Selling Ireland by the Sound

Cherish this moment: it’s for all of you who believe Irish dancing is overground synchronised swimming. I came to America, seeking the new; I discovered that but first I had to re-experience an Ireland preserved in a cultural freezer.

Green Linnet, the flagbearer of Irish music in America, had organised a weekend of musical, dancing and cultural mayhem and celebration. Over a hundred musicians, the cream of their crop, were playing but even my advisors couldn’t prepare me for the context. Irish-America can be more alien than even I imagined.

First the scene isn’t some Irish tavern in Queen’s or the Bronx packed with the sturdy citizens of the New York police and fire departments. Instead it’s the discotheque of Kutsher’s, an out-of-season holiday complex on the outskirts of Monticello, a town in the foothills of the Catskills that’s about two hours drive from New York city. Kutsher’s is a sort of Butlin’s with bagels, a place haunted by the ghosts of Zero Mostel, Broadway Danny Rose and old Jewish comics on the borscht circut. Woody Allen escaped from the Kutsher’s kitsch trap but Tony Manero, John Travolta’s character in Saturday Night Fever didn’t. This is where New Yorkers go to holiday after they’ve signed up for 2.4 children and a life sentence in the paint business.

As for the room, it’s a fishbowl that‘s coloured disco ultramarine with tiers of seating looking forward to the dancefloor and a stage above which rises a lighting system dubiously and disastrously modelled on the spaceship in Close Encounters Of The Third Kind. If this is Ireland, it must be one of Albert Reynolds’ ballrooms of romance, one of those Dreamlands and Cloudlands, resprayed and redesigned according to Ireland’s sole contribution to disco design: pre-post-modernism.

But is that Tony Manero dancing here, reliving his swivel-hipped youth? No, in this Bizarro world, witness instead a troupe of essentially middle-aged Irish set dancers, taking their learners’ first steps for a saunter round ‘The Walls Of Ennis’. Expect no spring-heeled athletes like Michael Flatley and Jean Butler here; this is a serious hobby. Just so and rather like lawn bowls.

Starting to hum Mr. Costello’s ‘This Is Hell’ I can’t forget one lugubrious goose, tall, balding, with glasses and a bulb of a nose, bouncing metronomically as if he believed Irish dancing was the most sedate and safe alternative to jogging.

I suppose I didn’t really know what to expect. I’ve had countless interviews with Irish acts of every persuasion and all have wittered on about their surreal initiations into the Irish-American experience. Even so it still hardly prepared me for the inevitable culture-shock.

But then the emigrant experience is really like one of those halls of mirrors where orthodoxies get reshaped, refracted and distorted. The experience may be identifiable and familiar but dimensions change. Rogue genes in the Irish character and experience, long dormant at home, suddenly take on a new and exaggerated precedence. The most modern can wear antique badges of identity long discarded in Ireland.

Time is also changed. Cultural scar-tissue that we’ve thought we’ve healed at home, can still be an open wound. The Thirties co-exist uneasily with the Nineties in ways we can’t imagine. The conflicts too are different.

I suppose that’s why I’m disorientated by the dancefloor. I’m fascinated how traditional music is renewing and resurrecting itself through the Nineties, often through Irish-American prompting yet here I’m confronted by Dev at the disco, not comely Irish maidens dancing at the crossroads but some social outing from a less than radiant past, congregated in a room that’s a survival of Seventies disco at its most kitsch.

It looks like cultural cryogenics. These people or their parents left an Ireland stultified and paralysed by the ancient ways yet they seem to cling on to the Fifties Triple Alliance of the GAA, Fianna Fail and the Catholic Church now so threatened in Ireland. Yet appearances are most deceptive. This Green Linnet event also includes the forces of renewal.

