I’ve come to Kinsale for the regular Wednesday-night session of traditional Irish music at The Spaniard pub, featuring Johnny McCarthy’s electrifying fiddle and flute playing, Con “Fada” Ó Drisceoil’s inspired button-accordion work, and Pat “Herring” Ahern’s elegant, understated guitar backup. Collectively, they’re known as The Four Star Trio, and it’s been almost a decade since I’ve last been to Ireland and had the joy of playing with them.
In the intervening years, broad economic and cultural changes have transformed the Emerald Isle. Riding the “Celtic Tiger,” the tidal wave of prosperity that has swept over the country in the past ten years, Ireland has gone from one of western Europe’s poorest nations to one of the world’s wealthiest. But the new affluence has come at a price. In a country where interaction among neighbors has always been a primary part of the social fabric, there are indications that the growing prosperity is beginning to create, as it has elsewhere, a general decline in community life and an increasingly isolated populace. “Of course, there’s still a degree of engagement,” Ahern says. “But not to the extent there used to be.”
The role of the pub, long the hub of social interaction, is changing rapidly. Stringent new drunk-driving laws, the rising cost of a pint of beer (approaching four euros, just under $5), the year-old ban on smoking in public buildings, and increased entertaining at home have all contributed to the decline in the pub’s prominence. With more vacations, more cars, and more disposable income, the Irish now have social outlets beyond the public house.
Pub keepers have suffered, and musicians have felt the effects as well. Ahern warned me of all this a few weeks before my arrival. “Last night,” he wrote in an e-mail, “Johnny and my--self were playing in The Spaniard, mostly to Americans—the appreciative type—and a few Brits. Then, at 10:30, they all left to go to bed, leaving a solitary local couple as our audience.”
This is a big change. I recall a typical pub evening as a kaleidoscopic beehive of locals drifting in and out, children running around, occasional applause, frequent laughter, some singing along, and above all, good craic. (Craic, pronounced “crack,” describes a warm, communal atmosphere, with laughter resulting from good humor and spontaneously funny situations rather than from scripted jokes. Music and drink are often part of the equation, but are not essential to it. As a rough rule, the later the hour, the better the craic.)
Contrary to common wisdom, the association of pubs and traditional music is a relatively recent one. Before the 1930s, especially in rural communities, music and dancing happened in the home. Neighbors would gather for entertainment and recreation on winter evenings and summer Sundays. Somebody would play a tune on the fiddle or the box (as the accordion is commonly called), to which some people might dance, then someone else would sing a song, and another person might tell a joke or a story. Between the mid-’30s and the early ’50s, the music moved to community and church halls, where dances were held. In the ’50s, these events were replaced by festivals promoted by organizations dedicated to the preservation of traditional music. Music did not become fashionable in the pubs until the ’60s, first in rural areas and then, by the early ’70s, in towns and cities as well. In the late ’80s, having discovered that music was a draw, pub keepers began paying two or three musicians to anchor a session in order to ensure that it would happen regularly on a given night of the week. The advantage to the musicians was obvious; the drawback was that the more they were hired for paid sessions, the less time they had to play together simply for pleasure.
Over the years, the format of pub music has changed. In the early days, the structure was much like the bygone era of playing in homes. “There was the tunes themselves—the music—there was singing, and there was dancing, and they were all part of the one thing,” says Ahern. “But what’s happened, particularly over the past ten years, is they’ve become compartmentalized almost totally.”
I witness this phenomenon myself at a Sunday-night meeting of the Cork Singers’ Club. I show up at 9:30 at a pub called Án Spailpín Fánac (“The Wandering Laborer”) and I introduce myself to Jim Walsh, the club’s director.
“Do you sing?” he asks me.
“I do,” I admit.
“That’s great, then,” he says. “I’ll put you on the list.”
The session is held on the second floor, above the main pub, in a room with great acoustics. People of all ages arrive, and there is an air of relaxed expectancy. Without any warning, when the room is about two-thirds full, Walsh kicks things off with “The Trip to Guagane,” a whimsical ditty about a series of misadventures that befalls a group of friends on a road trip to a rural area. By the third verse, several people have caught on to the refrain and are singing it along with him: “Rally rah fol de da, rally rah fol de dee.” Soon most of the 40 people in the room are joining in.
Walsh welcomes the crowd and lays down the premise of the club: “You might sing a song or tell a joke or recite a poem—the only rule we have here is that no instrument other than the human voice is permitted.”
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