Newlyweds Bob Hendren and Bette Conway outside the Irish Center, which was one of the reasons they moved to Philly.
When she was house hunting, Bette Conway probably looked at the same things most home buyers do—structural soundness, good location, maybe even updated kitchen and baths. But she had other things in mind too: Acoustics, parking, enough room for audiences. Conway wasn’t just buying a house—she was buying a house concert hall.
The 120-year-old three-story house on Third Street in Lansdale was literally a dream come true. “It was a dream I always had, and Bob shared that dream with me, to have a house big enough for our musician friends from up and down the coast and Ireland to be able to stay with us,” says Conway, a fiddler, jewelry maker, and senior geologist with the US Environmental Protection Agency in Philadelphia.
Bob is Bob Hendren, the man Conway married on May 8 in their new home, Spring Hill House, and now home to Spring Hill House Concerts. The two, who met at a musical house party, moved from Indiana to start a new life in the Philadelphia which is to them the well spring of Irish and old-time music. “The Commodore Barry Club (Irish Center) is one of the reasons we moved out here,” says Conway, who lived in the area about 20 years ago and remained as much a part of the music scene here as she could in absentia, coming in yearly for the Philadelphia Ceili Group Festival and the Philly Folk Festival.
Music is so much a part of their lives and relationship that when Hendren, a lawyer and environmental consultant, talks about their wedding album, he isn’t thinking about photographs. “A friend of ours recorded the music from our wedding, mostly old-time, on two CDs,” he says, laughing. “I’ll have to get you one. They’re top notch players, fabulous musicians.”
There’s no doubt about that. Between the two of them—she had house concerts in her Indiana home, he produced and promoted concerts, both were plugged into the Irish music scene at Indiana University—they have some remarkable friends. A few weeks ago, some of their friends from the Midwest stopped by for the first of the Spring Hill House Concerts—legendary button accordian player Paddy O’Brien and guitarist and singer Pat Egan, two- thirds of the trad group, Chulrua (the other member is Patrick Ourceau). Next week, friend Albert Alfonso, noted bodhran player and maker, will be stopping by with his friend Skip Healy, celebrated wooden flute maker and performer who has played solo at Carnegie Hall and with Mick Moloney, Paddy Keenan, Kevin Burke, Aoife Clancy, Joannie Madden and many other “names” from the Irish traditional music world.
(Alfonso and Healy will conduct workshops in their respective instruments on Wednesday, July 22, 6-8 PM, at Spring Hill House, 136 E. Third Street, Lansdale. Afterwards, they’ll sit in on the session at the Mermaid, 7673 Germantown Avenue, Philadelphia. Then on Thursday, they’ll be playing a house concert at Spring Hill House starting at 8 PM.)
“This house is really acoustically fine for music,” says Conway. “ One of the first parties had here, we had (Philadelphia accordian player) Kevin McGillian in the front room with Irish music going on, and blue grass in the family room, with all the doors open, and they didn’t clash. I love the high ceilings and the way the music resonates through here. When I saw this place I just knew, oh my goodness, this is the perfect place.”
It sits on an unusually large lot in a small, quiet neighborhood a few blocks from Lansdale’s downtown in a very old subdivision called “Spring Hill” on historical town maps. “The realtor explained that the sideyard was a ‘Hollywood’ lot—one that they used to raffle off at the theater,” explains Conway. And she learned quickly why the area was known as Spring Hill. “We have a spring in the basement,” she laughs. “The owners had turned it into a well.”
Conway and Hendren plan to refinish the third floor “so we have additional room where our friends can stay.” As it is, they have their first long-term house guest, fiddler and metalsmith Louise Walisser of the group Tenaigin who is helping Conway with her jewelry business.
Conway came to music early. As a youngster in Indiana, she played concert violin. “Then I became bored with it and quit,” she explains. “But when my daughter was two [she is now 16], I decided we needed to have some music in the house. I took some old-time lessons with Brad Leftwich, the famous old-time fiddler. Then one day I was helping a friend move into an apartment and met a friend who played Irish music. He offered to teach me a few tunes and I fell in love with it.”
Hendren has played guitar and banjo “for many years, but it doesn’t show,” he jokes. “I’m sort of a beginner in everything I do forever. I play bluegrass music on the banjo, plus I’ve played folk music and write oddball music myself. Coming here, this is a whole new thing—the level of the music, the quality, is just a lunar leap. We had good sessions and players in Indiana, but overall the tradition of the music here and the openness is just a delight. Not only is it a delight to be here, but to bring other musicians here.”
The difference, says Conway, is that in the Midwest, musicians came to Irish traditional tunes because they loved the sound. “Here, they come to it because it’s in their families. They grew up with it. As a friend here says, it was another member of the family.”
She remembers one of her visits to Philly with the girlfriends she used to lure from Indiana to the Philly Folk Fest (where she’s still known as Bette Fiddler). They were visiting with Kevin McGillian and his wife, Mary, “and they let us stay there all day, drinking tea and playing tunes with Kevin all day. ‘Do you know this one?’ ‘How about this one?’ And I thought, it seems like family to me. That’s what I want.”
It’s hard to avoid that family feeling when you’re listening to a superlative Irish musician playing in a living room in front of the bay window. But be forewarned: Once you go to a house concert, you may never want to hear music any other way.
