Cliff Island, in Casco Bay, Maine, didn't have many people. In fact, there were so few that all the children were served by a tiny one-room school in the village at the center of the island. That's where Bonnie Rideout lived for about half of each year during her childhood in the 1960s and 70s. "The teacher in the school was an ex-opera singer," Rideout recalled, "so music was a big part of her teaching. And there was this old upright piano in the corner. Every morning when we'd go to school, we'd have music. And we'd sing around the piano, and then we'd take all the chairs away and we'd dance to a record, learning square dancing and other kinds of dancing. And then we started our day. Every day was sort of like that, and I'd bring my violin to school."

Unlike many other budding fiddlers growing up on islands off the northern coast, Rideout was never surrounded by musicians in the community. She didn't listen to a lot of other fiddlers, didn't play for dances, didn't go to sessions. Instead, her earliest musical inspiration came from her family. "At home we would always play music," Rideout explained. "That's where I get the Scottish music from, because it's my parents' heritage. They grew up learning the old songs from Scotland."

Rideout's mother, Betty, plays piano, and her father, Douglas, plays ocarina. In fact, his collection of ocarinas was inherited from his grandfather, who in turn had them from his father. Whereas other families might gather around the television in the evening, the Rideout family tended to gather around the piano. "You know, they played the old Victorian songs, not just Scottish music. They'll play 'I'm Looking Over a Four-Leaf Clover' or Gilbert and Sullivan. My dad toots away on Gilbert and Sullivan as easily as he toots away on 'I Belong to Glasgow.' So they love the old songs of Scotland, but also just the idea of sitting around the piano and singing songs. And my mom's style of piano playing comes out of the Victorian living room sound. Lots of lush chords and stuff."

When the family wasn't on Cliff Island, they lived on a farm outside of Saline, Michigan, about 30 miles from Ann Arbor. Getting to the farm in Michigan didn't require an hour and a half ferry ride like getting to Cliff Island did, but it was still a pretty rural, isolated location. One neighbor in Michigan was Miss Cody (a niece of Buffalo Bill), who lived to be 109 or 110 years old. Miss Cody's house was a favorite destination for Rideout. "She had this old Victrola," Rideout said, "and she used to wind it up and play all these songs that we knew from my parents, listening to these old songs. And it was kind of neat because the only other musical person up the road was playing these things on the Victrola."

Adding to the geographical insularity of Rideout's upbringing was a certain withdrawal from the forces of mass culture that informed the musical perceptions of most people. Rideout is probably one of the few people of her generation to have grown up without a television in the house, and, except for the babysitter's transistor radio, she did not hear a lot of pop music, either. "I grew up with actually zero television. There's a certain reservoir of humor and jokes that when we get together with the neighbors go right over my head because they sing ditties from 1970s TV shows and I have no idea what they're talking about. I don't know what that 'Gergen's Island' or something is, some shipwreck thing."

This is an excerpt from issue #90.