He lost the tip of his pinkie in an accident, but Cape Breton fiddler Jerry Holland is out to spread some joy, says Rob Adams.

It's not the best preparation," says Jerry Holland with commendable understatement. The Cape Breton fiddler is talking about a recent accident that saw him lose the top of the pinkie on his left hand when he jammed it in a garage door. His left hand being his fingering hand, the accident has limited Holland's fiddle playing over the past few weeks, leaving him without the ability to play music for the first time in almost 50 years.

This would be a blow for any musician but Holland has faced worse - in 2007 he was diagnosed with bone cancer - and he's not about to let this latest setback stop him from looking forward to his first ever appearance at Celtic Connections, in this year's opening concert, The Cape Breton Connection.

His previous illness aside, Holland's absence from the festival until now is a bit of an oversight, considering his status as the then young Turk who lit up the Cape Breton music scene in the 1970s - and this despite being an incomer from Boston, Massachusetts.

Holland's father, Jerry Sr, was a fiddler himself from New Brunswick who moved to Boston to find work as part of a sizeable settlement from Cape Breton who, just as their ancestors had done, kept the traditions that had travelled from Scotland and Ireland strong in their new surroundings.

Jerry was five when his father began showing him his first tune. Jerry Sr had been over 50 when his son was born and had patience with his new student. He needed it, says Jerry.

"There was always music in the house. Dad was always playing, so it was natural for me to take up the fiddle, too," he says. "I remember it being really painstaking. You know, put your finger there. No, not there - there. Now keep your bow up. Hold your fiddle properly. It must have been quite trying for him but he showed me that first tune, finger position by finger position, and he was very encouraging. He'd be giving me all these instructions and I'd just be hanging on, trying to take in everything he was saying."

Painstaking or not, the lessons proved effective. Within a year the youngster had recorded his first audition tape, on which the control and sweet intonation that would later become his trademarks were apparently already evident. Audiences agreed. Already an accomplished step-dancer, who would be showered with coins for his performances, Jerry was gigging on fiddle by his sixth birthday and made his first television appearance shortly afterwards. As is the Cape Breton way, he combined step-dancing and fiddling at the same time.

"That playing and dancing thing all stopped for me about 150lbs ago," he says. "But the whole thing about playing for dancing was very important. There's a drive in Cape Breton music that is all about getting people's feet tapping. We'd be out playing at house parties and dances every weekend, because there was quite a vibrant Cape Breton scene in Boston, and we'd have to hit the rhythm right from the start. It was quite exciting for a young boy to be caught up in it all."

When he wasn't playing and dancing, Jerry would be practising on the fiddle that his father had bought in a Chinese laundry in Boston, only to discover it was a rare instrument by an Austrian luthier and worth rather more than the $50 he paid for it. Jerry Sr had a collection of 78rpm records by the great Irish fiddlers Michael Coleman and James Morrison, which Jerry would refer to constantly, and there would be more fiddle lore picked up on the family's visits to Cape Breton.

One meeting that particularly stands out was when the late Scots fiddler Ron Gonella heard the then 10-year-old Holland playing at a concert in Boston.

"Ron was a really elegant player and he was a great fiddle teacher Gonella taught latterly at Morrison's Academy in Crieff. For some reason, he was quite taken with what I was doing back then," says Jerry. "This made a big impression on me because everyone locally would be very encouraging, of course, but to have someone from outside - especially someone from the place where a lot of the music we were playing originated - being so complimentary suggested that I was doing something right."

By this time Jerry was playing guitar as well to accompany his dad, which was, he says, great experience, being able to listen in situ to the subtleties and variations in melody that he couldn't always hear when playing fiddle.

A full-time career as a musician might have seemed inevitable but Jerry trained as a carpenter and has often been glad that he did.

"It's been a balancing act," he says. "There were times, when I got into my twenties, when I was doing the John Allan Cameron television show in Montreal, which was fantastic experience but also hard work - I must have learned at least a thousand tunes over the different series - and I thought, wow, this is the life. But I'd seen the other side. Then after my son was born, I didn't want to be the kind of father who was out on the road all time and never got to know his children, so I stayed home and worked in carpentry and did local gigs."

Having finally moved to Cape Breton in 1975, Jerry went on to become the kind of influence to younger fiddlers that the older players he'd listened to had been to him. Always supportive and encouraging, and gratified to see and hear so many musicians following in the tradition, he takes the long view of music that, he jokes, he was playing before it was cool.

"I always tell students that it's good to admire the latest hot player but it's also important to look at the players who influenced the latest hot player and the players who, in turn, influenced them," he says. "If you do that, you'll get a rounder view of the music and will be more likely to play it with real heart and soul - because you can't fake those things and they're the ingredients that really help you to do what music should do, and that's spread a little joy."

Jerry Holland appears in The Cape Breton Connection at Glasgow Royal Concert Hall on Thursday.