Ireland unplugged: the roots of Irish folk/trad. (Con)Fusion

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Notes

On the emergence of the American folk revival see Dave Laing, Karl Dallas, Robin Denselow and Robert Shelton, The Electric Muse: The Story of Folk into Rock (Methuen, 1975), pp. 7–43. The concept of a modern ‘folk’ music is anomalous in one central respect, as described by Malcolm Chapman:

• ‘Folk’ music now exists, as a genre, recorded, performed, published, sung and listened to, in the nearly complete absence of any ‘folk’ to provide the full social context that once (in whatever arguable and murky sense) might have existed; the social context of ‘folk’ music today is one of vinyl and magnetic tape, recording studios, published works, media performance and specialist gatherings. ‘Celtic’ music is going the same way, and has always been closely related to ‘folk’ music in these respects. (Malcolm Chapman, ‘Thoughts on Celtic Music’, in Ethnicity, Identity and Music: The Musical Construction of Place, ed. Martin Stokes (Berg, 1994), pp. 29–44, pp. 42–43)

Commentators such as Nuala O'Connor—in Bringing It All Back Home: The Influence of Irish Music (BBC Books, 1991)—and June Skinner Sawyers—in The Complete Guide to Celtic Music: From the Highland Bagpipe and Riverdance to U2 and Enya (Aurum Press, 2000)—offer speculative sketches of the relations between Irish/British and North American folk music; tracking the fate of individual tunes and songs, however, is a standard research technique amongst academic folklorists.

For some impression of the extent of Dylan's influence in Ireland during the 1960s see the index to My Generation: Rock 'n' Roll Remembered—An Imperfect History, ed. Antony Farrell, Vivienne Guinness and Julian Lloyd (Lilliput Press, 1996).

On the folk dimension to English twentieth‐century art music see Andrew Blake, The Land without Music: Music, Culture and Society in Twentieth‐century Britain (Manchester University Press, 1997), and George Revill, ‘Music and the Politics of Sound: Nationalism, Citizenship, and Auditory Space’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space vol. 18, no. 5 (October 2000), pp. 597–613.

Laing et al., The Electric Muse, pp. 138–139; O'Connor, Bringing It All Back Home, pp. 153–156.

It's indicative of the fluidity of modern musical influence that Carthy should be responsible for a particular form of guitar tuning known widely in folk circles as ‘Irish’. As an instrument, the guitar itself is caught up in the controversies attending the meaning of, and relationships between, ‘traditional’, ‘folk’, and various other kinds of acoustic music.

See May McCann, ‘Music and Politics in Ireland: The Specificity of the Folk Revival in Belfast’, British Journal of Ethnomusicology vol. 4 (1995), pp. 51–75; Noel McLaughlin and Martin McLoone, ‘Hybridity and National Musics: The Case of Irish Rock Music’, Popular Music vol. 19, no. 2 (May 2000), pp. 181–200, p. 181; Mary Traschel, ‘Oral and Literate Constructs of “Authentic” Irish Music’, Éire‐Ireland: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Irish Studies vol. 30, no. 3 (1995), pp. 27–46, pp. 27–28.

• In Ireland: A Social and Cultural History 1922–1985 (Fontana, 1985), Terence Brown quotes a speech to a Dublin music festival by Thomas Derrig, Minister for Education, from March 1937:

  • That set of values which makes the Irish mind different looks out at us clearly from our old music—its idiom having in some subtle way the idiom of the Irish mind, its rhythms, its intervals, its speeds, its build have not been chosen arbitrarily, but are what they are because they are the musical expression, the musical equivalent of Irish thought and its modes. (p. 147)

• This was a repetition of the official line promulgated by de Valera himself in a radio speech from 1933, in which he claimed: ‘Ireland’s music is of singular beauty … It is characterised by perfection of form and variety of melodic content … Equal in rhythmic variety are our dance tunes—spirited and energetic, in keeping with the temperament of our people' (quoted in Brian P. Kennedy, Dreams and Responsibilities: The State and the Arts in Independent Ireland (The Arts Council, 1990), pp. 31–32).

Traschel, ‘Oral and Literate Constructs of “Authentic” Irish Music’, p. 31.

