Tonight’s featured singers are the Ní Bheaglaoích sisters, Seo--saimhín and Caitlín, angelic sopranos from Kerry, the county west of Cork. They begin with “Hide and Go Seek,” a song with alternating lines of English and Irish. Well into it, Caitlín starts the wrong verse and forgets the words. She looks at her sister for help, then turns to the room and says disarmingly, “We’re very nervous singing to a whole crowd.” Nobody minds the flub, and they soon get back on track and finish the song.
After two more by the sisters, Walsh begins calling on others. Sean O’Keefe sings “Wild Mountain Thyme,” also called “Will You Go, Lassie, Go,” a well-known traditional piece. When he reaches the first chorus, the entire room is singing. The feeling is akin to a religious ritual, a shared experience that lifts the participants out of the mundane reality of everyday life and deposits us on a higher, distant shore. Time is suspended as we travel together to another, less complicated land.
Sean McCarthy does a poignant piece about a mother singing to her son, whose father is off working in England because there are no jobs in Ireland. Two more songs, and it’s back to the sisters. During their second number, Walsh silently indicates to me that I’m next.
“We have a visitor from the States,” he says by way of introduction. I sing “The Horse Named Bill,” a sublime piece of nonsense I learned as a boy from Carl Sandburg’s American Songbag recordings. The lyrics are irresistible, and the song draws appreciative chuckles throughout and a rousing hand at the close.
As the evening continues, people keep arriving, and by the end, the room is packed; there are easily 70 people. In the course of the session, the singers vary from the highly skilled to the amateurish, but the audience is unfailingly attentive and provides a safety net of uncritical, unwavering support for every singer. It’s tremendously uplifting.
The next night, I head for a session at the Mutton Lane Inn. The band consists of two fiddles, a tenor banjo, a guitar, and an Irish drum called the bodhrán (pronounced “BO-ron”). The players are excellent, but the pub is cramped, hot, and noisy. The music, though traditional in its roots, is played in an avant-garde style, with unusual chord changes and quirky key modulations, and I have trouble relating to it. After 20 minutes, I bail out and make my way through Cork’s mazelike streets back to Án Spailpín Fánac, where students from the music department at University College Cork are holding their weekly session.
As soon as I walk in the door, I know I’ve made the right decision. It’s a much larger pub, and though the musicians are young, their playing is perfectly comprehensible to me. The large band is situated in a room at the back of the pub, with three fiddles, two flutes, two guitars, piano accordion, button accordion, tenor banjo, and Irish bouzouki. Like all good sessions, this is in no sense a performance; rather, it’s musicians playing for their own enjoyment and the pleasure of those who care enough about the music to listen. The session is driven by the fiddler, banjo player, and button-box player, who are a level above and together pull the others up to their plane.
Jim Walsh wanders into the pub, catches sight of me, and comes over. I tell him how much I enjoyed the singers’ club, particularly the supportive, noncompetitive ambiance. “That’s part of the ethos,” Walsh says. “Songs don’t survive unless they’re sung, and it doesn’t matter so much how they’re sung.”
At the end of the night, Walsh introduces me to Paudie King, the button-box player. He’s in his early twenties and about to graduate from UCC with a degree in math and Irish. I congratulate him on his excellent playing and wish him well. “Maybe we’ll meet again,” he says politely.
“You never know,” I reply.
The following evening, I accompany Mick Daly to The Corner House. Daly, a stalwart of the Cork traditional scene, is not only a stylish guitar player of Irish traditional music but also an excellent five-string-banjo player of American old-time string-band and bluegrass music.
The session is already under way when we reach The Corner House. The musicians are sitting just to the left of the door: fiddler, tenor banjo player, electric keyboardist, and button-box player—none other than Paudie King. We nod to each other as if we always run into each other at this pub.
Daly takes our instrument cases and leans them on the wall just inside the door. Leaving the instruments unattended—something unthinkable in the States—he orders a couple of pints of Murphy’s stout, and we sit down to listen. A few sips later, he asks, “Shall we play a few tunes, then?”
“If it’s okay with them,” I say.
Daly goes over and asks. He comes back with my mandolin case. “No problem.”
The fiddler starts up a hornpipe I don’t know, but I can hear the chord changes and I play rhythm, blending in without a problem.
During a break, Walsh blows in. He spots me and laughs. “Are you shadowing me?” I ask him.
A few minutes later, when Ahern and his wife, Gloria, arrive, I start to get the hang of how this whole thing works—it’s the community-center aspect of the pub. I feel like I’ve been initiated into a club.
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