There are a lot of myths that have grown up about O’Donoghues of Merrion Row over the years. One is that The Dubliners played there. One or two of The Dubliners might occasionally, indeed only very occasionally, call by for something or other but they never played there as a paid group. In the early days they may have practised here, not that The Dubliners were ever that pushed about practising. The fact of the matter is that they were too big and this place too small for such a thing to ever happen. It was, as it remains today, a tiny pub with a bar and window space to the front, a small lounge to the rear and that’s that. There is no stage, no rostrum, no microphones or sound system. Whatever music there may be at any given time comes from the floor with the singers or musicians depending entirely on the audience’s respect as to whether they will be heard or not and, often as not, the audience’s respect leaves a lot to be desired. This place is not for the fainthearted.
During the 1960s O’Donoghues of Merrion Row was a ‘head place’ more so than a traditional musical pub. It was perhaps more interesting to be there around lunchtime on a Tuesday rather than late on a Saturday night when things were mad. At quiet times like these you might get a song from Joe Heaney who might have an audience of four people, all who would have known and respected what he was doing. Joe was an angular and slightly angry Connemara man with that hard Spanish look often found in people from the west of Ireland. He felt very bitter about how he had never really been appreciated in Ireland or by Irish audiences. He had no time at all for Radio Éireann for example and other organs of the state that he thought should have been more helpful. He may well have had a point of course. It is just that he did tend to go on a lot about it. But I loved him. He was such a superb singer, so true to note and ornament singing with his eyes open and fixed to his right in an ancient and sad vernacular that would bring tears to your eyes and make you proud to be Irish. That this man should have ended his days as a porter in a Manhattan hotel is a serious indictment of us all.
Or Seamus Ennis might take out the uilleann pipes just to tune them up before going off onto his next gig and then, while he had them strapped on, he might play a few tunes. It was a workshop, a school, a meeting place, an office, a club and a boozer and eating place all rolled into one. At the street end of the counter was a large message board a bit like the tree outside the New Stanley hotel in Nairobi, where people left messages for each other not knowing if they would ever be received. But the mobile phone was yet to be imagined and landlines and coin boxes were at best problematic, so this notice board was extremely important if, for example, you wanted to ask someone to do a gig on such and such a date. I got plenty of work from this notice board.
There was another thing about O’Donoghue’s that was very useful: it was a great place for keeping up with what else was going on in the music world outside of Dublin. Someone in there would always know which was the best Fleadh Cheoil that weekend and who was going to it and you could always go into Merrion Row the Saturday morning of a Fleadh weekend and try to bum a lift. During the 1960s I must have been to at least twenty Fleadh Cheoils in all. Some stand out in my memory above the rest. The All Ireland in Boyle 1967 is a good example. All Irelands were always held over the August bank holiday weekend and those in the know would always stay back until Tuesday when all the cowboys and messers would have gone home. This was the day that the more serious collectors and artists had the place to themselves and my brother Davoc and I were in a pub next door to Grehan’s at the top of the square in Boyle. Here by chance we found Willie Clancy and he in full flight. Willie at that time would have been one of Ireland’s best known uilleann pipers and it was a great privilege to be in his company and to be at what amounted to a private audience with him.
My brother, who was and still is a better whistle player than I am, played along with Willie as best he could and I played a slow air or two during the afternoon which Willie very graciously acknowledged. The truth of the matter is though that my playing in such elevated company was almost laughable. Willie sang three songs also that afternoon. These were all new songs to me and one was funnier than the next. He sang ‘The Gander’, ‘The Family Ointment’ and ‘The Taylor Bawn’. To this day I still sing ‘The Gander’ and would consider it among my top five songs in popularity:
One evening of late as I strayed and I rambled through fields
Where oft times I’ve wandered with haste and with very quick speed.
I’d be going to a frake where rakes and fractions they do meet
There’d be drinks and strong tae, hot cakes and things that are sweet.