Change now to another room in Kutsher’s, the bar with windows viewing a swimming-pool which seems to attract gargantuan New Jersey sumo wrestlers, corpulencies and beached whale parcels of flab so vast as to be a reminder that the American philosophy isn’t so much Descartes as A La Carte – I eat therefore I am. Again the decor in this other blue room is straight from Planet Bizarro.

There’s something identikit about the combination of the adjacent water, plastic seating and the murky lighting system. Is this coincidence or the unconscious result of emigrant folk-memory? Has this Irish music festival really landed up in the only bar in North America that’s like the one on the Holyhead ferry?

John Ivers wouldn’t know: he went west not east. Father of Eileen, he talks proudly, fondly and funnily of his daughter. The purists, he says, keep asking “who’s that Yank that’s destroying all the tunes” and then he laughs, good humour mingling with his mischief.

“Who’s that Yank, destroying all the tunes?” Well, possibly the woman with the band most likely to break new ground since Moving Hearts. Next night, his daughter, Eileen Ivers will lead a breath-taking and almost blasphemous set.

Again, it’s a surreal scene in Kutsher’s dining hall, a vast refectory which can serve over 700 at its tables. Eileen dons her blue electric fiddle, Seamus Egan forces jazz overblowing from his flute and the rhythms of guitarist, John Doyle, don’t idle down some Clare backroad. African percussionist Kouymate digs into his sack for a medley of shakers and bells and the skins that his hands hammer aren’t built like a bodhran. In the front tables, teetotally sipping post-prandial tea and coffee, sit the senior generation of Irish-America. They clap but it’s obvious some are confused. This isn’t the fete of their fathers.

John Ivers doesn’t mind. A Fifties exile from Mayo, he worked hard for his American Dream, the best education for his children and he’s content to enjoy its rewards in his daughter’s playing. But in the bar, he asked a second question: why is Green Linnet the main record label for Irish music in America? The question’s simple; it’s also profound. Not because it challenges the pre-eminence of Green Linnet but instead asks why the entire Irish-American community let that label take the lead.

For there’s another relevant story here at Kutsher’s: Joe Dirrane. I’m with Jackie Daly, now of Patrick Street and once of De Danann, and to Jackie, Joe Dirrane is one very special accordion-player.

Partially, it’s technical brotherhood. Most accordionists play in B and C whereas Dirrane and Daly are among the very few who play in C Sharp and D. But there’s another reason: Joe Dirrane hasn’t played traditional music for 35 years.

Early recordings on 78 might have earned him a mighty reputation among his fellow accordion-players in Ireland but they didn’t pay the rent in Boston. Dirrane gave up the jigs and reels to toke his accordion round the city’s bar circuit playing sentimental Irish cabaret minstrelsy.

So the story of Joe Dirrane is pertinent to the question John Ivers is asking. Why did Dirrane stop playing? Why did Irish-America not support traditional music?

Perhaps, it’s a by-blow of the Kennedy myth. Sometime in the Sixties, the prospering later generations of Irish-America wanted class and no sniff of the pigs in the parlour. They escaped it and welcomed instead the world of Wilde and Yeats. Prestigious Irish-American cultural foundations might endow literary studies but not their own traditional music. Throughout the weekend at Kutsher’s I hear a significant running gag: the Irish-American glitterati only come out and rattle their jewellery for the Chieftains.

Take the recent experiences of Chicago’s finest fiddler, Liz Carroll. With such as B.B. King, she’s just been presented by Hilary Clinton with a fellowship prize from the National Council for the Endowment of the Arts, America’s leading official award but she’s never received equal patronage from her fellow Irish-Americans. Still Carroll can laugh it off. Another award-winner was the legendary gospel group, the Five Blind Boys of Alabama; one of their members informed Carroll he was a Frank Patterson fan; the Elvis Presley/Count John McCormick connection becomes more credible!

Certainly you become conscious of discrepancies. At various points in the past, Irish-America has exerted a huge influence on the homebred and homebound tradition – the pioneering research of Chicago’s police chief O’Neill and the example of the first recordings in the Twenties are the two most-stated examples.

