By: Jeff Meade

I only went in to play some music, honest.

I am sitting in a bar called The Tass in Edinburgh’s Canonsgate neighborhood. A traditional music session is in full swing, and I’m playing the bodhran—an Irish goatskin drum that looks like a giant tambourine, but without the jingles—and trying to blend in harmoniously with the locals.

I first hear the sounds of the session as I am heading home after dinner at the famous World’s End pub just across the street. (Their fish-and-chips platter features a piece of batter-dipped haddock roughly the dimensions of an ironing board.)

I take a quick look inside The Tass. Fiddles? Yes. Accordions? Yes, again. Bodhrans? Sadly, no. They are bodhran-deprived. So I head to the flat to grab my drum and jog back to join the session.

For a while, I stand alone at the bar, nursing my pint of Tennents Lager and cradling my drum like an abandoned baby. (“Honest, I found it wrapped in a blanket just outside the door …”) Eventually someone takes pity and invites me to play.

The fact that I’m in a bar playing traditional music is not a major news flash. What’s different, at least to me, is this: There is sheet music—whole, dog-eared booklets of the stuff, each one bearing the imprimatur of the ALP (Adult Learners Program) Scots Music Group. The booklets are scattered across the hardwood tables, propped up against coppery pints of Belhaven Best and Caledonian 80. The pages are open to tunes with prosaic titles like “Miss Drummond of Perth.”

I’ve never played in a traditional session where anyone followed sheet music. Lots of Irish traditional musicians don’t even know how to sight-read. Ask them which note they just played on the flute and they will say something like: “I think it was this little bitty hole, right here.”

It often comes as a surprise to people who don’t play (the Muggles of the “trad” world) that instruments like tin whistle, often as not, are taught by ear—not exactly the “think system” espoused by Professor Harold Hill in “The Music Man,” but close. If there’s a method at all, it’s more like “monkey see, monkey toot.”

Even those musicians who can read music don’t bring sheet music to sessions. Through constant repetition—otherwise known as “practice”—traditional musicians seem to reach a point where they operate on pure muscle memory. Their fingers know the tune, even if their brains have no idea what the fingers are up to.

But I digress.

Now, here I am in a bar on the lower end of Edinburgh’s famed Royal Mile, a stranger in a strange band. I recognize some of the tunes—“The Atholl Highlander,” for example, and “Off to California.” But “The Back O’ Benachie?” Maybe real musicians (as opposed to drummers) know the tune, but it’s a new one on me. I wouldn’t know a Benachie if it bit me on the butt.

About 20 musicians are jammed into the narrow bar, taking up benches and chairs just below the windows that look out onto Jeffrey Street. Most of the players are fiddlers. A couple of piano accordion players, two or three guitarists and one very talented tenor banjo player play supporting roles.

The place still smells—in a good, smoky, charred animal protein sort of way—like the evening’s steak special. There are mirrors advertising “Campbell & Co.” and “Edinburgh Ales” hanging on the walls. There’s also a great big fussy print commemorating the aftermath of the Battle of Culloden. Scots are like the Irish in that they nurse grudges over centuries-old ignominies. It’s dim in the bar, and my 56-year-old eyes can just make out the details of the crowded scene in the picture. I think somebody lost.

After a while, the session is chugging along and picking up a head of steam. I find myself attempting to carry on a conversation with a fiddler—named Pat, I think. I can only just make out the high-pitched squeaking that might be her voice. In that room, approximately the length and width of an old Penn Central rail car, with the music building and expanding to fill every available space, fruitful conversation requires a Miracle Ear the size of a satellite dish.

This whole exhausting “hands across the water” communications exercise is complicated by Edinburgh accents that—even under the best circumstances—can sound remarkably like someone swallowing his own tongue. I find myself grinning and laughing a lot—and hoping I’m not grinning and laughing in response to a story about someone’s dead wee dog.

And I play, passably—not badly enough that people’s eardrums rupture, but not so well that anyone offers me a recording contract on the spot. I keep right on playing, for close to two hours, until the pub’s owner taps her watch and tells us all to pack up our whistles and fiddles and banjos—and my drum—and move along. It’s just closing in on 11 p.m. when I step out the door and trudge back to the flat, hoping I’ll remember to look the right way when I cross the street and not get mowed down by the 35 bus.

Some of us travel so we can add to our collection of plastic refrigerator magnets from far-away places. But most people, it think, travel in the hope of harvesting memories, which generally outlast and vastly outshine plastic refrigerator magnets.

I’ll remember the fish and chips at the World’s End (a week later, and I’m still not hungry), the maniacal laughter of magpies in the courtyard outside our flat, and our all too brief cruise on the still, gray waters of Loch Lomond.

I won’t soon forget making it to the top of Arthur’s Seat, the windswept crag overlooking Edinburgh—and all without dying. I’ll always remember the afternoon that the owner of Bagpipes Galore, a shoebox of a shop at the bottom of the Royal Mile, locked his door to the other tourists and put on a brilliant, spontaneous performance on the Scottish smallpipes just for me.

But I’ve reached a point where my most indelible recollections are triggered by the yeasty tang of lager, the pluck of banjo strings, and the privilege of banging out tunes with the townies. It’s the kind of memory you can only have if you play the music. (No matter how pathetically.) That night at The Tass is something I’ll recall every time I pick up the drum and pound out a reel or a jig at the Shanachie Pub or the Mermaid Inn.

And the beat goes on.