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Send us your review:
Describe the atmosphere and live music at a local pub, restaurant, festival, church or temple, club night.... inspire other people to check it out!
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Musician: Joan Holloway
Location: Wildhern, Hampshire
Instruments: various percussion / voice
Music: traditional English
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 听听Listen (2'53) to Joan Holloway play 'Pop Steers Polkas' (from "From the Vale" by Chris Bartram & Keith Holloway, WildGoose Studios, WGS 258 CD)
'I do traditional Lancashire step clogging and I play bodhran, triangle, spoons 颅 basically anything, but especially bones'.
How I came to this music:
I'm a percussive dancer. I do traditional Lancashire step clogging and I play bodhran, triangle, spoons 颅 basically anything, but especially bones. And I've been involved in all types of music over the years. I haven't had a telly for about 25 years, so my husband and I are either out playing music or we're listening to it live or on the radio.
I'm from a musical family. My father was a song and dance man and I've got a sister who was singing with the Australian National Opera. I got completely hooked on English traditional music when I first went to Sidmouth International Festival about 30 years ago, and the man who inspired me to take up bones was a guy from the Lake District called Len Davis.
He died about three years ago, but he could play with four bones in each hand, whereas most people 颅 including myself 颅 only use two. I first saw him about 25 years ago and was instantly addicted.
Bones can be made from wood but the most common used in this country are actually the ribs of a cow that have been boiled up and straightened and cleaned up. Apparently some of the best are made from whale bones.
To play them, you hold the two strips of bone between your fingers and one stays fairly still and the other moves against it. They sound a bit like castanets and may actually be the original inspiration for them, since the earliest reference I've got to bones is about 2000 BC in Egyptian times. They're found all through Europe and the Middle East and they were very popular with African American bands during the 1920s and '30s.
Where I play:
 In pubs of course! We want to keep music live, keep it in the public eye and keep passing it on. I also do Morris dancing and I'm a caller with barn dances and Ceilidh bands. I do a lot of playing with that but also with lots of pub sessions in the Hampshire Area.
Bones are not that common, so I get a lot of interest no matter where I go. People come up and ask 'can I have a go?' We go to a lot of sessions and work with many different bands, but one of the regular ones I play is a blues band in the area called Beggars Belief.
A favourite song:
Its actually a tune and it's from a CD called From The Vale, which my husband Keith Holloway (a melodian player) made with his musical partner Chris Bartram. The CD focuses on music and song from the Vale of the White Horse, because my husband was born in Abingdon.
The tune's called Pop Steers Polkas and they got it from an old character known as Pop steers who lived in the Wantage area. Chris used to go past his place to and from school and Pop used to sit on his doorstep playing a melodian and Chris picked up this tune that way. It's a composite of two tunes 颅 O Joe the Boat is Going Over, and a variant of Pigeon on the Gate. Anyway, it's got a really good bones sound on it.
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