle for 8 years, she doesn’t think it will become a career. Most Irish trad musicians don’t make enough to quit their day jobs. “And I don’t want it to be my job,” she says. “I want it to be something that I love forever.”
