Just two quotes:

For 50 years Ciaran was the voice of Irish traditional music on Irish radio. His work over the years saved the music of 100s of players who’s unique style and phrasing would have been lost without the recordings he organised. His beautiful voice was part of our Sunday mornings for decades. It was always a pleasure to meet him and share a moment. His legacy is huge but his presence will be sadly missed. – Christy Moore

Coming hard on the heels of the death of Liam Clancy, the passing of Ciarán MacMathúna is a signal that we are in the process of losing a great generation of Irish folk pioneers. – Niall Stokes, Hot Press editor

Enough said.

Governor Martin O'Malley's multi-instrument Baltimore celtic rock group

The wave of interest in Irish music set in motion by Riverdance over a decade ago appears to have run its course. Once again many top Irish musicians are resting. Things are also changing on the lucrative Irish festival circuit in the USA.

To take one example: In Chicago, Irish Fest returns for its 10th year this summer, July 24-25, for two days packed with Celtic music, food and dance, all on the scenic grounds of the Arlington Heights Historical Museum.

“We’ve grown a lot over the years,” said Cathy Robertson, one of the organisers. Attendance at Irish Fest has more than doubled, she said, but they also have grown to include more variations of Irish music. “We started with the traditional step dancing, pipe bands and folk groups,” she said.

“But then we saw how many people the Celtic rock bands drew, and we knew we had to have a mix.”

I first noticed this trend when I came across the Kansas City Celtic Music Fest website. The bands had Irish names, but none of them were of Irish origin.The site is run by artist and web designer ‘Eolai gan Fheile’. I emailed him and asked what was happening. His reply was most informative:

“I’m witnessing more and more neighbourhood Irish festivals with, if not entirely homegrown, then at least US-based, Irish entertainment, and city festivals are heading that way – though I doubt it will go completely that way as, despite the growth in N America, there still isn’t the depth of talent in traditional music there as exists in Ireland. That said, with groups like Solas, Cherish The Ladies and so forth it is possible and indeed if it happened probably no one would necessarily notice.”

He added: “Also with the growth of the festivals in the last 10 years you have specific types of “Irish” music that seems almost unique to North America – for example Celtic Rock is hugely popular with every town having at least one band that indulges in something it calls Celtic Rock. While you can trace lineage of such music in Ireland from Sweeney’s Men and Horslips through to the Sawdoctors with a dousing of the Pogues – in North America it has spun off into a very big genre that is perfect for festivals however Irish it may or may not be”.

Big Irish names are still being invited to perform in the USA, but shortage of funds, transport and visa difficulties mean the larger festivals club together and jointly host Irish acts (the larger Kansas festival in the autumn will have a number of native Irish acts). A quick check through the tour schedules of, for example, Dervish, Danu and Clannad, suggest they rely on more concert tours, particularly in winter or early spring, to bring  in the dollars. Also, many Irish acts now depend on Europe for festival income.

The visa problem is a thorny old issue. Back in 2003, the successful Boston College Gaelic Summer School and Festival came to an end over Homeland security strictness. One fiddler from the Shetland Islands had to travel to London to get her work visa. Singer Len Graham had to travel from Co Down to Belfast three times before he was cleared to travel.

I leave the final word on the growth of American-based acts to ‘Eolai gan Fheile’. “It’s undeniable that there’s a significant growth in numbers playing traditional music – you’ve had US All-Ireland champions at this stage – and Irish dancing, as well as all the various forms of whatever Celtic Rock may be – something with very few barriers to entry, however you define it”.

I see from my local newsite at http://www.topix.com/ie/galway that Joe Madden, New York and formerly of Portumna, has packed his accordion for the last time and moved on to the Big Session in the Sky. I was also intrigued by ‘Young Pup’s’ comment about the passing of the Fifties generation. Since 2000 we have lost Sean Maguire, PJoe Hayes, Junior Crehan, Paddy Canny, Vincent Broderick, Johnny Leary and many more.
The time has come for us to have a good look at the influence and legacy of the Irish musicians who came to prominence in the 1950s, to name but a few: Leo Rowsome and Seamus Ennis, Joe Cooley and Paddy O’Brien, Sean Maguire and Paddy O’Keeffe, Willie Clancy, Mrs Crotty – you get my drift.
No doubt the Forties and Thirties had great Irish musicians too. So what is so remarkable about the 1950s musicians?
Radio Eireann, under Seamus Clandillon, broadcast popular traditional music programmes throughout that decade. Also their field workers like Seamus Ennis, Ciaran MacMathuna and Sean Mac Reamoinn explored regional music, uncovering new material and styles and encouraged a deeper appreciation of the genre. The considerable work by the BBC has to be acknowledged here, too.
Music was recovering from the stiffling influence of the Dance Halls Act of the 1930s and the pessimism of World War II. This was followed by the proliferation of the Ceili Bands. Increasing travel – mostly a by-product of economic emigration – exposed Irish musicians and listeners to the great Sessions-in-Exile in London, New York, Chicago, and so on. The playing of Coleman and Morrison was more widely known in Ireland through the increased use of gramophones.
This is just a quick visit to Fifties Irish Traditional Music. As ‘Young Pup’ pointed out, the time has come for us to somehow honour these great musicians.

