These boys had the right idea:


When I was little, and my father was around for a while one summer, there were also the fiddle players. They'd appear out of nowhere and just move in for
days, eating and drinking and playing the fiddles in the evenings. Their whole lives seemed to be like that, going from house to house. In the winter they'd
move in for months with someone who had a kid who wanted to be a fiddler himself. There's also a piper named Sandy Boyd who lives like that: wandering
around playing and teaching music, getting paid in hospitality.

My father learned to play the fiddle, but stopped after he got married.

"The fiddle is a lovely thing," my mother says. "But it's bad for attracting boozers."

(Linden MacIntyre, Causeway: A Passage from Innocence, p. 134. About a childhood in Cape Breton.)