These programmes continued for as long as I can remember, with Ciarán’s relaxed and comforting voice coming forth from the radio, purring in our ears. He introduced us to performers like Ann Mulqueen, whose unaccompanied songs inspired the singing of so many young women. Some of these singers caught the attention of other singers and collectors of songs in Ireland, and over time the groundwork for new radio presentations was developed with the inclusion of a variety of artists.
5
A Single-Row Accordion
During this time I was a young bystander, listening and learning as best I could. ‘Mammy, I want an accordion!’ I plagued my mother. ‘I know I can play it!’ I nagged so much that one day I heard her mention it to my father. This was a major breakthrough. At last they were taking me seriously. My mother picked out a single-row accordion that was advertised in the Sunday Press newspaper. It was a German make called a Hohner, a C-row. Tom and Joe Byrne also had a couple but they had double-row keyboards. We didn’t know about keys, sharps, flats, or any kind of technique. Nevertheless, my mother sent a deposit of ten shillings to Cotts of Kilcock in County Kildare, which was a furniture store. The total cost of the accordion was ten pounds and ten shillings.
About three weeks later I was on my way home from the national school in Daingean when one of my schoolmates said, ‘Paddy, here’s yer Mammy!’
‘Where?’
‘Coming up the road,’ said little Andy McCormack. And then I saw my mother cycling towards us on her way for groceries in Daingean and I remember she was wearing her maroon coat and white and blue headscarf.
‘Paddy! Paddy!’ she shouted. ‘The accordion came! The accordion came! It arrived an hour ago.’
It was a huge surprise, because I didn’t know she had ordered it. When she got off the bike she was a little out of breath. ‘We could have told you, but we wanted it to be an early birthday present.’
I was stuck for words. ‘Go on home,’ she said. ‘Your daddy is there mindin’ your sisters Patricia and Kathleen.’
I began to run. I arrived home with my lungs hurting from the cold wind that blew eastward along the Mill Road. As I walked towards our door I could hear the sound of the accordion as my father played ‘Believe Me If All Those Endearing Young Charms’.
I put my schoolbag away and sat by the fire. Moments later my father handed me the accordion and I immediately slid my right thumb into the thumb strap behind the keyboard. With my left hand inside the strap at the bass end of the instrument I began squeezing its bellows in and out. At the same time I began pressing my fingers nervously on the middle section of buttons along the keyboard. It was wonderful to hear all the different notes, and the excitement ran through me like a shot of ice-cold drinking water. I stopped and looked at my sisters and my father and I began to giggle. My sisters also giggled and my father stood up and reached for the empty kettle. A mug of tea was his way of relaxing. He filled the kettle and said, ‘Paddy, why don’t you play “Maggie in the Wood”?’ I had often played it on the mouth organ, having learned it from my mother, but now I was put to the test of finding it somewhere on the ten buttons that made up the length of the keyboard. I pressed a couple of them and pulled the bellows back and forth and pressed more buttons as each note sounded with two notes for each button, depending on whether the bellows was pulled out or pushed in. An hour later my mother returned with her groceries with me beginning to find ‘Maggie in the Wood’. She stood looking at me when I dribbled out the first part of the tune. ‘Good lad,’ she said. ‘There’s music in yer blood.’
In another hour I had all of it and was making headway with ‘Saddle the Pony’. My mother was touched by this jig. ‘Lord,’ she said in a raised voice, ‘your grandfather Johnny Dunne jigs that tune. It’s one he’s awfully fond of, along with “The Shaskeen Reel”.’
After I put the accordion into its box I felt tired, my right thumb felt sore and my left hand also ached a little. I didn’t try to play any more that night because I had chores to do and homework from school. I was exhausted when I went to bed and soon fell asleep. Waking up next morning I could recall a dream that came to me in the night. In the dream I saw several accordions being towed along the Mill Road. They were outfitted with rubber wheels and were gigantic in size, as big as the house we lived in. Several sturdy farm horses were hauling them along the road towards our home. There was a man in charge of the horses whom I didn’t know. A neighbour of ours was also in the dream. As the giant accordions came closer he shouted, ‘By God, look at him!’
‘Who?’ I said.
