Queen’s piper in U.S.

Press, 10 January 1983, Page 16

Queen’s piper in U.S.

By

CHRISTOPHER SULLIVAN

of the Associated Press PIKESVILLE, Maryland He was once piper to the British Crown, toasting Queen Elizabeth after his recitals at Buckingham Palace.

“Deoch slainte na va righ,” Walter Wilkie would toast, after the Queen poured him a dram at the conclusion of his recitals.

As he left the dining room, she would call ceremonially, “Good night, my piper.” Today, Mr Wilkie performs for six Johns Hopkins Hospital doctors — his students at weekly tutoring sessions on the bagpipes — and for audiences at festivals with a Caledonian theme.

“It was a dying instrument at one time,” says Mr Wilkie, aged 43, who grew up in Glasgow.

But the bagpipes’ popularity has grown in the United States, he says, because Americans have come to better understand the instrument’s music.

“It is very ... people say haunting, but bagpipes , are only haunting in certain circumstances,” Mr Wilkie mused. “If you hear one player playing alone in a grassy field on a sunny day, it is not haunting — it is stirring,” he says. When he plays by himself, often on an electric bagpipe, he warms up audiences with familiar American pop songs.

“Then I get their attention,” joked Mr Wilkie. When his pipe band practises in the parking lot of a synagogue near his home, he said, crowds of up to 300 have turned out for the impromptu concerts.

On a wall in his home hang diplomas from the College of Piping in Glasgow, where Mr Wilkie said he enrolled when he was nine. At 16, he began touring Scot-

land with several bands before joining the Army, as a piper in the elite Scots Guards. When in London, the Band of the Scots Guards often accompanies a regimental brass band in the daily Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace. “When you are a Guards piper, you are a household piper to the Queen," Mr Wilkie said.

During part of his fiveyear Army stint in the 19605, he was one of a handful of bagpipers who played solo serenades for guests at State dinners given by the Royal Family. “The first couple of years you are there, you are kind of in awe of them, in spite of occasional nips in the ankle by one of the Queen’s pet corgis.” Mr Wilkie has played for several heads of State, including the late President John Kennedy. One of President Kennedy’s requests; “MistCovered Mountain," was played by another British Army bagpipe band at his funeral in 1963.

. After leaving the Army, Mr Wilkie, a licensed electrician, returned to Glasgow expecting to get a shipyard job. None turned up, but as he combed the advertisements he spotted a notice calling for a Scots piper to join and teach a band in Hartford, Connecticut. “Within six weeks, I was in the United States,” he said. That was in 1965. His non-musical work has taken Mr Wilkie and his wife and son from Hartford to Syracuse, New York, and now to this Baltimore suburb. In each place, he has had a band.

Here, he leads the John F. Nicoll Pipe Band, which he named after a champion player who was his neighbour in Scotland. At 92 and now blind, the namesake still teaches young musicians. Mr Wilkie said he balked

when his mother suggested he seek instruction from Mr Nicoll because Mr Nicoll had not been trained at the College of Piping. Later, he said, a fellow Scots Guards piper who was self-trained reinforced the lesson he eventually learned from Nicoll.

“He would play, and it was beautiful,” Mr Wilkie said of the piper. "That’s what he had been doing for 15 hours a day, sitting in the croft." (A croft is a small enclosed field or farm). “It is not always booklearning that turns out the best."