On 6 Feb 2010, Richard Shuttleworth wrote: > How many more books on Billy Pigg can you find to write? (Big grin here)
The existing one (the 1997 book with the biography and interviews in) is effectively out of print - there are a few copies left which will be available to NPS members only. The one you have was an ephemeral printing only. The tunebook-sized volumes currently in production are a re-write of the 1997 book, with some biography, updated information on Billy's playing style using two or three of Geoff's transcriptions of common tunes as illustrations, and revision (where necessary) of the tunes themselves. I've listened to all the tunes with a far more educated ear than 13 years ago: the 1st edition I was effectively ghost- writing. One will have all Billy's compositions in: the other is a wider selection of tunes he played. Once that's out, I will have said all I'm intending to on the subject. Billy was a one-off (there are those who would say thank goodness!), an important influence on C20 piping and wrote some darn good tunes. > Gay McKeon .... This version varies quite a bit from Billy's in the > second part but it is certainly the same air. I shall study this. Gay came and did a concert at the Chantry a few years back and I was most impressed. I suspect that like most airs, this one has as many versions as there are players - and so it should be, in a sense. > Adrian plays > Sliabh na m'Bhan followed by The Iron Man. My liner notes are so old I > didn't see the forward slash in the printing Ah, that explains it. > Thank you, Julia, for separating my enquiry from the bitter correspondence > it seems to have generated. Not at all...we are both, I believe, founder members of this list, and have followed it through an assortment of ups and downs. On balance I think it's been of great use to a large number of people over the years. I believe we first "met" on the bagpipe list which preceded it, which IIRC drowned in a welter of GHB wars that make some exchanges on here, recent and not-so-recent, pale into insignificance. Anyway, I like lively debate. Julia To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
