Early on in 2013, just after New Year, my good friend the violin-maker Padraig Ó Dubhlaoidh came to stay, and brought his fiddle with him. He came with a piece of paper that he had had in his case for over 30 years, entitled Four Jigs by Tommie Potts, which he had been given by Tommie himself in the early 1980s.  Padraig had never been able to decipher these, but thought it was about time I had a go. Once I had worked out the strange key signatures (B flat, F flat and C flat, for instance) and the strange notation for grace notes and the semiquavers, I had music that seemed to work, and I tried them out on Padraig, who exclaimed excitedly that it sounded ‘just like Tommie’!

Shortly after he returned home, I did a bit of online research and found that there was a new CD of Tommie’s playing, Tommie Potts - Traditional Fiddle Music from Dublin and even managed to find some sample tracks. One, labelled ‘Banish Misfortune’, to my astonishment, was not ‘Banish Misfortune’ to begin with: it was the first of ‘my’ newly discovered Tommie Potts jigs called ‘The Droll Man’.

Research went into overdrive! Padraig and I have written to a variety of people we thought should be interested in the discovery of what appear to previously unrecorded jigs by Tommie Potts, with no real interest emerging so far. So here is a taste: ‘The Droll Man’.  Without too much trouble, you will be able to listen to this, or buy your own copy of the CD! (The dotted slur is in the original, which I had edited slightly; the rolls are notated exactly as Tommie notated them.)