strings OF LIFE

this scribe?s initiation into the world of traditional music came via the usual routes for a teenager in the ?80s: a rake of big brothers? Horslips albums with a side order of Moving Hearts and Van Morrison to go. Aside from a brace of Sean S Riada records I had no grounding in the classics, and although The Chieftains (in their capacity as opening act for The Stones at Slane in 1982) were the first live act I ever witnessed, it was to be some years before I would understand that the same rogue blood was coursing through Paddy Moloney?s veins as through Keith Richards?.
Even an abiding love for The Waterboys couldn?t move me: I favoured Steve Wickham on the Raad electric violin rather than it?s acoustic counterpart. In the last few months, however, a number of serendipitous incidents set me on the first steps of what novelist Peter Handke once termed a ?slow homecoming?.
Last April I interviewed the novelist, poet, publisher and playwright Dermot Bolger whose book Father?s Music had just been published. Tracey, the book?s main character, is haunted by the memory of her father, a travelling Donegal fiddler by the name of Proinseas Mac Suibhne, who lit out on the girl and her mother when she was a baby. Mac Suibhne and the spirit of his music haunts the book. The trad connection was strengthened by the fact that Bolger dedicated Father?s Music to piper Seamus Ennis, sean-nss singer Joe Heaney and fiddler John Doherty.
During the course of the interview, I was particularly intrigued by the novelist?s thumbnail sketch of the latter: ?John Doherty was a Donegal fiddle player who was on a par with Yehudi Menuhin but never actually owned a fiddle himself. He was a pedlar by day and played music in the evenings and was respected by people in his area for it. People like Ennis and Doherty tell me more about being an artist than 25 novels where the central character is a writer or a poet or a film-maker or whatever.?
I vowed to keep an ear out for the fiddler and maybe check out his recordings in Claddagh or Gael Linn the next time I had a few quid to spare. That might?ve been the end of it had I not been dispatched to Manchester on a mission from God (well, Hot Press really, but I often get the two confused) six weeks later. On the flight over, I began thumbing through the Aer Lingus Cara magazine and chanced upon a piece by Dermot Bolger entitled The Last Storyteller, an account of the writer?s first encounter with John Doherty in 1974.
Bolger, then 15, had set out that Easter to hitchhike around the remotest areas of Sligo and Donegal with a friend. After several nights of roughing it, he ended up in a pub in Carrick where Doherty was playing. The writer thus describes the then 80-year-old fiddler in full flight: ?His chin and eyes were the only still parts of him. It seemed impossible for any old man to play so fast and so strong. I recall every customer watching his bow hand draw grace-notes and the tiniest ornamentations from the space between the notes. The sound was so rich that it seemed more than one fiddle had to be playing, with three and four notes existing at one time. I had never heard music like it before. The applause after each tune was loud, but also restrained, as if out of respect.?
By now I was anxious to investigate the man behind the horsehair. As luck would have it, the cosmic chips were falling in my favour that week. Gael Linn Records sent me some sample CDs including a collection entitled Taisce ? The Celebrated Recordings by John Doherty. With antennae bristling, I stuck the CD into the machine and cranked the volume.
Two things struck me straight off ? the simplicity and the fire. After years of hearing traditional instruments couched in cheesy synth sounds, spancelled by unsympathetic rhythm sections and neutered by colour-me-Lunny arrangements, the impact of hearing one fiddle, front and centre, up close and universal, was revelatory. Doherty?s playing was driven and skillful, he navigated the tunes like a man piloting a small but very nimble aircraft. While I can claim to have little or no comprehension of the subtler nuances of indigenous Irish music, after a few plays my ear slowly learned how to appreciate the modal drones of the slow airs and the violently precise stop-start strokes in the more frenetic tunes.
Recorded at an informal session in Glencolmcille in June 1974 (mere weeks after Dermot Bolger?s encounter) Taisce . . . is a confounding inventory of rare and often strange tunes. Doherty had an equally sure hand with hornpipes, highlands, barndances, mazurkas, airs, laments, reels, single, double and slip jigs, brass band marches, pipe marches and strathspeys, and he allied this to a natural gift for storytelling and duetting skills (with brothers Simon and Mickey).
Doherty was born at the end of the last century, the youngest of nine children, six of whom could play the fiddle. His family had been involved in fiddle-playing and tinsmithing amongst the farming communities of rural Donegal for generations and their musical lineage stretched back to the 18th-century piper Tarlach Mac Suibhne. Doherty established regular circuits which he travelled, making and trading items of tin during the day and playing fiddle at night. Having the renowned fiddler as a houseguest was considered a privilege.
A Donegal man to the core (?I?ve travelled it every inch on heel and toe all my life . . .?) he ventured out of the county only a couple of times, once when he won the gold medal at the Oireachtas fiddle competition in the early 1950s, and again to record a television programme for UTV, Fiddler On The Road. He died a legend, on January 23rd 1980, and is buried in Fintown cemetery.
In The Last Storyteller Dermot Bolger related a yarn about John?s father, the great fiddler Mickey Msr Doherty: ?When he lay dying in a Donegal hospital, John went to visit and played his father?s favourite tune to cheer him up, as well as he thought he had ever played it. But Mickey Msr rose from his sick bed to snatch the fiddle in annoyance and launched into the tune himself, playing with a frenzy John Doherty had never heard before. His father finished the tune, handed the fiddle to his son and laid his head back to die. At the same moment a fiddle in the Doherty family home fell from a nail on the wall and burst asunder. If I?d never heard Doherty?s playing in person, I might laugh at the story, but I recall moments from that night in 1974 when I would not have been surprised if John Doherty?s fiddle had burst into flames in his hands.?
Doherty didn?t release a record until he was in his ?80s. Celtic rennaisance man and RTE luminary Ciaran MacMathzna assigned himself the difficult task of trying to track down and make field recordings of the famous fiddler in the 1950s. MacMathzna had to enlist the services of a local doctor and trek from village to village in search of Doherty until they finally found him walking a remote mountain roadside. These field recordings were often made in isolated farmhouses with no electricity ? the only power source was the battery of a car left running in the yard outside.
John Doherty?s was an aural tradition: he would travel the parishes of South West Donegal: Kilcar, Glencolmcille, Teelin and Ardara (areas renowned for fiddlers like Frank and Con Cassidy, Francie and Mickey O?Beirne and John Mhosey McGinley) stopping in at ?visiting houses?, cottages where neighbours would gather to spin yarns and exchange news. Local musicians eagerly anticipated the new tunes that the masters would bring, the plain people looked forward to the excitement of the house parties.
These days, the country?s a little smaller and we can travel to the action rather than wait for it to come to us, but thankfully some of the magic of those nights is preserved on such recordings as The Floating Bow, Bundle And Go, and of course Taisce ? The Celebrated Recordings. They are a fitting testimony to the man who once admitted . . . ?I fought the battle for Irish music and I fought it strongly.? n
? John Doherty?s Taisce ? The Celebrated Recordings is currently available from Gael Linn Records.