St. Patrick's Day: Traveling to the West of Ireland

Journeying to the Music

By Garrett Riggs
QuailBellMagazine.com

I was around 14 when my mother presented me with the Claddagh ring. She had a co-worker bring it back from a trip she had taken to Ireland.

My mother gave me the ring that had two hands encircling a heart (offering the heart really) one evening and told me, “one day, when you get married, you’ll turn it around to show your heart is taken.” She looked out the kitchen window toward the driveway where my father’s truck was decidedly absent.

She took a drag from her cigarette and exhaled.

“I always wanted see Ireland,” she said, “It sounds like there’s magic there.”

She stubbed out the cigarette and told me her mother’s last name was Kennedy. Her mother had died when my mother was very young and she and her sisters had been sent to live with various relatives, reuniting with my grandfather after he remarried a few years later.

My mother grew up during the Great Depression in the part of Southern Indiana that is a stone’s throw from Louisville, Kentucky. That area blurs the border between North and South, and my mother’s childhood was one of poverty and ignorance that she escaped from by reading. She was a voracious reader and traded in sacks of paperback books at the used book store almost every week. She mostly read mysteries, but she also had a soft spot for W. Somerset Maugham, who also had had a spectacularly awful childhood and blended the pain he saw in life into his fiction.

Mom unloaded the dishwasher, glancing out the window, looking for my dad’s headlights, but probably not really expecting them. Waylon Jennings had a song about a “good-hearted woman in love with a good-timin’ man.” It could have been about my parents. My mother used to send me into bars along the gulf coast to see if he was inside. I also have memories being left in the car on dark nights while my mother did the searching. As an adult, I would read Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes and wish I didn’t recognize his father in my own.

Within two years, my mother would be gone from lung cancer and a brain tumor, both of which had gone undetected on X-rays taken less than a year before she had died. When the doctors finally found the cause of back aches, the cancer had spread so aggressively, they gave her “six months…maybe a year.” She made it four months—long enough to see me through my 16th birthday and the family through Christmas.

My mother was 54 when she died. She spent her entire life working and raising children. Her only escape was the books that described people and places that were far away—the Connemara hills, the Cliffs of Moher, and the cottages and shops in the little towns in the West of Ireland. These were just some of the places she never got to see outside of her dreams.

*   *   *

I lasted one semester in Tuscaloosa, where two life-changing events happened.

I met Richard Yates. He was dying from emphysema and had mellowed with age and sickness. He had written books like Revolutionary Road and The Easter Parade, capturing the anxieties of mid-century America with his spare, observant style. When I met Yates, he could no longer carouse and cause a ruckus. But he would talk with passion and ferocity about writing and books. He spent the semester preaching to us about Alice Munro, Flaubert, and Toni Morrison. One night at a party, he offered me the Heineken he was drinking. When I turned down the beer, Yates put a copy of Beloved in my hands like it was a treasure.

The second discovery I made was in a used a record store when I found a stash of records by The Pogues. From the first song, I was floored by Shane MacGowan’s writing. He was a Romantic and a punk. He combined the anger and frustration of unemployed immigrant youth in London with the ballad tradition of Ireland. He wrote songs that evoked homesickness for a place one barely remembers. He wrote songs that celebrated the beauty hidden in the grit of the streets. The tunes were different, but something in the lyrics reminded me of the high-lonesome songs my father used to listen to. My father was fond of country music’s crooners like Eddy Arnold, but when he was really down, Hank Williams Sr. was the salve.

*   *   * 

When I was in my early 20s, I quit the writing program at Alabama knowing I didn’t really have any “life experience” that would deepen my writing. I went to St. Augustine and took a series of low-paying jobs that would let me concentrate on writing while meeting plenty of colorful characters—I was an innkeeper, a fry cook, a pet sitter, and a record store clerk.

My friends Jeanne and Marty offered to take me to Ireland with them. I had watched their menagerie of pets on several occasions and to thank me, they offered up the extra travel miles they had accumulated.

Our first stop was in the town of Corofin, where their friend Teresa ran a pub called McNamara’s. Teresa brought out food from her family’s kitchen behind the pub—thick slices of ham, sharp cheese, bread, and sweet butter.

