Wynter on Tap

Wynter and Tommy Sheridan turning up the heat at the Chieftain in Plainville, MA.

Wynter Pingel started off the evening playing the traditional Irish reel The Maid Behind the Bar. Softly at first, her thin fingers delicately dancing along the fiddle’s strings. Then the other five musicians, all sitting in a semi-circle on the tiny stage, joined in, blending another fiddle, banjo, percussion, guitar, and accordion into one sound. It got fast and loud and hot in short order, Wynter’s feet involuntarily tapping to the driving beat she, they, were creating.

On a chilly evening this past November I had parked myself on a barstool at The Chieftain, a local watering hole serving pub fare and beer in Plainville, Massachusetts. The Boston-based Irish band Connaught was gigging there, and it seemed everyone from the area knew about it too. The pub was at full capacity, perhaps eighty souls with standing-room only and a line of hopefuls at the door waiting for a spot inside. Along the walls was a hodgepodge of decorative themes: a football signed by Tom Brady and other sports paraphernalia, a life-size cigar store Indian, Guinness and Newcastle beer signs and posters, and three tv screens strategically mounted near the ceiling so the patrons could watch The Breeders’ Cup. Even the little real estate on stage that wasn’t claimed by a musician was filled with microphone stands, speaker wires, and floor monitors while the instrument cases huddled in clusters along the edges. The place was cluttered, but it was the music that owned the space.

Wynter, dressed in loose-fitting slender jeans and a royal blue knitted pull-over with her brown hair pulled back tight into a long ponytail, sat with her back ramrod straight, her fiddle firmly tucked between her collar bone and chin and worked the bow. She played Irish jigs and reels to the overwhelming Boston-area Irish audience as if born to the music. But what newcomers to the club that night would not know was that she was a Wisconsin transplant without a drop of Irish blood in her veins. And Wynter Pingel had been sightless from birth some 41 years go.

The rhythmic tap, tap, tap of Wynter’s white cane was barely audible in the din of the South Boston neighborhood street sounds punctuated by deafening rap music from cars passing by. She walked slowly and deliberately on the sidewalk, feeling the hard stop of her cane on the right sweep against the granite base to a wrought iron fence separating the sidewalk from the courtyard outside her apartment building. In her other hand, Wynter carried a wooden box, cube-shaped, perhaps twelve inches in each dimension. It had a latch on one side to secure the lid, and a handle on top not unlike the kind found on a briefcase.

Tap, tap, tap.

Along the way we made small talk. Wynter often prefaced her sentences with, “Yuh-knooo;” grace notes to her thoughts, her accent a vestige of her mid-western roots.

Tap, tap, tap.

A couple yards further Wynter’s cane fell silent with nothing but air low to the ground on the right-side sweep. We were at the entrance gate to the courtyard. Her hair flowed half-way down her back partially covering her slender body. A few strands fell across her face as her thin fingers pressed the code buttons to the gate’s lock. With a deft-head movement, Wynter quickly shook those strays back where they belonged, or at least off her face.

My natural inclination was to help her along the sidewalk, to carry the wooden box, to open the gate. But she didn’t need my help. If Wynter wanted help – ever – she would ask for it, thank you very much.

I had met Wynter on this crisp fall day for a conversation, although not for a conversation in the usual sense. Instead, we spoke in another grammar – of musical notes and 1-4-5 chord progressions, scales, thirds and fifths, and key signatures. We sat in the courtyard where she removed her concertina, a small bellows-type musical instrument, from the protective wooden box. Wynter slid her hands under the straps on each side of the concertina, placed her fingers on the end plate buttons that, when pressed while drawing and pushing air with the bellows through the internal reeds, create the notes. I took out my flute, a reproduction of an 1850s Firth, Pond & Co. made of African Blackwood with silver keys.

Together we shared in our common addiction of traditional Irish jigs, reels, and hornpipes. The first conversation was a trio of tunes dating back at least a couple hundred years: Smash the Windows/Haste to the Wedding/The Frost is All Over (one of Wynter’s favorites).

Three times each?

“Sounds good!”

A few passers-by paused to eavesdrop on our conversation and watch us from the sidewalk through the wrought iron fence before pursuing their own business elsewhere.

Did they recognize her musical accent, a relaxed and flowing blend of East Galway and County Clare styles of playing with little in the way of note ornamentation? Many players start out striving to master the Sligo style – fast and furious with lots of ornamentation, gussying up notes with cuts, strikes, and rolls. But the East Galway and Clare styles are subtle, more mature, like fine Irish whiskey. It welcomes you into the conversation with warmth. It’s a style that matches Wynter’s demeaner. Perhaps the street-side observers couldn’t verbalize what they heard, but they felt it and understood its universal language.