Now this evening was freezing indeed then it was very cold
There was frost in me heels me Boys and there were cramps in me toes
So I thought it no harm to warm me shanks by the fire
Expecting Maura and her daughter that they surely would me admire.
The tae pot came round in spouts we got stuff that was strong
Oh Maura says spake or make a verse of a song,
Old Bill in the corner he cursed and he swore with the fright
Since his gander was stolen and roasted last Saturday night.
Now Bill’s gander was old he was noble both sturdy and strong
He never grew cold although he lived very long.
His beak and his legs were as yellow as the gold it do shine
And his gub it could bore an inch hole in a very short time.
And I have travelled Killarney, Killgarven, Kanturk, and Millstreet
Along by Cork Harbour I’d be hawking in turkeys and in geese
But in all of my rambles and travels no finer did I meet
Than the likes of Bill’s gander for grandeur and very fine breed
Now the girls they all came for game and they were looking for breed
When they heard of the name and the fame of Bill and his Geese
They measured this gander’s fine legs with a carpenter’s rule
But they never could part him once they saw the fine length of his wings.
There is a wit and a genius threaded through this song of internal rhyme and rhythm that is a quintessential Irish mix of the brilliant and the utterly absurd, the beautiful and the ridiculous. The song is about nothing and everything all at once. The genius is buried deep inside the nonsensical. I love it. My only great regret is that, like most great songs, we have absolutely no idea who wrote it. If I knew who the man was I would visit his grave every year and place goose feathers by his tombstone. May he rest always in peace for he has given me much.
Had I not wandered into that pub beside Grehan’s on that Tuesday after the All Ireland Fleadh Cheoil in 1967 I would never have met Willie Clancy and I would never have learned ‘The Gander’ and my entire life would have been just that fraction less enriched. Chance is an extraordinary thing all the same, is it not?
Attending Fleadh Cheoils during the 1960s was a hazardous business and never quite risk free. First of all there were the messers and the cowboys to be contended with. These were kind of benign lager louts with guitars and bodhráns who roamed the streets in droves singing or rather shouting out some of the words of ‘The Black Velvet Band’ or ‘The Shoals of Herring’, it had to be a ‘Clancy number’. They were usually naked from the waist up. You could only put up with so much of these gobshites. Where they were really annoying was when someone, maybe a child even, was playing or singing something sweet and delicate that the rest of us wanted to listen to. Although in actual fact I have never been in a fight in my life, fighting with some of these yobdaws was always on the cards.
Another hazard about going to a Fleadh was the weather. We never brought sleeping bags or tents or anything like that with us. We didn’t own such luxuries in the first place and in any case we didn’t see any need for them. ‘Accommodation’ at a Fleadh was the first hay barn you could find outside the town. You had to scout for these in the daylight and before you got too drunk. In theory the whole thing sounds lovely, romantic even – sleepin
g snuggled up in the sweet new-mown hay and the farmer’s wife bringing you out a cup of tea in the morning and the cuckoo calling in the background. The reality of course was something totally different.
In a hay barn just outside Clones it is pissing rain outside and it is 8.30 in the morning. Most of us are nursing moderate to severe hangovers and are having a bit of a lie-in. Christy Moore, Frank and Donal Lunny, Peter Sheehy, Mick Bulfin and a whole lot more of us are holed up in this shed. The next thing, and all of a sudden, don’t we hear this madman of a farmer and he ranting and raving down on the floor under us. Then he grabs up a hayfork and starts lunging at the haystack to see if he can dislodge a few bodies. ‘Get to fuck out of my hay barn,’ he roars. I never saw a group of fellows leave a hay barn so quickly in all my life, rain or no rain.
I remember another wet Fleadh Cheoil, this time in Thurles. The trouble here was that we had fallen into a serious session of music and singing early in the day and never got to scout for a hay barn. When the music and the drinking and the craic were all over we came out to find it dark and raining. This time it was every man for himself. Having wandered around for a while I eventually found a greyhound track with starting traps. I gladly climbed into one of these and, snug and out of the rain and the wind, I slept the sleep of the just. Hotels, guesthouses and even B&Bs were considered at the time to be a waste of good drinking money.
