Thomas Hair (musician)

Thomas Hair (1779–1854) was a violinist and player of the Northumbrian smallpipes, who lived in Bedlington. This town, and the surrounding district of Bedlingtonshire, were until 1844 a detached part of County Durham, but were then made part of Northumberland.

He was described in his obituary as suffering sight loss, and by Waddell as 'blind'; his will is signed with a cross, suggesting he was unable to read or write. This seems superficially inconsistent with him subscribing to books of local interest; however, somebody else could have read the books to him.

Thomas taught the Northumbrian smallpipes to both Thomas Todd and Old Tom Clough, to Henry Cotes, the vicar of Bedlington, and to at least one other 'clever pupil', referred to as 'poor blind Tom'. This last pupil may well be Thomas Norman, who was also blind, and inherited Hair's pipes.

A tune named after him, Thomas Hair's Hornpipe, survives in the notebook of his younger contemporary William Thomas Green (1825–1898), also a piper and fiddler, and may well be Hair's own composition. Hair and Green are likely to have known one another personally, living only six miles apart; as Green's father William was innkeeper of The Seven Stars in Morpeth, and piper to the Duchess of Northumberland, they would have had commercial as well as musical interests in common. As Thomas Hair's Hornpipe begins and ends with the same figure as "Roxburgh Castle", it may well have been composed as a companion piece for that tune.

A local poet and cobbler, James Waddell of Plessey, in 1809, referred to a local vicar (unnamed by him, but elsewhere identified as Rev. Henry Cotes, of Bedlington), who played the pipes, being taught by Old William Lamshaw, who was piper to the Duke of Northumberland, and by the "celebrated blind youth of B-d-n, Thomas Hair". Later, in 1831, John Farrer of Netherwitton wrote a poem, in Standard Habbie metre, which has long been associated with poems about piping, praising Hair's playing of the smallpipes,

...
Wikipedia