We conversed in another tune, The Eavesdropper, a nod to those dwelling along the wrought iron fence to pick up bits of our musical dialogue. An older gent dressed in comfortable, but worn working clothes stopped to listen around the time of an afternoon shift change. It looked like he dated from the time when South Boston was a bastion of Irish expats and second-generation Paddys. “I like that good old music!” he finally said before moving on.

Wynter grew up in a small town in northern Wisconsin, the middle child bookended by an older brother and a younger sister all under the watchful eyes of a protective mother and a father who did not want to treat Wynter differently than the other two children. Her dad took them cross-country skiing, sledding, hiking, and swimming. They all had to wash dishes. And like many young families, music lessons were part of their childhood experiences. Of the three siblings, only Wynter formally adopted the music grammar into her life. “We all loved music,” she explained, “but I think I was the only one who got the natural ability for it.”

Wynter’s first instrument was a violin of sorts. According to her sister, Lyndsay, when Wynter was only a few years old she was learning to hold a violin made from an empty check box and a ruler. Then the formal lessons started: classical violin, piano, and voice culminating in a music degree from Viterbo University in Wisconsin and later with a professional diploma in Music Production and Engineering from Berklee College of Music in Boston.

For Wynter, it’s about the relationship to the music. Wynter explains that “there was just the joy of making these sounds and imitating players. It was for me a very solitary thing. It wasn’t about the external gratification that I got from it. It was much more internally gratifying.” It is like total music immersion: the sounds, the physical interaction with the violin or with the piano, the notes as well as the silences between the notes. It’s about being one with the instrument. But first one must be aware. And this takes practice.

“When I’m out for a walk,” Wynter says, “I will just decide all of a sudden to be as aware as I possibly can of myself and my surroundings…and then I just let this information come in with this decided, with this intentional sense of awareness. I’ll pay attention to the way my feet feel while I’m walking over whatever surface they’re on. I’ll pay attention to any of the sounds that I hear: birds in the trees or somebody calling someone across the street or a garbage truck or a dog. What does the air feel like around me? What does it feel like for my body to be moving through this particular space?”

Does Wynter think that by not having the sense of sight that another sense, like hearing, is heightened? She thinks this idea is hogwash and believes she cannot hear better than others.

Her sister, Lyndsay, disagrees. “When we were kids we would play hide-and-go-seek, which all my friends would think was cruel, like [Wynter] is never going to find you. Well, I’d stand on this big wood dining table and hold my breath when she came into the room because I knew she would be able to hear me breathing.”

Now apply that sense and awareness to music, mix in natural talent and lots of practice and you’ve got a great musician, or as Emerald Rae refers to Wynter as a “Bass Ass” musician.

Emerald is a New England-based fiddler and Berklee alum who hosted traditional Scottish and Irish music jam sessions at John Harvard’s Brew House in Cambridge’s Harvard Square in 2009. This was the time when Wynter had drifted away from the classics and started dabbling in folk music. Piano and voice became less important to express her music and she repackaged her classical violin as a fiddle and later added the concertina to her musical expressions.

Emerald remembers Wynter coming to the sessions and just listening. “She didn’t know very much at the beginning. I vaguely remember her not knowing a ton of tunes. She was there with us all the time.” The session was a “kind of little community of people,” Emerald adds. “That was our community for a long time and Wynter was totally part of that. She was always very independent and self-reliant, and we would offer to help her with things, but she didn’t want any help. She had it. She was on it. She was on top of it.”

Wynter recounts her first traditional session at John Harvard’s where she started down the path of Irish music. “It smelled like beer and burgers. And that it was big and open and usually loud. They seemed to be very supportive of me starting out and learning what this was all about.”

Wynter sat next to tin whistle player David Bowman, who would later become one of her good friends. “I said this was the first session I’ve ever been to, and he said, ‘Oh, well, there’s one at The Banshee in Dorchester tomorrow night, and then there’s one at Tommy Doyle’s in Harvard Square on Thursday, and I can meet you there and I can bring you to…’ That was the start of it all and then I just started going.” Eventually she learned most of the tunes the community played at John Harvard’s and she recognized everybody’s voice.

Wynter further describes her path toward Irish music: “I think that it was a combination of things: One is that unexplainable pull of that particular music – it just grabbed me… But another part of it was that I’ve always been kind of a solitary person, just kind of a loner. And part of that is by choice, and part of that was I never felt like I fit-in in a lot of places. The Boston Irish Music community really took me under their wing, and so not only did I get this music that I was loving but that I also got a family.”

And that is how this “Bad Ass” musician got addicted to traditional Irish music.

As a child, Wynter would join sister Lyndsay and a friend to play radio and make their own play radio station. Sometimes they would have singing competitions, judged by themselves in which Wynter mostly won. But to sing publicly?