At the same time, institutionalisation, even of a liberal ilk, fosters a hierarchy of musical taste and value. As Edward O. Henry writes:

• Governments promote those kinds of music favoring the desired image. This music can become a kind of ethnic, regional, or national show business—entertainment for people outside more than for those inside the community in which the music was originally performed. The music persists, but sometimes in an altered form with a different ethos. Those types or styles of music selected for presentation acquire an implicit seal of official approval, and those which are not selected suffer neglect and less chance of survival. (‘Institutions for the Promotion of Indigenous Music: The Case for Ireland’s Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann', Ethnomusicology vol. 33, no. 1 (1989), pp. 67–95, p. 68)

As Thérèse Smith has pointed out, this tension is at least as old as the modern interest in Irish music as an expression of national identity. In comparing the activities and practices of two early activists, Edward Bunting and Thomas Moore, Smith writes of ‘a fundamental philosophical difference: Bunting was interested in collection and preservation, Moore in re‐interpretation. It was inevitable that Bunting would be the loser’; she goes on, ‘for it is a truism of anthropology that virtually the only thing that is constant about culture is change: cultural elements that are no longer perceived as useful are discarded if not re‐interpreted.’ (‘The Fragmentation of Irish Musical Thought and the Marginalisation of Traditional Music’, Studies vol. 89, no. 354 (2000), pp. 149–158, p. 154).

Not everyone considers Ó Riada's embrace of traditional music to have been the great leap forward for twentieth‐century Irish music it is widely represented to be. From the perspective of art music, as Harry White writes:

• The more nearly he encountered the ethnic tradition, the more difficult it became … to integrate that tradition within the language of the European aesthetic … The significance of Ó Riada [is that] he silenced the claim of original art music as a tenable voice in the Irish cultural matrix: he silenced it too in its address upon the Irish mind. In its stead, he advanced the claim not of original composition but of the ethnic repertory itself. (The Keeper's Recital: Music and Cultural History in Ireland, 1770–1970 (Cork University Press, 1998), p. 149)

The Irish acoustic ‘scene’ during the late 1960s was typical of most modern popular musical scenes which, as described by Sara Cohen, tend to be ‘created through … [local] people and their activities and interactions. Many forge close relationships with each other and form clusters or cliques, while others are part of looser networks or alliances’ (‘Scenes’, in Key Terms in Popular Music and Culture, ed. Bruce Horner and Thomas Swiss (Basil Blackwell, 1999), pp. 239–250, p. 240). For example, Irvine regularly guested (alongside future guitar hero Gary Moore) with progressive folkies Dr Strangely Strange before going on to play with seminal ‘trad.’ groups Planxty and Patrick Street. Woods contributed with his wife Gay to the classic Hark! The Village Wait album by influential English folk‐rockers Steeleye Span, before forming The Woodsband, and eventually joining (after an extended sabbatical) The Pogues. In a long and eventful career, Henry McCullough played guitar with Joe Cocker and Wings, amongst others. It's also interesting to note that many of these folkies had close connections not only with beat and rock musicians (Moore and Philip Lynott, for example) but also with the showbands: Joe Dolan and Leo O'Kelly (of progressive folk act Tír na nÓg), for example, played in minor outfits The Swingtime Aces and The Tropical Showband, respectively; McCullough started with showband The Skyrockets before going on to play with showband‐cum‐beat group Gene and the Gents, while Des Kelly, former leader of showband heroes The Capitol, was manager of Sweeney's Men.

Of course, Planxty's willingness to combine different styles and traditions may not have been the trail‐blazing, high‐concept package it was widely perceived to be, but the result of much more pragmatic, and much less romantic, developments—as Paul Brady said in interview in 1981: ‘it was basically a whole load of people with varying, different views and attitudes towards life and music, desperately trying to find some common way—some direction to go in. Some wanted to stay there, others wanted to get out—and I wanted to get out.’ (Niall Stokes, ‘Paul and the Road to Damascus: An Interview with Paul Brady’, Hot Press, 23 May 1981).

In the same 1981 interview with Niall Stokes, Brady claimed that he didn't ‘find many messages coming through to me from that area’, and that ‘there is a bottom to the well … I think probably people are arriving at that same opinion’; he went on, ‘that there’s an end to what people can do with traditional music without it no longer being traditional music. Whether or not that's been reached yet is a matter of opinion.’

Quoted in From a Whisper to a Scream, dir. David Heffernan (Daniel Productions in association with Radio Telefís Éireann, 2000, three episodes), episode 3.

Mark J. V. Olson, ‘ “Everybody Loves our Town”: Scenes, Spatiality, Migrancy’, in Mapping the Beat: Popular Music and Contemporary Theory, ed. Thomas Swiss, John Sloop and Andrew Herman (Blackwell, 1998), pp. 269–289, p. 279.

The change in Irish cultural values since the 1960s is evident, as Marie McCarthy suggests, ‘in the ongoing and extensive debate concerning the meaning of “Irish music”, and in increasing efforts to provide access to a variety of musical genres’ (Passing it On: The Transmission of Music in Irish Culture (Cork University Press, 1999), p. 171). ‘In no other period’, she continues, ‘did mass media have as great an impact on the way music is known and transmitted’ (p. 172).