Meet Bristol’s Fiddler On The River

If it’s the weekend and the weather holds, music is in the air at Lions Park along the Delaware River in Bristol Borough. The notes that float through the breeze come from Cletus McBride’s fiddle. His “stage” for Irish melodies and sometimes the Blues is the grassy area at the foot of the St Brigid monument. 

His audience includes an assorted throng of picnickers, dog walkers, bench sitters, and sometimes boaters who use the docks adjoining the wharf. Some pass by and wave, others gather around the monument. Occasionally, spectators will break into a dance. 

“I try to get down to the river Saturdays and Sundays, depending on the weather, and people let me know that they appreciate my music,” said McBride, whose “uniform” of the day – any day at the river – is casual: jeans, T-shirt, and sneakers. Longish graying hair, a beard, and mustache that give him the look of a many whose life is his art. 

McBride, a one-time journalist who spent his college years at Holy Family College (now University), cramming homework, a job as a photojournalist for several Philadelphia papers, and in 1997, the Magnu Cum Laud graduate to become the director of public relations at his alma mater. 

But the siren song of musical notes, introduced to him by his father, who taught his then 14-year-old son scales and strings, called to McBride. He was making a name for himself, starting in his own Mayfair neighborhood in Philadelphia, then stretching to gigs in the Philadelphia area, New York State, Maryland, and Delaware, and he wanted more. It was a life-changing offer that his destiny became clear. 

“A man named Frank Brittingham, who lived in Lafayette Hills, came into Blarney’s in Fox Chase, where we were playing, and asked us to do a gig on St. Patrick’s Day in, of all places, St. Thomas.  We took the job, even thought we only had three weeks to prepare.. Irish music was very popular on the islands in those days, so off we went,” McBride said. 

“We had a blast,” he added.

As it turned out the gig lasted 17 year for  McBride, his fiddler Harold Dunn, and his base player, Joe Spinelli. 

“We stayed on the island playing music, haging out on the beach, drinking our beer and having fun,” he said.

Summers were spent back home, and even then, they picked up gigs in Sea Isle City, New Jersey he added. 

It might have seemed that working and basking in that tropical paradise would last forever, but two factors collided to send them back to the United States: Bittingham retired, and demand for Irish music dwindled.

Back home, McBride moved to Bensalem Township to care for his mother. 

The musician was 62 when his mother died, seven years ago, and he moved to Bristol Borough, where he clings to the music that his musician parents – his father played in a band and his mother sang  – instilled in him at a young teenager. 

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