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Special areas: Playing the piper 

01/11/99 

By Bryan Woolley / The Dallas Morning News 

You hold a leather bag under your arm and blow through a tube 
that's attached to it, thus filling it with air.

Then you squeeze the bag with your elbow and force the air out
of it through four larger tubes that also are attached to it. 
The air passes through reeds that are attached to the four larger
tubes, and this produces noises. Three of the tubes always make 
the same noise, but the fourth has eight holes along its length,
and by placing your fingertips over different holes at different 
times, you make it produce different noises. You try to make these
noises sound jolly or fierce or sad. 

Meanwhile, you keep on puffing and puffing to prevent the bag from
running out of air. Then you're ready to see if you can do it while
marching to the beat of the drums. 

When you can handle that, you're a bagpiper. 

If you get good enough at it and live in the United Kingdom, you
might play for the queen or the lesser royals or the prime 
minister. If you're good at it and live in Dallas, you might 
become pipe major of the North Texas Caledonian Pipes and Drums
and give lessons in playing the wild and ancient instrument. 

Don Shannon has done the one, now he's doing the others. The latter 
can be frightening, he says, because, well, you're living in Dallas.
 
"Dallas was a complete shock to my system," he says. "I lived in a
wee small village in Northern Ireland. When we talked of going to 
the big town for a beer on a weekend, the big town had six sets of
traffic lights. To come from there to Dallas and drive down the LBJ 
for the first time, it was terrifying. I could not believe it." 

For 30 years, Mr. Shannon was happily piping within the small 
confines of Northern Ireland, playing for the queen at Hillsborough
Castle, for Prince Andrew at Dungannon, for Prime Minister Tony 
Blair at a Belfast police station, leading a pipe band and winning
a competition here or there, never giving a thought to the land of 
cowboys and oil wells. 

Then in 1995, he was one of a group who came piping to Washington.
While in the capital, Mr. Shannon and his companions played at 
Prince Andrew's birthday party at the British Embassy, then retired
to the bar at their Holiday Inn for a few tunes and a draught. 
There he encountered Trish Prewitt, a Dallas artist who had gone to
Washington to visit her daughter. After many phone calls, letters 
and trans-Atlantic plane rides, Mr. Shannon moved to Dallas and 
married Ms. Prewitt last April. He joined his bride in her Far 
North Dallas home and set himself up as a professional piper. 

"Trish and I had trouble deciding who should move where, for she 
just loves Ireland, as everybody does," says Mr. Shannon in the
lilting Irish brogue that everybody loves. "Then a good friend of
mine who has been around the world a few times said, 'Don, I believe
you should go to America.' That was my turning point. He's a very
world-wise man. 

"So I said, 'That's where the woman I love lives, so let's go for
it.' I never in my wildest dreams thought of coming to America, or
ever imagined that I was going to be living in Dallas. It's the big 
city and bright lights. J.R. Ewing and Southfork. When I told my 
friends in Ireland where I was going to live, their eyes got wide.
Even now it's strange and weird in a way." 

Soon after arriving, Mr. Shannon made contact with the North Texas
Caledonian Pipes and Drums, a contingent of some 25 Scottish and
Irish musicians who have performed in the area for years. 

"That was my first bright light here," he says, "to find a piping 
community. Pipers seek out other pipers no matter where they go. 
I played a few tunes with them. As the year went by, they found 
that I was pretty good and put me in as pipe major." 

Whenever people contact one of the Caledonians in search of a piper
to play at a wedding, a funeral, a corporate party or just a fine
old Celtic bash, they're often put in touch with Mr. Shannon, who 
has more experience and polish than most other North Texas pipers.
Wedding consultants and funeral directors have discovered him. 

Business is so good that he now makes his living with his pipes, 
which he was never able to do on his native sod. "I believe every 
Texan has a Celtic connection somewhere," he says, "and there are 
only a few pipers about. 

"In Texas, people are willing to pay the piper. In Ireland, pipers
are everywhere, and they never get paid. They're just invited to get
drunk with the guests." 

But in Texas, no Celtic connection is really necessary. Mr. Shannon
recently played at a wedding in Midland where there were 28 groomsmen
in tartan kilts of the Black Watch, and the heritage of neither
family was Scottish or Irish. 

"They had seen a photo in a magazine of a piper leading the wedding
party down the aisle," Mr. Shannon says. "They thought that was so
cool that they decided to do the whole wedding like that." 

Mr. Shannon began learning his art when he was 13 from a fellow named
Hugh Smiley, "a dear friend, who is now dead." Piping has been his 
passion ever since. Now he's passing on his joy to others, giving 
lessons to some 20 students between ages 8 and 62. Some are 
Caledonian colleagues, who drop by for a "wee tuning" from time to
time. Tuning bagpipes is a difficult task, he says, and in Ireland 
not many pipers will share their knowledge of it with others.

"Most pipers there will turn their backs to you while they tune their
pipes, so you can't see how they do it," he says. 

For many, living in a house with a learning bagpiper can be an ordeal.
It can take up to five years to learn. 

"It's difficult for the family, it's difficult for their neighbors,
it's difficult for the postman, it's difficult for dogs," he says. 

"For the non-piping fraternity in Ireland, the joke is that the pipes
sound best from a distance - about 9 miles." 

But the pipes stir the blood of many Texans, it seems, and Mr. 
Shannon hopes that when they hear him play, they feel just as he
does: 

"When the hair stands up on the back of me neck," he says,
"it's a good thing."