It was while playing and singing in O’Donoghue’s of Merrion Row that I first met my wife to be, Ann Hughes. She and two of her girlfriends just wandered in there one evening and sat at the table around which we were playing. These three young women worked together in the blood bank and lived in a flat just up the road in Upper Leeson Street. They, each of them, seemed to have a love for and a grasp of the kind of music we were doing but no one more so than Ann. After the session I accompanied the three of them back to their flat where I was introduced to the as yet unfamiliar world of air hostesses and blood bank attendants. I had been spending too much time with musicians, bohemians and medical students. But here there was a whiff of glamour and a new world to be explored.
* * *
Running parallel to all the Dublin stuff we had, if you like, our country seat in the form of Pat Dowling’s public house in Prosperous, county Kildare and the old kitchen in the basement of Downings House a mile away. The secret to the success of these twin institutions was their closeness to Dublin and the almost irresistible attraction that traditional musicians and singers had and still have for things rural. The roots of most folk music are sustained in the soil of the countryside and therefore frequent excursions out of the city become an imperative for anyone serious about playing, singing or just listening to this kind of music.
But why Prosperous you might reasonably ask. It could have been some place handier to the city like Lucan or Clonee or some place like that which in those days would still have qualified as ‘the countryside’. The answer to this is, as so often is the case, people and circumstances. The people in question were my brother Davoc, his friend Ciarán Burke who was later to join The Dubliners, myself and Pat Dowling, the man himself who had at the time just bought the pub from the Cribbins.
Those were the people. The circumstances were that in early 1963 Davoc was doing up a cottage that he had beside the big house and, being a bit strapped for cash, he somehow prevailed on Ciarán Burke to lend a hand. Ciarán, with his then girlfriend, Jeanie Bonham, more or less encamped on site working on the cottage by day and drinking in Dowlings by night. To the people of Prosperous Ciarán and Jeanie would have cut quite an extraordinary dash. Had two aliens from Mars been thrown in their midst they could hardly have been any more different. They were in fact classic beatniks but the problem was that beatniks had not been invented yet so nobody knew what to call them or how to classify them. He was handsome and tall with a Parnell-like beard, tweed jacket and general unkempt appearance, she was small and squat in a floral dress, beads and bangles and smelling of smouldering sandalwood.
But it hardly mattered what they looked like. It was what they were able to do that mattered. Ciarán played a Clark’s tin-whistle and kind of sang in a husky and slightly off-key voice. Jeanie was the better singer. They sang a duet thus:
Soldier, Soldier, Soldier, would you marry me now?
With a hey and a ho and the sound of a drum.
Arrah no fair maid I couldn’t marry you.
Because I have no shoes to put on.
So she ran to the shop as fast as she could run
With a hey and a ho and the sound of a drum
And she brought him a pair of the very very best
Saying here my small man put them on.
And so on in that vein until your man has built up quite a good wardrobe for himself and never marries her in the end because as he says in the very last line of the song: ‘I have my own wife at home.’ Innocent stuff for sure but then these were innocent days. Ciarán would then encourage some local character like Larry Dowd or the Pike Keegan to sing a song and all of a sudden there was a proper session going, something very unusual for the days that were in it. Pat Dowling stayed quietly in the background but did everything in his power to encourage these sessions, firstly because he loved the craic but also because he could see the potential that singing and music sessions like these had as crowd pullers into his new pub.