But it also seems marginalised in an Irish-America that – to put it very simplistically – became culturally fractured between sentimental balladry and the attractions of high culture. Of course, a similar division happened in Ireland but nowhere near as rigidly, since all the various factions could mutually influence each other. The lack of state support may be another reason. New York, Boston and Chicago couldn’t expect the benefits of RTE and Gael-Linn.

America’s distance in time and space from Ireland also means the tradition is almost exclusively instrumental. You don’t need to change your Chicago or New York accent to play fiddle, whereas any American would be understandably nervous of posing as a sean-nós singer. Moreover, I doubt if Irish-America could generate its own Shane MacGowans from the children of its own Fifties emigrants. The experiences are too diverse; it’s far easier to write and sing about a few commonly agreed themes like emigration and the Brits in the North rather than exploring more treacherous areas of identity.

But then in Ireland, our closest alternative to the Green Linnet weekend must be an event like the Willie Clancy Summer School. But you’d never experience something as beautifully bewildering as a traditional music party in a Jewish holiday resort or see a scene like the uniformed and bemused Black and Hispanic maids passing by as musicians play their sets on a stage in the vast lobby. The whole complex has been taken over and an overflow of about 200 other guests are even rooming in other establishments in the town of Monticello.

Green Linnet’s boss, Wendy Newton is heartened by the attendance. In ’93, they began with between 450 and 500 paying guests and about 60 musicians and dancers. This year, they were far more ambitious, paying for 150 musicians, dancers and staff and Green Linnet have been rewarded by over 900 guests paying an average of $300 for the whole weekend package.

The guests are far from exclusively Irish-American. Irish music has tapped a wider audience in America with support from both bluegrass and World Music fans. Some guests have even brought instruments for their own informal sessions. One fan, Richard Mahoney has even come from the frozen outback of Canada’s Yukon Territory travelling through Alaska to reach here.

Still Wendy Newton thinks the increase is essentially Irish-American : “It’s about 60/40 in their favour. I think the Irish-Americans are now beginning to get it that this music has class and that they should be proud of it rather than disdaining it.”

The Celtic fringes contribute a few other non-Irish guests like the Scottish Cunningham brothers and the Cape Breton fiddler, Jerry Holland but otherwise, the weekend marries Ireland and America, though there’s a bias to the fiddle and accordion with Paddy Keenan the lone piper.

Partially that’s a reflection of the Green Linnet roster. Wendy Newton is a fiddle nut, first introduced to Irish music during a ’70s holiday when she heard the playing of Tommy Peoples in Clare, though it’s true to say that the freemasonry of piping with its arduous apprenticeship hasn’t always found the most fertile ground to prosper in America.

Even so the musicians straddle a myriad of backgrounds in age and style. There’s veterans like Dirrane and Joe Burke together with the new brigade of fiddlers, represented by the triple act of Ivers, Carroll and Martin Hayes. And even if I’m dumbfounded by the dancers in the disco, I’ll soon learn that Jean Butler and Michael Flatley aren’t the only innovators from America.

Really, there’s too much here for a lone hack to cover. On Saturday alone, there’s over 30 different events spread over six different venues. I can’t catch everything and sometimes, my notes are a mess beyond my later translation. What exactly did “Flannery’s 14th Street/ 7th and 8th/Korean Deli” mean?

Sometimes you can only catch a tune from a set so what follows can only be a highly selective and far from canonical digest of my own personal highlights. For instance, problems start from the off. What to choose after my Kutsher’s breakfast bagels : Liz Carroll with fellow American , Billy McComiskey, in one room or a second accordion/fiddle combination of Jackie Daly and Kevin Burke in another?

Instead I go to Hell, or “Welcome To Hell !”, an accordion workshop. Or perhaps more aptly, Last Supper, since at one point, there’s twelve of these apostles of the accordion sat beside compere, Phil Cunningham. But it’s the variety not the number of these players that impress since the accordion has an ill-deserved reputation as a rather predictable instrument.