“My mother always used to want me to sing in front of people and I just hated it because I didn’t like to be put on the spot. I think that she carried a lot of guilt and shame over the fact that I couldn’t see. I always felt like she wanted me to sing for people because that was her way of trying to prove to herself that there was something really special I could do… to prove to herself that I was worth something. That’s more complicated than it probably was, but that was another kind of example of not wanting it to be about showing off.”

Even at Viterbo, Wynter would go to the practice rooms and just play her violin for hours. Alone. She didn’t want to play with anybody and didn’t want anybody to hear her. Today is different. “Now I do like playing for people and I do like the attention that I get playing with people, but it definitely was for a long time a very solitary thing.”

Perhaps it was moving to Boston that initiated the change. Back in Wisconsin, in her small hometown with a population of less than 2000, there wasn’t much to do. If she wanted to go into town, someone had to take her. If she needed to run errands, someone had to take her. No matter what the reason, it was always Wynter and someone else. Just after her first year at Viterbo, Wynter participated in a five-week summer music program at Berklee. Several years later, and with some prodding from Lyndsay, she enrolled in Berklee and has stayed in Boston since.

“I almost hate admitting this,” she says, “but [moving to Boston] was a big deal. Things like going into a coffee shop and ordering a coffee. That was something I never did. I didn’t do that – I was always with somebody that would do it. It was really nice to go where you could be a little different and you didn’t draw attention to yourself the way you do in a small town.” Since then, Wynter has mastered the Boston public transit system, with only a few mess-ups. As Emerald Rae relates, Wynter has entertained the early sessions with hilarious stories of getting lost in the big city.

Still, there are challenges.

In a blog she wrote while working as a proof-reader for the Boston-based National Braille Press (Have Cane, Will Travel: Adventures of a Former Guide Dog User, June 1, 2015), Wynter laments, “One of the most frustrating things I’ve learned is that, very often, one cannot walk five steps without some form of unsolicited advice from a stranger. Things like, ‘There are stairs coming up,” and the ever popular, ‘Watch Out!’” Watch out for what? For a pole or tree in her path or for a charging bear?

Wynter’s bandmate Tommy Sheridan, octogenarian, accomplished accordion player, and political sparring partner, but more importantly, one of her good friends, often drives her to the local jam sessions and gigs. Being the gentleman that Tommy is, he opens doors for Wynter. One day he opened the passenger-side car door and placed his hand on Wynter’s head the way a police officer would so the recently arrested will not hit their head on the cruiser roof.

“Don’t put your hand on my head!” Wynter told him. “I can get in the car by myself!”

Now they rib each other whenever Tommy picks Wynter up for a gig. He opens the passenger-side door and says, “Wait until I can put my hand on your head…” They laugh. Then she gets in the car. By herself.

What does Wynter want – really want? I prefaced this question with a Gospel narrative: Jesus was leaving Jericho when a blind man kept calling out to him. Finally, Jesus asked the blind man what he wanted. Jesus could have healed the obvious. Instead, he asked the blind man what he wanted. Maybe the man didn’t wish to be healed of his affliction. Maybe he just wanted a hot meal, or a pair of sandals, or a blanket to keep him warm at night.

Wynter knew exactly where I was going with this and continued this thought about New Testament Bible stories. “People were always being healed of something that might not necessarily be what they would have considered their affliction. Their affliction was probably the shitty way everybody treated them. I’ve never been somebody who wished I could see as much as I wished that other people could just get over it. Sure, it would be nice to hop in a car and drive myself somewhere, but I don’t lie awake at night wishing that.”

Then I realized Wynter had already told me earlier what she truly wanted, but I didn’t hear it at that time.

“I want to have a great deal of humility. I also want to have the confidence to know that I can do whatever it is I can do well, yah knooo.”

“I would listen to people who were really amazing musicians, and it would make me feel kind of jealous and sad, like I’m not good at all, and I think the healthy way to look at it is that it’s an art. Everybody who does it brings something to the table. It’s not about being better than somebody. Sometimes we have these moments where you really just have to be so humbled by this amazing thing that is coming through you, like you’re the vehicle for something that almost has nothing to do with you. It’s an amazing, amazing feeling, and maybe that is where I want to be, where I am just a servant of this gift. If it can come through me and touch somebody else’s life - I have to be in awe of that.”

The patrons at the Chieftain that chilly November evening had long lost interest in the horse races and with their own conversations, instead diverting their attention to the band, to Wynter’s fiddle melody cutting through the pub noise. A few “Hups!” and hollers were offered by the audience. Soon most of the patrons were clapping to the beat, tapping their toes, or tapping their fingers on the bar to the musical rhythm. In one tiny spot near the stage, four people attempted their version of Irish step dancing.

That grammar of musical notes and 1-4-5 chord progressions, scales, thirds and fifths, and key signatures from somewhere out there in the ether flowed through Wynter, down into her fingers and out through her fiddle to touch a pub packed with people – to a pub packed with people she could not see.

And it was amazing.