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.”
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.
All those sessions are just a warm-up for the moment I’ve most been looking forward to—the chance to play with The Four Star Trio once again. Not only are they a great band, they’re also very loose and funny.
The star of the group is McCarthy. The first time I played with him, I was plenty impressed by his sterling fiddle playing, but he really knocked me out when, halfway through the session, he put down the fiddle and picked up the flute and was equally brilliant on that instrument. This is uncommon in Irish music: There are musicians who are superb on more than one instrument in the same family—say, strings—but it’s not often that you find someone who excels on instruments in two different families. McCarthy is the only one of the trio who could be considered a professional musician—he’s also a classically trained flautist—but he has a day job as well, teaching at the Cork School of Music. The others are teachers, too—Ahern of math at Cork Institute of Technology, and Ó Drisceoil of English and Irish at Douglas Community School. This is not unusual: Many of Ireland’s top traditional musicians make their living at other work, which is one indication of how deeply embedded the music is in the culture—it’s just part of life.
The music is less a part of my own day-to-day existence, but despite the time that’s passed since I last played with these guys, it feels smooth as silk. I know some of the tunes, and I’m happy to hear them again; others are new to me, but I hop aboard the chord train and they roll effortlessly along. The one time I stumble, at the beginning of a new tune in a medley of reels, McCarthy steps in and rescues me.
Between the spells of music, there is nonstop hilarity, led by Ó Drisceoil, whose nickname—Fada—means “long” and refers to both his height and his extraordinary proboscis. He is a truly funny man, and when he sings “Ben Hur,” his phantasmagoric, five-minute rendering of the story in contemporary terms, he brings down the house.
It’s good craic, but all too soon, midnight arrives. The evening ends with the medley of three tunes the Cork City Council commissioned McCarthy to write for President Mary McAleese when she came to town to unveil Cork as 2005’s European Capital of Culture. I don’t play along; I just sit and soak up the beautiful sounds.
In another ten years, will I still be able to hear—and be part of—such superlative traditional music in Cork’s pubs? It’s anybody’s guess. As Ahern says, “These things move in cycles. For a number of years, we’ve been talking about moving the music back into houses, but it hasn’t really happened. It will probably take a deliberate effort on our part to make it a reality. But I can see that maybe, in the years to come, there’ll be more people just ringing each other and saying, ‘Do you want to play a tune tonight?’—the way it used to be.”
Whatever the venue, there’s no question that the music will continue. It wouldn’t be Ireland otherwise.
The Details
Hearing Music There
Definitions of traditional music vary; no doubt some would include “Danny Boy” and “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling” in the category. Just because it says “Traditional Music” in a pub window doesn’t mean you’re going to hear the real thing.
Also, be aware of the tension between the pub as community center and the pub as tourist experience. As musician Pat “Herring” Ahern says, “That whole Riverdance thing has created a kind of expectation, both among Irish people who don’t understand the music in the first place and among tourists who’ve come to Ireland to hear this music. They expect Riverdance, and they’re disappointed that it’s actually a much smaller-scale, quieter type of thing.”
Schedules change from time to time, but in addition to the sessions mentioned in the accompanying article, authentic traditional music can be found at the following Cork pubs: The Lobby Bar (1 Union Quay) Sunday at 6:30 and Tuesday and Friday at 9:30; The Phoenix (3 Union Quay) Thursday and Saturday at 9:30; The Gables (32 Douglas Street) Wednesday, Thursday, and Sunday at 9:30; Sin É (8 Coburg Street) Friday and Sunday at 6:30 and Tuesday at 9:30.
The Corner House (7 Coburg Street; 450-0655) also has music on Wednesdays, and Án Spailpín Fánac (28 South Main Street; 427-7949) has additional sessions every night except Sunday. If you’re fortunate enough to be in Cork on the first Friday of the month, The Corner House hosts an enormous session attended by every musician who can make it.
Eating There
Stick to the restaurants. While many pubs are starting to serve food to make up for reduced beer sales, it isn’t anything special. Also, pubs that host traditional music generally don’t serve food in the part of the pub where music is played. With most sessions starting at 9:30, you’ll probably want to eat first anyway.
Jacques (9 Phoenix Street; 427-7387), pronounced “Jacks,” and The Douglas Hide (63 Douglas Street; 431-5695) are both intimate restaurants serving outstanding food. At Jacques, fish specials change daily depending on the catch. The Douglas Hide offers a lovely smoked-mackerel potato cake for starters, and the sirloin comes with an amazing smoked-tomato salsa.
Jacobs on the Mall (30A South Mall; 425-1530), a stylish restaurant in a converted Turkish bath, has 30-foot ceilings and skylights running the length of the room. The roast cod and the crisp-skinned salmon are excellent.
For
lunch, try the Farmgate Café at the English Market on
the Grand Parade (427-8134) for great salads, or Café
Paradiso
(16 Lancaster Quay;
427-7939), often called the best vegetarian
restaurant in Ireland, where the potato, spring onion, and wild garlic tortilla
is accompanied by wonderful wilted greens.
For a picnic lunch, try the English Market (The Grand Parade), whose shops feature meat, fish, produce, wine, smoothies, cold cuts, organic food, chocolate, eggs, coffee, tea, pastries, bread, and olives.
Staying there
Crawford House (011-353-21-427-9000; from $108) and Garnish House (011-353-21-427-5111; from $108) are both very nice B&Bs, about a block apart on the Western Road and an easy 10- to 15-minute walk or a short bus ride from the city center. The former has tasteful contemporary décor, while the latter is more traditionally furnished. Both provide full breakfasts, and all rooms are en suite. Be sure to ask for a room away from the street because the Western Road is a major thoroughfare.
If you prefer to stay in a hotel, try Isaacs, downtown at 48 MacCurtain Street (011-353-21-450-0011; from $132; includes full breakfast). Again, you’ll want a room away from the street. Rooms 203 and 220 are the best in the hotel.
The Hayfield Manor Hotel (Perrott Avenue and College Road; 011-353-21-484-5900; from $457; includes full breakfast) is Cork’s only five-star hotel. It’s all you would expect, right down to the putter and movable cup for golfers in each room. Downtown is a ten-minute walk away. —J.F.