‘It’s . . . it’s Ciarán MacMathúna,’ my neighbour yelled, ‘the man on the radio.’
With the new accordion, and the radio’s presentation of A Job of Journeywork, I was beginning to sense that this traditional music was not as scarce as we first thought, and as I listened each Tuesday night I was intrigued to learn of a new organisation called Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann (CCÉ) that was sponsoring music festivals and competitions in various counties, especially in the west of Ireland. These festivals or music gatherings were officially referred to as ‘Fleadh Cheoils’. The very notion of hundreds of musicians in one town for three or four days was difficult for me to envision. The names of the towns where the All-Irelands had been held up to then were eventually introduced through the medium of Ciarán’s weekly programmes. Some of them are still remembered in stories from Fleadh followers who reminisce about the great early days of mighty competitions and competitors who won or lost in Longford, Ennis, Loughrea, Dungarvan and Monaghan. During the 1950s it was a major honour to win a solo competition and winning an All-Ireland was regarded as the ultimate prize. There were programmes printed for these occasions with lists of competing performers on fiddles, flutes, uilleann pipes, accordions, etc. The céilí band competitions were usually the highlight of the weekend, and competitive rivalry was nurtured beforehand with weeks of practice. The Kilfenora and Tulla bands from County Clare were examples of the great spirit that prevailed. They played against each other in packed halls with adjudicators having to decide against one side or the other at a time when different bands and their supporters travelled far to claim the honour of victory.
Much of this had already occurred when we heard of it through the radio. Ciarán presented musicians from live recordings taped at prizewinners’ concerts where the best of Ireland’s amateur talent came together to play their best tunes and sing their finest songs. It was indeed a revival of Gaelic soul expression, and hearing it on the radio was magical and heart-warming.
An All-Ireland accordion champion was then the talk of the Midlands, and Offaly in particular. He was Ciarán Kelly from Shannonbridge in Offaly, and his box playing was all the rage. I first heard his music played on a Grundig reel-to-reel tape recorder when two brothers whose names were Mitchell stopped by our house. Their recorder was powered by a battery and when I saw and heard it I was astounded. They played a recording of Ciarán Kelly over and over for me, which they had taped off the radio. Ciarán was playing ‘The Spike Island Lassies’ and a companion reel that I can’t recall. It was great stuff and hugely inspiring. I was almost twelve when my mother and father bought the single-row accordion for me, and from then on I was alone with it, to do with it whatever I could figure out by myself.
It was very common to learn music by ear because there were no accordion teachers around or even within cycling distance. Not many people, if any, knew or understood Irish traditional music and most people were unable to recognise the difference between a jig, a reel and a hornpipe. This was the musical climate in which I grew up, except for a few people here and there who enjoyed the music but did not really understand it. Many people in today’s Ireland still don’t understand our traditional music. But in all fairness, the same people are usually very sociable and accepting when they hear a tune in a pub or even at a wake.
As time came and went I struggled with the music and kept practising the accordion
as best I could. The biggest problem was listening and learning a tune, and the need for further listening meant I’d have to hear it again on the radio. Sometimes a tune I was learning was played frequently on Take the Floor, Céilí House, or A Job of Journeywork, but very often I might have to wait several weeks for it to be played again. Learning music from the radio was a very tedious experience and very frustrating. It tested my patience.
One evening I was pleasantly surprised when Ciarán MacMathúna introduced the accordion player Paddy O’Brien, from Newtown near Nenagh, County Tipperary, who was then living in New York but was home that summer for a visit. ‘And here he is,’ announced Ciarán, ‘with two reels, “Trim the Velvet”, and “The King of the Clans”.’ O’Brien began with his controlled and steady flow, not too fast and not too slow. It was like a tonic; I can’t explain the effect of his playing as it touched me and threw me into a musical quandary. The tunes were delicious; if only I could eat them! The structure of the melodies seemed to relay a profound message from the core of the tunes. And then he continued with a selection of jigs, ‘The Lark on the Strand’ and ‘The Pipe on the Hob’. Lovely and steady again and well grounded. The tune choices were another strong point in Paddy’s favour, and he had lots of them. It was a new experience to hear this man’s music and how he was able to handle an accordion. As it turned out, he was a pioneer of the B/C accordion, and his influence was already established when I first heard him. And then hornpipes, also steady and solid and tailor-made for dancing. Two of them, ‘The Flowing Tide’ (an Ed Reavy composition) and ‘The Cuckoo’. My God, I wondered, what kind of man is he? How does he play like that? There was no one to tell me anything. It was brutal and lonely. I felt exiled among the fields of Castlebarnagh and cut off from those who might give me some advice or encouragement.
