Martin Wynne’s #1

Martin Wynne's #1 is one of roughly half a dozen tunes the Sligo fiddler Martin Wynne composed in the 1930s, before he left Ireland; his reels numbered one through three are reckoned the best of them. Wynne grew up in Bunninadden, in south County Sligo, spent the war years in England, and settled in New York in 1948, where he fell in among the great Sligo emigre fiddlers. A shy man who never recorded commercially, he instead passed the old Sligo bowing style to younger players — Brian Conway chief among them — and his tunes travelled through them into the session repertoire. The reel is most often heard paired with Martin Wynne's #2.