when I was looking on-line to try and find the lead spoken poem voiced by Johnny Cunningham I was startled to learn that he had died of a heart attack at 46:
Obituary Johnny
Cunningham 12:02AM GMT 19 Dec 2003
Cunningham began his professional career as a member of Silly Wizard, an implausibly youthful Edinburgh band that went on to establish a formidable reputation, touring throughout Britain, in continental Europe and in America. Over the next 17 years, the group recorded nine albums, Cunningham appearing on all but one of them, and influenced countless aspiring musicians.
Although associated with his accordion-playing younger brother, Phil, who also played in Silly Wizard, Cunningham spent nearly half his life in America, involving himself in a number of diverse but rewarding collaborations.
Much as Cunningham was inspired by traditional music, to the point of writing melodies that could sound hundreds of years old, his temperament was unsuited to confinement in a cultural ghetto. There were experiments with jazz-tinged, ambient music (in a group called Nightnoise) as well as forays into American country and (with his Boston-based band Raindogs) hard rock.
He also produced, with considerable flair, records for other artists, notably the all-female Irish-American band Cherish the Ladies, and worked in the theatre, composing music for Peter and Wendy, an adaptation of J M Barrie's fairytale staged on Broadway.
Until the day before his death, in New York on Monday evening, he had been touring with the Irish singer Susan McKeown, presenting A Winter's Talisman, their annual collection of music and poetry.
He had also recently completed a screenplay, Seeds of Crime, an ecological thriller, with his American girlfriend Trisha McCormick, with whom he shared homes in Manhattan and New Bedford, Massachusetts.
John James Cunningham, the eldest of three children, was born at Portobello, a declining resort on the east of Edinburgh, on August 27 1957. His father, John, was a fireman; his mother, Mary, played the organ at church.
At six, he began to learn to play the violin and quickly demonstrated the natural gift for music that was to compensate for his unremarkable progress as a scholar. Phil began accordion lessons at about the same time; both also played the harmonica and were recruited for an Edinburgh children's revue that presented shows in old people's homes and miners' welfare halls.
While still at school, Cunningham formed a band called Home Brew. At 15, he decided that the classroom held no further attraction for him and joined Silly Wizard. The journalist Alastair Clark recalls presenting a performance by the band for the BBC in Edinburgh and being unable to mention the fiddler's name on air because he was playing truant.
After one abortive attempt to produce a record (it was recorded in two days but never released) and a successful legal action to stop a bootleg album, they were given their first contract. The debut record was called simply Silly Wizard; it was followed by others with more imaginative titles, including Caledonia's Hardy Sons, So Many Partings and Wild and Beautiful.
Detractors occasionally sought to dismiss Cunningham as a "speed merchant", and it is true that he was capable of playing tunes at lightning pace. However, he was also a technician with impressive range. "With Johnny it was control and excitement at the same time," said John McCusker, another accomplished Scottish fiddler who regarded Cunningham as his inspiration. "He could play 30 tunes at 100 mph, then produce the most heart-breakingly beautiful slow air."
If folk music is still seen by a large proportion of the English public as something of a joke, it is in Scotland part of a living tradition. Few Scottish eyebrows were raised when Cunningham's original music was chosen as the signature tune for The Beechgrove Garden, BBC Scotland's gardening programme.
During the 1980s, Cunningham reached what many will remember as the peak of his performing career, as a member of Relativity, an outstanding quartet that brought together the two Scottish brothers and an Irish brother-and-sister pairing, Micheal O'Domhnaill and Triona Ni Domhnaill, from the Bothy Band.
In recent years, he teamed up with the Irish and Breton musicians Kevin Burke and Christian Le Maitre for performances under the banner of "Celtic Fiddle Festival". Yet he undoubtedly derived as much pleasure for himself from touring or recording with such artists as Bob Dylan, Hall and Oates and Bonnie Raitt.
Cunningham's boundless musical qualities were matched by a talent for bringing smiles to the faces of people he encountered. Musicians checking into familiar hotels in American towns through which he had recently passed often found that he had left drinks behind the bar for them.
On stage, he was a seasoned raconteur and ad lib humorist. Once, in America, he played a set which included a piece of music called Come Ye By Atholl. Afterwards he was asked by a woman in the audience for the story behind the tune, which she had misheard as Come Eat My Apple. Cunningham responded instantly with a detailed but wholly fictitious account of the Battle of Culloden, explaining that Scottish warriors had a tradition of exchanging fruit with the enemy.
Knowing nothing of such battlefield ways, the wicked English had merely taken advantage of the Scots' lowered guard and moved smartly, as apples were proffered, to win the day. "That is why, to this day, the Scots will eat no fruit or vegetables," Cunningham concluded gravely.
For Cunningham's Christmas present, his girlfriend had set up a website in his honour (www.johnnycunningham.com), which she has decided shall now be his memorial. Among many messages of sympathy already posted on the site is one from an admirer who attended the Winter's Talisman tour when it reached Northampton, Massachusetts, last week.
"As always," the writer says, "he had us all laughing at his dark Scots humour, and wiping tears as he fiddled Robbie Burns's Auld Lang Syne. He ended the show with an ironic Scottish holiday greeting, 'We're born in pain, live in fear and die alone. Happy Christmas'."
Cunningham, who is believed to have suffered a heart attack, died in Trisha McCormick's arms. When he initially complained of feeling unwell and then lost consciousness, she had telephoned his brother, twice the victim of heart attacks in his thirties, for advice. She called again 45 minutes later with news of his "peaceful and painless" death.
Cunningham never married, but was regarded by Trisha McCormick and her family as the stepfather of her son and daughter from a previous marriage.
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