By this time I had overcome my fear of my grandfather’s gramophone and I would wind it up for playing from time to time. My aunt came to visit a lot, and each time she brought more records with her. One of the records had a couple of fiddle selections by the County Meath fiddler Frank O’Higgins. Frank played with piano accompaniment and this combination was also a new experience for me as I wasn’t familiar with a lot of fiddle music. His tunes were jigs and reels, and one jig that moved me was ‘The Maid at the Spinning Wheel’, which had three parts.
There were also a couple of Michael Grogan’s records, which I was very fond of because Michael was an old-time accordion player and I liked the sound and energy in his playing. As I listened to these recordings I struggled with the makeup and shape of the tunes, trying to figure out the sequence of the notes. My experience with hearing these recordings was limited and it would take a long time before I would truly appreciate what was involved. In the meantime, I’d have to do what I could with my minute amount of knowledge. Still, I was playing some jigs and reels but I wasn’t able to play very fast, and much of it was riddled with stops and starts. And when I noticed that my instrument was not equipped with enough notes for many of the tunes, it bothered and irritated me, and I made my concern known to my parents.
‘You should thank God for small mercies,’ my mother confided. ‘We are living in poor times.’
Of course she was right. The 1950s were a time of major economic problems for Ireland. My father was always employed as a labourer with Bord na Móna, a semi-state outfit that was in the process of developing the boglands in County Offaly. They were already mass-producing turf in the many bigger bogs throughout our area and my father, along with dozens of other family men, shovelled, dug, cleaned and helped drain thousands of acres of bogland. It was also a time of another development which went unnoticed, a cultural one of common understanding between the men of Offaly and many men who came from the western counties of Ireland. A language of the bog inspired their vocabulary – the names for various bog machines, nicknames for men and even some nicknames for wives or girlfriends. Everyone got to know a lot about each other and stories were formulated from experiences of adverse conditions or situations of camaraderie. I wasn’t clear about what the purpose of all this activity was until my mother mentioned to my father that cutting and rearing turf in such large amounts didn’t add up, especially when all of it was loaded onto small rail cars to be brought to the local power station, where it was used as fuel for generating electricity.
My mother couldn’t reason with the logic of burning such massive amounts of turf. ‘Paddy,’ she said, ‘play a few tunes. Maybe it’ll help clear my head.’ My father lit a cigarette and swallowed a mouthful of strong tea. I began with a march called ‘Roddy McCorley’, which my father and his fellow workers often sang in the pubs in Daingean. Their version of the song was ‘Seán South of Garryowen’, and it was new and immensely popular. It proved to be a song of enormous sympathy and one that guaranteed that the pledge of a young Limerick patriot would never be forgotten among Irish nationalists, wherever they might be. His name was Seán South, and he had died in action as an IRA volunteer during a raid and subsequent gun battle with the RUC in Northern Ireland. This episode had happened six months earlier, and in that time the song of Seán South awakened the consciousness of the Irish people and some individuals would listen to no other song. In any case, I played its melody a few times, and followed it with ‘The Dawning of the Day’. My repertoire was now expanding with a small mixture of songs and tunes, not to mention a hornpipe or two.
Another slight turn of fortune entered my life with a visit one winter’s night from an old melodeon player known to us from playing at house dances. The first time he came into our kitchen he was carrying a new Paolo Soprani C#/D accordion. ‘This is Mick Hayes,’ my mother introduced the visitor, ‘he’s a great man on the accordion.’