Word quickly spread that there was some right good sport going on in Pat Dowling’s pub. Soon local musicians, who up until then we didn’t even know existed, started to drift in. People like Ned Farrell on the bodhrán and piper Mick Crehan from Naas who later was to play at the graveside when Willie Clancy died. There was box player Gerry O’Mahony and his wife, Peggy Carroll, who was a good singer. There was banjo player, Joe Ward; the Moran brothers, Denny and Ducks from Robertstown, both box players; Frank Burke from Sligo, fiddle player and singer; Mickey Maguire, flute player from Coill Dubh always with his wife, Mary, who could lilt a fine tune. Then there were the Newbridge brigade, Donal and Frank Lunny, often with their parents, Frank senior and Mary Lunny. Christy Moore and his mother, Nancy, and maybe his brothers, Barry and Andy, and later his sisters, Anne, Terry and Eilish, all good singers. Nan McCormack would try to organise us. There were various members of the soon to be defunct Liffey Folk Four. Within a few weeks a legend was born that was to last for the better part of the next ten years. These were the Wednesday night sessions in Dowlings of Prosperous.
Pat Dowling was a generous man. Singers and musicians would all be looked after with a free pint or two and towards the end of the evening a massive plate of sandwiches would somehow materialise, having been made up by Maureen in the back kitchen. Maureen was Mick Crehan’s landlady and we were always trying to get her fixed up with Pat Dowling because neither of them was married and it seemed to us a good idea and a perfect match. The sandwiches were made with white batch loaf, roast beef and YR sauce, just the lad for hungry musicians. The musicians that I have mentioned here were, if you like, the core people. In addition to these we always had our Dublin contingent join in the sessions. I am not going to start naming all the famous and not so famous singers and musicians who would join us from time to time. Just take my word for it. There were very few singers or musicians indeed frequenting the pubs and clubs around Dublin during the 1960s who did not call into at least some of the Wednesday night sessions in Dowlings of Prosperous.
The second leg of this most extraordinary academy of Irish folk music was the old kitchen in the basement of the big house – Downings. When conditions were right or when the spirit moved us, or if there were some special people in for the session, perhaps no more than two or three times a year, all the musicians and singers and characters down in Dowlings would be issued with verbal invitations and asked to come on up to the house and we would keep the craic going. They had to bring their own drink and no food would be served. These parties were all about venue and music and if that was not enough for you then you knew where to go.
The basement
had a hard-stone flagged floor, which lent the room fantastic natural acoustics and resonance. The uilleann piping of say Liam Óg Flynn or the mandolin playing of Francy Grehan were all greatly enhanced by this feature. Heat of a winter’s night was provided for by way of an enormous open fire onto which old furniture was usually thrown – benches or old chests of drawers or anything that came to hand. Davoc was in the antique business at this stage so burning old furniture was not quite as bizarre as may first appear. And in any case it was always good for a laugh. There was a pair of hob-nailed boots kept on a shelf. If anyone was in the mood for it they could put these on and batter to the music. At times the whole place took on a surreal quality, an out of this world aura to it all.
And if you should go away across the ocean,
Then take me back you to be your servant,
In fare and in market you will me well looked after.
And you will sleep with a Greek king’s daughter.
You took what’s behind me and what’s before me
You took east and west when you wouldn’t mind me
The sun, moon and stars from my sky you have taken
And God as well or I am much mistaken.
CHAPTER 6
Making of a Doctor
All during these medical school years I would live at home in Downings House during the holidays and in flats or digs during term. In all I lived in no fewer than fourteen different addresses around Dublin as a medical student. I often shared places with my good friends Óg and his brother Peter Sheehy in Charleston Avenue near Ranelagh and later out in a flat in Fairview. Also I once shared a place in Rathmines with Tony McMahon, the great box player. Tony flew through pre-med in Surgeons and then seemed to lose interest in medicine having got over the biggest hurdle in the entire course. He once found me playing the tin-whistle during an idle moment and said that it was a horrible tune made worse by my playing of it. If you were looking for compliments then Tony would not be your first port of call. He was hugely intolerant of any player not up to his own very high standards. But once you got to know Tony you soon found out that his bark was worse than his bite.
The Vasectomy Doctor Page 8