Tag Archives: Folk music of Ireland

Shane MacGowan, the last of the spailpíns

The Pogues’ pugnacious punk frontman may well be the last inheritor of the wayward spailpín singers. Throughout its history, Ireland has found figures to express its dreams and torments, or at least its boisterous fighting spirits. Mid-19th-century Ireland found such figure in James Clarence Mangan. Mid-20th century Ireland discovered a few such figures in Patrick Kavanagh, Brendan Behan, and Luke Kelly. In Shane Patrick Lysaght MacGowan, a native of Puckane, a village in County Tipperary, Ireland found a late 20th-century inheritor to this wayward legacy.

Ever since planter colonialism beat down the haughty, aristocratic-minded bards, Ireland has maintained a consistent subaltern tradition of poets and singers. The tributaries that fed into this tradition, which for lack of a better term, might be called a spailpín culture, ranged from sean nós and folk ballads to music hall and dancehall fare. Songs of hard labor and hard living, of wandering and exile, resentment, and loss emerged from this culture, nurtured by two languages to form part of the musical repertoire.

The Pogues in 1990.

Shane MacGowan came of age in 1970s England when the rock world, no stranger to its own forms of dissolution, was being convulsed by punk, a raucous, aggressively atonal anti-musical genre that gave the finger not just to the soppy pop of the mainstream culture industry but to all bombastic stadium rock. Out of the merging of these two unlikely patrimonies was born the legend of The Pogues. If Riverdance announced the birth of a slick and synchronized new 21st-century neoliberal, post-nationalist Ireland, was it the fate of The Pogues, and specifically MacGowan, to be the last of the spailpíns, the tail-end of a tradition stretching back to Eoghan Rua and Cathal Buí?

Read on in the article “Shane MacGowan: The tail-end of a great Irish tradition?” by Joe Cleary (The Irish times [13 January 2017]). Find it in RILM Abstracts.

Below, MacGowan and The Pogues perform with The Dubliners an epic version of The Irish rover.

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Filed under Europe, Performers, Popular music

The female accordion

The first concertinas to arrive in County Clare, Ireland, were inexpensive German instruments, a far cry from the elegant parlor instrument invented by Sir Charles Wheatstone in 1829 and popularized among the social elite of Victorian England. They were disseminated by traveling peddlers and local and more distant shops—and probably by maritime traffic, given Clare’s position at the mouth of the Shannon estuary, the last port of call for tall ships about to cross the Atlantic.

By the end of the nineteenth century the concertina had all but replaced the uilleann pipes in popularity there, and Clare had already developed a reputation as a treasure-trove of concertina music and the home of some of the instrument’s finest players. After its completion in 1892 the West Clare Railway carried concertinas into formerly inaccessible rural areas, and before World War II the instrument became particularly popular among women musicians, earning it the nickname bean-cháirdin (female accordion).

This according to “Clare: Heartland of the Irish concertina” by Gearóid Ó hAllmhuráin (Papers of the International Concertina Association III [2006] pp. 1–19; RILM Abstracts of Music Literature 2006-5495).

Above, the legendary Elizabeth Crotty; below, Kate McNamara plays Sergeant Early’s dream and The plough and the stars.

BONUS: Read about the gendering of another traditional Irish instrument in The female harp.

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Filed under Europe, Instruments, World music

Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Eireann

 

Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Eireann, the largest group worldwide devoted to the preservation and promotion of Irish traditional music, is celebrating its 60th anniversary this year.

With hundreds of branches in 15 countries on 4 continents, the non-profit organization sponsors  classes, concerts, and sessions in local communities. It also hosts a website, which accounts for its presence in RILM. A page on their site titled The music includes links to tracks from their CDs, recordings of sessions, and tracks from the Comhaltas Traditional Music Archive; video recordings of some of today’s foremost performers; selections from their own tune books, as well as other tunes from historical sources; a photograph archive; and Treoir, the Comhaltas journal.

Below, Emma O’Sullivan dances a reel at a Comhaltas event. Note that this is not the rigid-posture style popularized by shows like Riverdance, which is considered by many to be a more recent development; this style is known as sean-nós, which means “old style”.

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Filed under Dance, Europe, Resources

The Dunn Family Collection

Although he never mentioned it in his published writings, the collector and compiler of traditional Irish tunes Francis O’Neill (1848–1936) made wax cylinder recordings of some of his fellow musicians in Chicago, probably in the late 1890s and early 1900s. Once believed lost, 32 of these recordings were discovered in 2003 when David Dunn opened a suitcase that had belonged to his grandfather, who had been a friend of O’Neill. Dunn brought them to the Ward Irish Music Archives in Milwaukee, which contacted the American Folklife Center for help in digitizing them. Several recordings by the renowned uilleann pipe player Patrick J. “Patsy” Touhey (1865–1923) are included, along with performances by four other luminaries of the Chicago Irish music community.

The recordings now comprise the cornerstone of The Dunn Family Collection, an online exhibit hosted by the Ward Archives that also includes manuscripts, artifacts, photographs, and sheet music collected by the instrument maker and repairer Michael J. Dunn (1855–1935). Dunn was also a captain in the Milwaukee Fire Department, while O’Neill—when he was not pursuing his passion for Irish traditional music—served as Superintendent of the Chicago Police Department.

Thanks to Patrick Hutchinson for alerting us about this collection! Patrick plays the uilleann pipes with Bento Boxty.

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Filed under North America, Resources, World music