Mick sat in front of the fire with me watching and waiting in my usual corner. He was a man who loved conversation and above all was in love with his own comfort. After a short while my father uncorked a bottle of porter and handed it to him, and my mother came with a glass. Mick poured and drank, and began pulling at the lobe of his right ear. ‘Isn’t it great to be a musician,’ he remarked, ‘and so much thought of us.’ He looked at me and winked. I stared and waited.
I was beginning to get fed up when finally my mother asked him to play. ‘Paddy would love to hear a tune, and so would I.’ Mick reached for the accordion that was in his big black shopping bag. When he had it on his lap, he said, ‘I’d better take off me topcoat,’ and stood up. My patience was being tested by this sudden delay. When he had his coat off he began talking again about a funeral and a soul being lost somewhere on its way to heaven. He was really good at telling ghost stories, but I was wondering if he would ever get to playing. When he finished his story my father offered him another bottle of porter and Mick’s face shone with sweat. ‘Glory be to God,’ he said. ‘May all the relatives of the twelve apostles shower this house with graces and good luck for all eternity!’
There was little doubt about his sincerity and my father was impressed. ‘You were always a good man, Mick.’ Then he said, ‘Molly! Why don’t we put on the kettle and we’ll make Mick a sandwich.’
‘Don’t bother,’ said Mick. ‘Don’t go out of your way. I came here to help the young lad – where is he?’
I’m sitting in front of you, you amadán! I was saying this to myself when he once again lifted his accordion onto his lap.
‘What would you like to hear?’ he asked.
We couldn’t think of anything. So he began with ‘The Star of Donegal’.
‘Good man, Mick,’ said my father. ‘You’ll never, never die.’
It was good for Mick to hear this because he lived in dreadful fear of dying and going straight to hell. But then again he was also susceptible to praise and loved every word of it. ‘You’re too good to me,’ he said. ‘Too good. I don’t deserve this.’
‘Oh, you do,’ said my mother. ‘Everyone around here knows Mick Hayes. Your name and fame is everywhere.’
&nbs
p; Mick became overwhelmed with emotion and began to sob. He pulled out his handkerchief and daubed at his eyes and nose. ‘It’s easy to get carried away,’ he whispered. ‘It’s times like this that put me in mind of me mother. She had a heart of gold, and if ever there was a saint, she was one—’
‘Molly, is the kettle boiled yet?’ my father intervened.
My mother dried the teapot and my father set about cutting slices of loaf bread. Soon we were all drinking tea and eating bread and jam. Mick ignored the loaf bread and was eating my mother’s bread-baking, which was wheaten bread with a tasty crust. When we were finished, Mick enquired of me, ‘Are you playing the basses yet?’
Before I could say anything, my mother said, ‘We were hopin’, Mick, that you’d show him a little about how to do it.’
‘Well,’ says Mick, ‘it’s not too hard. It just takes a little bit of getting used to. Watch me play a march,’ which he did, and then he played a jig. He said, ‘Get your accordion out.’ I had it close by, and immediately set it on my own lap. ‘Now,’ said Mick, ‘follow me.’ He played the march again, one-two, one-two and one-two as his fingers crossed over on the top two inside basses. Then he played a waltz with the basses one-two-two, one-two-two. He was playing ‘Under the Bridges of Paris’. I’ll always remember him for this, and for playing extra tunes the same night. After an hour he got up, moved his chair away from the fire and put his accordion out of reach. ‘God,’ he said, ‘it’s very warm.’
My mother opened the door to let in some cool air. We could see some brown sweat trickling down the sides of Mick’s forehead, and I was curious to know what it could be. I was later told that Mick used brown shoe polish to colour his hair and used a little Vaseline to keep his hair in place for when he had his cap off at Mass. This was the kind of behaviour that some people enjoyed. If you were a little odd or eccentric, my father would make friends with you. It was common for people to make funny remarks about each other and laugh at one another’s point of view. When I heard about Mick and the shoe polish I came to his defence by saying that I didn’t care what colour his hair was. Needless to say, Mick wasn’t around when someone talked about this, and my father and mother later consoled me by saying he was a good neighbour and musician and that they thought highly of him and respected him a lot. I was now reassured and asked when he’d be back again. It was a month later when he called, but I was disappointed when I saw that he hadn’t the accordion with him.
The Road from Castlebarnagh Page 4