That’s incorrect. You only have to hear the difference between four such well-known Irish players as Tony McMahon, Sharon Shannon, Seamus Begley and Jackie Daly to appreciate the variety of styles that can be expressed through the many different models of the instrument. And here the spectrum spans the piano accordion militant to the most petite button version; from the most complexly droned slow airs to the most light and lilting dance tunes. This workshop alone would teach the prejudiced that Irish music is definitely not all the same.

After lunch, there’s an Irish music trivia quiz, “Bringing It All Back Up”. Sample question: which Irish musician is also a nuclear physicist? Charlie Lennon. Another teaser: they play an early and somewhat embarrassing example of crossover folk lite, a single by the Johnstons who once included Paul Brady and the presiding guru of the Irish-American scene, Mick Maloney. Your own correspondent is the only one with sufficiently skewed taste to recognise “Continental Trailways Bus”.

The question-masters, Earle Hitchner and Myron Bretholz, can be taken as standard-bearers for the music outside the Irish-American community. Both work as journalists and radio presenters so I ask Myron how he came to the music.

Myron’s experience is likely typical of his generation. Liberal Jewish parents who had Fifties American folk acts like the Weavers and Harry Belafonte on the family phonograph, then time at Georgetown University where he presented a folk show on the college radio in the mid-Seventies. He started with Fairport Convention and Steeleye Span and then discovered the Chieftains and Planxty records then becoming available in the States.

He recalls :” I didn’t really know what I had yet though I was zeroing in on what I wanted. And whenever I started playing that Chieftains and Planxty stuff, the phones lit up like a Christmas tree.”

Now Irish music links with the World music fashion and Myron thinks: “It stands at the fore because even people who’ve never heard an Irish tune, when they hear it for the first time, they go bluegrass even though it’s not quite falling on the right beat. So it’s a lot more connected in with America per se in a way we couldn’t find the references in say, Bulgarian music . . . there’s something familiar about it even if you don’t know before you start putting the pieces together.”

Kutsher’s isn’t a totally unique event. Somebody told me there were a number of summer Irish music camps in upstate New York, including one with 100 students of whom almost 50 were Jewish. Of course, this could be the result of American Jewry’s cultural curiosity and commitment to liberal causes but Myron puts another question to me:

“Why is Irish music, which is inimitably rural, become such an urbanised music here? You don’t think of Irish music in America in terms of the farm, at all. And to that extent, it’s more polyglot in the cities, more Jews, Blacks, Orientals and I’ve seen them all interested in Irish music.”

But if Irish-American music has been a blue collar scene that didn’t attract the emigrants, escaping to their suburban paradises, Myron thinks that’s a common American ethnic experience: “It’s the same reason that the Jews didn’t want to speak Yiddish outside of the house because it identified them as being immediately perceived as being from this inferior place. And so everybody wanted to assimilate with America . . . And it cut across all the cultures. Like the Italians didn’t want to speak Italian outside the house.”

“But now” he says “it’s turned upon itself. Now it’s very fashionable not only for the Irish to be involved in their heritage but for people like myself to say this is really good stuff.”

Drift next to the lobby for another and sublime fiddle/accordion duo, Martin Hayes and John Williams. Like Liz Carroll, Williams sprung from the Chicago scene and his alliance with Hayes is melodically intricate, music that’s like spiders’ webs in the dawn sunlight after the dew. The tempos don’t dictate the listeners’ responses; instead they relax, soothe and invite the ear’s attention. This music has a light and generously open hand; it doesn’t clench its fist to trap the melody.

Flash forward now to the Saturday evening concert in the Dining Hall. Mostly this is Irish-America on proud display with Cherish The Ladies’ Joanie Madden a cheerfully irreverent compere. Now come the dancers with another Irish-American cultural two-step.

