About this tune

Since it was first recorded by its composer in the 1970s, Sandy MacIntyre’s Trip to Boston has been enthusiastically adopted by fiddlers all across Prince Edward Island and has even begun to acquire a distinctive Island identity. For the most part, Islanders tend to truncate the title, and refer to the tune simply as Trip to Boston.

Of special interest: how Evangeline and West Prince County fiddlers Edward P Arsenault and Dennis Pitre have made the tune their own.

Composer John Campbell – the son of famed Cape Breton fiddler and pioneer recording artist Dan J. Campbell (1895-1981) – grew up in Glenora Falls, NS but  lived in Watertown, Massachusetts from 1962 until his death in 2010. He estimated in an 1981 interview that he had already written over 450 tunes.

Sandy MacIntyre (b. 1935) is another well-known Cape Breton fiddler. He grew up in Inverness Town, Nova Scotia, but spent much of his adult life in the Toronto area.

Notation for this tune as played by Carl & Jackie Webster is in Fiddle Music of Prince Edward Island.