“You must be famished,” she said, pushing plates at us.

Jeanne asked, “How are the Toms?” Old Tom and Young Tom were regulars at the pub. One took care of sheep during the day and the other was a farmer.

Teresa assured us that both Young Tom and Old Tom would be along soon and almost as she was getting the words out, a man with piercing blue eyes and curly salt and pepper hair stepped through the door—this was the elder of the two Toms. Old Tom was decked out in a navy blue suit and Wellingtons.

He broke into a grin when he saw Jeanne and Marty and he came over to clasp their hands. The pub filled with more people including Young Tom, who gave Marty a hearty clap on the back as he ordered a pint of Guinness.

A duo with a fiddle and guitar set up in one of the corners and Teresa turned off the radio that had been playing classic American country music—Merle Haggard, Johnny Cash, and Loretta Lynn. The duo played instrumental folk tunes, heavy on the selection of jigs and reels and an old man in a tweed cap insisted on dancing with each woman in the pub.

At the end of the night, Jeanne led everyone in singing “The Parting Glass.”

The blending of human voices was rough and raw, but full of emotion that eclipsed the over-polished records of Irish ballads made in studios. Thankfully, no one in that crowd was going to sing “Danny Boy” in the style of Bing Crosby. No, this was the music of the soul, all these voices rising together to ring out the night. We would hear other live music throughout the trip—bands in Sligo, Galway, and Killybegs—but nothing compared to the music made by friends and neighbors celebrating the end of a hard week of work.

*   *   *  

A couple of days into the trip, Jeanne suggested a visit Roundstone Musical Instruments. She wanted a bodhrán and the master maker of them is Malachy Kearns. The bodhrán, a drum made of a birch frame with a goatskin head, provides the heartbeat of Irish folk and traditional music. The instrument is a simple one and most anyone can beat out a rhythm on one, but in the hands of a skilled player like Kevin Conneff of the Chieftains, the bodhrán can be a full percussion section by itself, capable of booming bass and staccato raps of wood against wood.

Moving Hearts and Planxty had been playing non-stop on the tapes she and Marty had packed for the journey. Both of those bands had Christy Moore in common and Christy got his bodhráns from Kearns’ shop.

Christy Moore is something of a national treasure in Ireland. From his days in traditional bands like Planxty and experimental groups like Moving Hearts to his solo career, Moore has simultaneously preserved Irish folk music while adding to the catalog with his own songs. Moore writes about everything—love, religion, politics, alcoholism—with the same intensity. A song like “Smoke and Strong Whiskey” is a damning criticism of social and political problems in Ireland, while “Lisdoonvarna” celebrates the Matchmaking Festival that has gone on for more than 150 years.

Kearns’ bodhrans were used in productions of Riverdance and were featured in the ceili scene in The Titanic; the American Embassy also invited Kearns to make bodhráns for President Barack Obama and his family in honor of their visit to Ireland in 2011.

Kearns himself greeted us when we stepped inside the shop. He had a broad face and thick arms that would be more at home on a construction site than in a tiny studio making delicate instruments of birch and goatskin. Rows of drums hung overhead. Some had hand-painted Celtic designs. A picture of Christy Moore playing one of Malachy’s drums was hung on the wall.

“You’re taking these to America, then?” he asked as he rang up the drums. He offered to ship them for us, “unless you’ll be playing them in the pub tonight, of course.”

Before sending us on our way, Kearns demonstrated some of the basics of playing the bodhrán, showing us how to dampen the sound by applying pressure to the back of the skin.

*   *   *

The bartender in Galway was a little more skeptical of yet another group of tourists from the U.S.

“Oh, you’re from America. So, are all you Yanks as violent as you seem? Does everyone have a gun, then?!” was his first question as he heard my accent.

He went on polishing the glasses and waiting for a response as if he had asked about the weather.

 “It’s not like what you see on TV,” I told the bartender.

“I see,” he said. “It’s the same with us and the Troubles.”

 My father had been nervous about me going to Ireland for fear of the IRA and violence. I shared this with the bartender and he nodded as if I had just proved his point.