First, there’s the fashion faith of our fathers bit. I’ll take the four males in their strictly classicist Liam Fay white shirt and black trousers mode but the women are pure and stridently adorned Celtic haberdashery. Yes, those uniforms, the ones that are as likely to prompt the Irish fashion cringe as early Aer Lingus hostess uniforms, the ones that are the best reason for arson at Bunratty Castle. The ones that always seem as if they’re emblazoned with characters from the Book of Kells, tie-dyed if not smeared by an unsteady hand in the most excruciatingly gaudy colours.

One step back for clothes sense but one proud step forward for the dancing. Or is it one step sidewise? The Irish connection to bluegrass and thence to rock’n’roll recently has been long laboured but Irish dancing also made its contribution to America. Others, far more expert than I, see it as among the late 19th century elements in the original black tap styles that led directly onto Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly.

Or something like that. What does seem true is that Irish-American dancing has a sizzle that was never quite so repressed by the Church.The style may still be classically straight-backed but this is a genuine new blend of Celtic choreography that can be an occasion of Sin E. Furthermore whereas there’s a rift here between homegrown Irish music and dance, the Irish-American groups often incorporate dancers into their show.

So Flatley and Jean Butler aren’t alone. Instead they’re the tap of the iceberg. Among the eight dancers are a host of All-Ireland champions. The women are Jean’s sister, Cora, Regan Wick, Eileen Golden and Deirdre Goulding; the men : Donny Golden, Liam Harney, Kevin Broesler and Linnane Wick. Suddenly in a Jewish dining-hall in upstate New York, Irish dancing doesn’t seem so prim anymore.

I’m thinking of a flier for a book, “Between The Jigs And The Reels”, I’ve picked up in the lobby. By Caoimhin Mac Aoidh and available from Drumlin Publications, Nure, Manorhamilton, Co. Leitrim, it’s a history of Donegal fiddling. But I’m struck by one par in the blurb, mention of the Gweedore P.P. at the turn of the century, one Fr. James McFadden who fought a fanatical campaign to burn all fiddles in his Gaeltacht parish. If successful, he would have eliminated all hope of the Bothy Band, Clannad and Altan. These dancers show what he hated and feared.

Next morning, you can have a reviving Bloody Mary before another Jewish breakfast and Mass - by Fr. Charlie Coen, a musician, himself in contrast to the McFadden - in the Stardust Room beside the Launching Pad. Hangovers are also being blessed in the Deep End and the set dancers will follow the Mass in the Stardust.

The music is thinning now. Martin Hayes and Paddy Keenan both play sessions in the lobby before Mick Maloney leads the closing concert after lunch. At its centre is another fiddler, an exiled Derryman, Eugene O’Donnell who’s soon to return to his native city. He looks like a senior schoolteacher impeccably turned out for prize-giving. It’s not quite Gene Vincent according to Ian Dury but it’s close: brown suit, white shirt, brown tie, white hair and lastly, brown brogues, regularly flexing to the rhythm.

Somehow he characterizes all the Sunday-best pride and dignity of the exiled tradition. Over the weekend, there’s been other senior musicians like him: Felix Dolan and Andy McGann who’ve lent a hand to most sessions and Joanie Madden’s father, Joe with whom she shared a stage. These exiles now have the consolation of seeing either their real or spiritual children returning their music to Ireland. The gender change over the generations can’t be discounted either. More often than not, the men of the black Forties and Fifties see their daughters leading the return. And no, I didn’t find the reason. Maybe, the boys were mostly lost to rock’n’roll . (And all that might also mean in urban competitive America!)

So he plays a slow air with a measured expressiveness and a classical neatness that rids it of any romantic exile’s self-pity. He finishes, we applaud and Mick Maloney announces Eugene O’Donnell’s going home to Derry. Now it’s planes as well as boats and trains, the TransAtlantic traffic will be mighty.