Web queries about Irish music

Ebb and flow has always been a feature of musicial tastes. The wave of interest in Irish music, which had been on a roll since the launch of Riverdance in 1994, has been falling steadily since the new millennium. This is supported by Googletrends where the graph for internet queries about Irish music has been in steady decline. Even the reliable St Patrick’s Day spike has been shrinking.
A regrettable feature of this decline in interest has been the closure in the past two years of three record shops heavily dependent on Irish music sales: The Living Tradition in Cork, Mulligans in Galway and Sinnotts in Waterford. These closures may in large part be blamed on the switch from CDs to downloads, but they must surely also have been connected to the declining interest in Irish music.
The December 2001 issue of Irish Music Magazine had 110 pages: this year the December issue has a total of 54 pages. Significantly it doesn’t carry even one full-page add from any of the Irish music record companies.The magazine has become heavily dependent on Irish music festivals which, ominously, are in turn dependent on corporate sponsorship and public funding.
Venues also reflect the trend. The Glor centre in Ennis, Government-funded as a dedicated Irish cultural centre, no longer relies solely on Irish music acts and Galway’s Roisin Dubh, festival time apart, is no longer an Irish music venue.
The only silver lining is that Irish music artists are free of record company dominance and can sell their music via downloads from websites over which they can have complete control. However, they may have less outlets to promote their wares unless festivals can find alternative funding.
Meanwhile, true musicians will continue to enjoy their weekly sessions in pubs and clubs from the Crosses of Inagh to Tokyo and San Francisco. The music lives on.

The sad death of composer and musician Vincent Broderick (see below) last week recalled how he won the All-Ireland flute playing Championship in Loughrea, Co Galway, in the mid-Fifties with a copper flute he made himself after he had lost his regular one.
It reminded me of the only conversation I ever had the pleasure of with Mairead Ni Maonaigh of Altan in which she commented that the true creativity in Irish music lay in the broad area of interpretation. Many of the tunes, as she would know coming from Donegal, may well be of Scottish and Jacobite origin, and many of the dances may have originated in Europe (I use ‘may’ simply to bypass argument). But what stands out and gives Irish music its universal appeal, is the interpretation which the Irish have put on those tunes and dances.

Vincent Broderick’s copper flute reminds me how the Irish have adapted foreign instruments to local conditions and tastes, and in the process have made technical advances. While the bagpipes were common throughout western Europe by the 11th century, by the early decades of the 18th century, the uilleann (bellows) pipes with added drones and regulators began to emerge in Ireland.
A more recent example of the creative application in Irish music is the bouzouki. Johnny Moynihan adapted the instrument to Irish music in the mid-1960s. Today it is central to the Irish music session and has been adopted also by Scottish and English folk groups.
Then there were the generations of traveller musicians who made fiddles out of wooden boxes. Blasket islanders made fiddles out of driftwood. I even heard of a man in Co Mayo who made a fiddle out of the bonnet of an old Morris Minor.
And Riverdance: well those Balkan rhythms were introduced into Irish music by Andy Irvine and the choreography bears an extraordinary resemblence to 42nd Street, 1939 version!
Anybody out there got other examples?

Where did all those jigs and reels and hornpipes come from? According to the Co Sligo flute player Seamus Tansey, they came from:

The singing of the birds, the ancient chants of our forefathers, the calls of the wild animals in the lonely countryside
the drone of the bees and the galloping hooves of the wild horses.

Another flute player, the late Vincent Broderick from near Loughrea in Co Galway, once recalled working on the bog in his youth. “You hear the lark singing, the frog croaking in the bog hole or the wind whistling through the heather. All these things seem to record inside your brain.” Already a have dozen names of tunes spring to mind.
Vincent Broderick described the origin of one tune. He was sheltering from a thunderstorm under the bank of a bog and reading a story about crocks of gold in The Leprechaun in Kilmeen, by Seamus O’Kelly. “And I went to sleep and when the rain was over, the sun came out and a lovely rainbow formed across the bog. All of a sudden this music came into my mind. That was the two tunes I composed – The Rainbow’s End and The Crock of Gold.” Other titles by Vincent Broderick include A Frog in the Pond, The Swan’s Nest, and The Mountain Stream. Even a tune he composed since moving to Dublin, The Mad Cow Roundabout, about Dublin’s chaotic M50 motorway, manages to retain a rural link. He has 200 tunes to his name.