The bartender noticed the book I had with me—an encyclopedia of Irish music.

“May I?” he asked and pointed to it.

I nudged the book toward him.

The bartender flipped through the book, which was heavy on the rock acts from Ireland—U2, Thin Lizzy, Rory Gallagher, the Saw Doctors, etc.

He put the book down.

“Luke Kelly,” he said. “That’s all you need to know about Irish music.”

Luke Kelly was born into a working-class Dublin family in 1940. He died of complications from a brain tumor in 1984, but in his short life, he reawakened Irish folk music with his revival and interpretation of songs that ranged from rebel songs to love ballads. Kelly rose to worldwide fame with The Dubliners, a folk band that took its name from the short story collection by James Joyce. Kelly, along with Ronnie Drew, Barney McKenna, Cairan Bourke, and John Sheahan, brought Irish folk music to the international stage at a time when musicians like Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, Ewan McColl, and the Clancy Brothers were also using folk music to thrust civil rights, politics, and economic issues into the spotlight.

With a flaming red mane of curls and a wild beard covering his craggy features, Kelly had a fearsome stage presence. Like Pete Seeger, Kelly used the banjo as a rhythm instrument and belted out songs with ferocious glee. Watch footage of live performances and you will see a musician who knew how to read and connect with his audience. Kelly wasn’t a songwriter, but he was a great interpreter of songs. He gave raw emotional performances that resonated with the audience and influenced other singers. Listening to his version of “Dirty Old Town,” one can hear where Shane MacGowan borrowed some of his phrasing for the Pogues’ cover of the song.

Kelly is often described as a political singer because he chose to bring Irish rebel songs into the band’s repertoire, but friends say he was more interested in the stories and emotions brought out by the songs he sang.

He did sing rebel songs like “The Rising of the Moon” and traditional ballads like “Will You Come to the Bower?” that both date to the 19th century, but he also brought contemporary songs into the Dubliners’ mix. Shortly after Ewan McColl wrote “Dirty Old Town,” Kelly brought it to the band.

During a night of song swapping, Derry-born Phil Coulter played “The Town I Loved So Well” for Kelly. Coulter says he kept his eyes closed when he sang the song because he was afraid of how Kelly might react to the song about the way everyday lives were affected by the violence in the North. When he finished singing, Coulter says, he opened his eyes to see tears on Kelly’s cheeks and knew he had finally been able to express in music all the things he felt about his home town and the human toll of the fighting between the IRA and the British soldiers (Luke Kelly). “The Town I Loved So Well” became a regular part of the Dubliners’ catalog, and Luke Kelly’s emotional delivery helped people outside of Ireland understand the pain of the situation.

*   *   *

On one of the last days of our journey, we climbed a small hill and crossed a pebble-filled stream before finding the overgrown graveyard. The only thing that marked it as a graveyard was the white crosses that had been painted on the crooked iron gate.

Marty pulled the gate open and Jeanne and I stepped in.

“There it is!” Jeanne whispered and pointed toward something at the back of the graveyard.

A semicircle of stones sat in front of a small alcove. The stones were the crumbled wall of an ancient, disused well.

The alcove was hung with bits of ribbon, notes, and other personal items left behind by visitors to the holy well. Old stories claim that holy wells are places of magic, where people leave offerings and pray for the sick, in memory of the dead, or for help with money, love, and life. In some myths, wells and springs originate in the Other world and the water acts as a bridge between the two realms.

I wasn’t religious and didn’t believe in folk tales, but thought it was fitting when Jeanne suggested I leave a little something of my mother’s behind so she could “visit” Ireland. We wrapped a broken necklace that had belonged to her in a bandanna I had worn throughout the trip and placed it deep inside the alcove, out of the way of the wind and storms that blew through the area.

Jeanne stepped back and walked over to where Marty was examining an old headstone.

Feeling a bit foolish, I whispered to my mother’s long-gone spirit. “It is all as beautiful as you had dreamed.”

Resources:
Luke Kelly the Performer (2005), Dir. By Michael Feeney Callan. Irish Music Licensing, Dublin.

#Real #IrishMusic #Tourism #MalachyKearns #LukeKelly #HolyWells #Memoir

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