Keepin' it Reel

First of all, my apologies for the heinous pun you just read. It couldn't be helped. These things just materialize, you know? Anyway, on to business. I was listening to some funky old Cajun fiddle music burned to disc from some old round black flat thing, and it was of the traditional, pre-accordion, twin fiddle variety. A lot of the tunes that those traditional Cajun fiddlers played were reels, a tune style more commonly associated with Irish music. I couldn't help but wonder whether the reel was brought into Cajun music by the Irish settlers who assimilated with Louisiana's French settlers a hundred or so years ago, or if, in fact, the style is much, much older and came up through both the Irish Celtic tradition and the Northern French Celtic tradition.

I got sort of obsessed with finding out the answer to this question, and discovered that there was little to no definitive information on the internet (actually, I got tired of sifting through websites about fishing reels), so I asked my all-things-fiddle source. His answer? "Reels have been around forever, man. They were, like, totally popular in Europe as dance tunes for a bunch of hundred years before we even came to America, and they were popular pretty much everywhere there was Celtic fiddle action going on." So I guess it's probably likely that both things happened: the Irish who immigrated to French Louisiana brought a bunch of their own reels, which just added to the French Celtic repertoire of reels that were already happening there. It's kind of cool to think about, really... the reel may well have been the common language for those two groups of people once upon a time, and now both their shared reels and their descendants are totally intertwined.