Honoring tradition Larry Reynolds, fiddler of local renown, is mourned - The Boston Globe

Frank Joyce had to keep his funeral home in Waltham open a lot later than planned Wednesday night. Larry Reynolds’s wake was supposed to last for six hours. But it took more than nine hours to get everybody through the line.

“At least a couple of thousand people,” Joyce said. “They just kept coming.”

It seemed like half of them returned to Waltham on Thursday morning, to St. Jude Church, where Larry Reynolds was dispatched from this world with the two things that embodied him: kind words and beautiful music.

A Waltham cop, perplexed by the size of the crowd that spilled out of the church onto Main Street, tugged at a photographer and asked, “Who was this guy?”

Larry Reynolds grew up in a village called Ahascragh, in County Galway, in the west of Ireland. When he was 10, his brother Harry bought him a fiddle and his sister Betty, who was working as a maid for a wealthy family, paid for lessons. He was schooled in the traditional style peculiar to East Galway, and he played for love, not money.



But money was scarce and so, like many Galwaymen of his generation, Reynolds immigrated to Boston. He was 20 years old when he got here in 1953. He fed his stomach by working as a carpenter. He fed his soul by playing his fiddle. He used his bow like a saw, to build something that would last.

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Honoring tradition Larry Reynolds, fiddler of local renown, is mourned - Metro - The Boston Globe:

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