The greatest living composer of traditional Irish tunes, Paddy Fahey, also from Co Galway, this time to the south of Loughrea, has been a farmer all his life.
It was the poet and folk singer Fred Johnston who told me this story about Paddy Fahey and a visiting student who was writing her thesis on the composer. Directed to the fields where he worked, the student asked him where he got his inspiration?
“Well,” replied the shy and reserved farmer, “I composed one in that hollow over there . . . another by those bushes in the next field … and another one on my way from the barn.”
Anecdotal, I admit, but as time goes by, I think there is more and more truth in it.

The amazing thing about Ed Reavy was that he composed his 500 or so tunes not on the boreens or in the fields of his native Barnagrove in Co Cavan, but in Philadelphia, to which his parents emigrated when he was still a teenager.

Mick Moloney has written that back in Cavan “The Reavys’ own house was a popular location for sessions. They owned a big barn where the local musicians used to congregate for sprees – music and dancing. He took to America with him vivid recollections of these evenings of merrymaking and those memories were always to stay with and inspire him.”
Ed Reavy was in his thirties before he started composing and lived until he was 90. How often his imagination visited the dreamscape of his youth?

The small village of Menlo sits by the River Corrib a few miles north of Galway city. Nearby is the scene of the boat tragedy that gave us that haunting lament Anach Chuain. The last village east of the river to give up speaking the Irish language, within a 20-mile radius lie the birthplaces of piper Patsy Touhey, singer Delores Keane and fiddler Frankie Gavin. From it Menlo Park in California gets its name.

Two events, so small as to be completely off the radar, in that village, back in 1915, have been drifting around my imagination since I read about them a few years back while thumbing through a book of memories taken down in Irish from a Menlo man, Tomás Laighléis, and published in 1977*.

The young men of the village were in the habit of congregating in the shelter of the castle walls by the gatehouse on sleepy Sunday afternoons in summertime, talking about stuff. Some would play pitch and toss.

Around five o’clock this day they suddenly heard the sound of music. Young and old jumped to their feet. A boat appeared rounding the corner full of uilleann pipers. The pipers joined them ashore and played for them such music, according to Tomás, that was never heard in the village before, or since, or as long as leaves will grow on trees. Those old folk who could walk came down from their houses. Villagers and musicians swapped songs and stories.

The sun was low in the sky by the time the pipers set off in their boat back to the city, but not before one of them gave a rousing talk, quoting a poem by An Craobhinn Aoibheann, aka Douglas Hyde, later the first President of Ireland. According to Tomás, he got a cheer that was louder than when the first stone that was ever smashed in Menlo, noted for its limestone quarries.

Some days later, a group of the King’s Highlanders arrived from the Renmore garrison in the city and took up a position overlooking the village. All bagpipers. It was midweek and the village men, small tenant farmers, continued working in their fields. No group of people gathered around the musicians. They played their music, ate their provisions and marched back to barracks.

Small ripples, admittedly, but part of a huge wave that would in time bring down a mighty empire.

Tomás never saw the men who entertained them that Sunday afternoon again but heard that many of them were to take part in the Easter Rising the following year, some losing their lives. I can’t help speculating whether one of them was Eamonn Ceannt, signatory of the 1916 Proclamation, Commander of the South Dublin Union during the Rising, founder of the Dublin Pipers’ Club, uileann piper, executed. Born in the east of the county, the railway station in Galway is today named after him.

As I am writing this, I break off to watch a concert from Hyde Park, London, on telly celebrating the upcoming 90th birthday of another patriot, Nelson Mandela. I have never been a fan of Freddie Mercury or Queen, but like millions sat in awe at their stunning 1984 Live Aid performance. Only a few months earlier, as Mandela languished in prison cell 46664, Queen had earned their way on to a United Nations name-and-shame list after their concert performances in Sun City, apartheid South Africa’s answer to Vegas, in defiance of the expressed wishes of the ANC. “The band is not political,” guitarist Brian May explained.

At the Hyde Park London concert, who should I see coming on stage to perform in honour of the great man but – Brian May and Queen (with Paul Rodgers in for Freddie Mercury).

Happy birthday, Mr Mandela. In Menlo you’d know where you stood.

*Seanchas Thomáis Laighléis, by Tomás de Bhaldraithe. An Clóchomhar Tta., 1977.

Welcome to the Ramblinghouse Weblog.

The good news is that the new website at Ramblinghouse.org is up and running.

You are welcome to visit, any hour, any state, at http://www.ramblinghouse.org/

- Fear a’ Ti

Ramblinghouse

PS. If you are interested in Connemara ponies, visit my sister’s weblog