Dessie O’Halloran and Sharon Shannon, “Say You Love Me”
We went home for the summer in 2002 but the next summer we went to Ireland instead. We rented a three bedroom cottage for a month on Iveragh Bay in the southwest corner of Ireland and after that, spent a couple of weeks in London before returning to Dubai and work. In Ireland, we stayed in Killorglin, a town of 1650 people and 35 taverns. In 2000, 21% of the Irish population was under the age of 15. If you apply the same ratio to Killorglin, there was a pub for every 37 adults.
True, in the summer, the population swelled. (And the pubs prospered.) Ireland is very pleasant in mid-summer. The sun goes down at eleven at night and rises between three and four in the morning. There’s a light rain almost every day but it’s not burdensome and the temperature is perfect all day long. We even thought, though not for long, of buying a retirement home there. But then it hit us what the winters would be like: the sun wouldn’t come up until after nine and it would go down by four, and it would be perpetually wet, cold, and windy. There’s a reason that arthritis is such a plague in Ireland.
But it was heaven when we were there. Our cottage sat atop a gently sloping hill. You had merely to step out the front door, pass through the front yard overflowing with flowers and blooming trees, and walk down to the beach, and you could stare at water that not too far away flowed directly into the ocean. We had room so we invited people in in pairs for three of the four weeks –our son Jeremy and my sister Lou for the first week; Sadie and Bob Spear, old friends from Utica, NY; Larry and Diana Powell, close friends from grad school days at Yale. Almost daily, we drove around in our rented Peugeot, eyeballing the sights. We ate out most days and made a sizable contribution to the local economy by buying tweeds, linens, art goods, etc. It was one of the most relaxing vacations we’ve ever had.
Our favorite restaurant in Killorglin was a restaurant bar named Nick’s. It had a warm, friendly pub, great seafood, especially the salmon, a welcoming atmosphere, and a pianist, John Murphy, who played every night at suppertime, sometimes alone, sometimes in partnership with a fiddle player (he had bright red hair) or a flutist. 
The first week, with Jeremy and Lou there, we went down to Nick’s on the third of July. We started at the bar while our table was being readied. Lou had a tumbler of port, I think Esther did too, and Jeremy and I had draft Guinness’s with a side of Jameson’s.
We moved to the table for the meal. John Murphy was playing.We moved to closer to the piano when we were done.
John took a request from a table of locals who were celebrating a birthday. We joined in the singing and applauded the table when we were done.
Some men dressed in golfing outfits emerged from private rooms in the back of the restaurant and joined us. One of them, dressed in shirt, shorts and an extraordinarily large, floppy beret-like cap, sat at the bar, nursing a beer. A friend joined him, then others. Without warning, the man stood up. He announced to all of us assembled that they were members of a golfing club that traveled from site to site, trying out the courses. Today had been Killorglin’s turn. What a special night this is, he continued, because we have with us tonight a very special guest, a fellow golfer from Poland, and he wants to celebrate being here by singing a song for us. A man stood up and started singing “People,” or maybe it was “Memories,” some song of that ilk, but not in English –in –he said it was Polish, but it wasn’t. It was gobbledegook. He sang. We clapped. He bowed. Then he gave a speech. More nonsense talk. Then, he admitted it was a con. He was Irish. He’d never spoken Polish in his life.
By then, it was midnight and the start of the fourth of July. One of the owners, the wife, had come out from behind the bar and was talking with us. She told us that she’d been in the States with her amateur theater group the previous year. They’d performed in Colorado Springs, where Jeremy taught college. By that point, everyone was talking to everyone. Someone asked John to play an American song so they could celebrate our national holiday with us. The only American song John knew was “John Brown’s Body” and he didn’t really know that very well. We stumbled through it. Sang it a second time to get it better.
By then, we’d probably been drinking and eating for six hours. We were pretty mellow. Before we left to go back to the cottage, though, the owner insisted we take a free bottle of champagne with us for breakfast. The next morning we woke up with lovely memories. Possibly hangovers, too, but I don’t remember that.
A week and a half later, Sadie and Bob were there. Esther took this photograph with Sadie at Muckrose Castle.
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Our last night in Ireland, Larry, Diana, Esther and I ate dinner in Killarney and caught a concert by Mary Black, who’s recorded with Emmy Lou Harris, Dolly Parton and Nanci Griffith, and is a native of nearby Dingle.
That week, on a day trip to Killarney, I made friends with this fellow.
I never much liked Irish or Celtic music before that stay. My image of it was of New Age slush, soupy and overly spiritual. But I was there, and we heard it night after night in the pubs, and we liked it there. One night, with Sadie and Bob, we went dancing in a rundown establishment directly opposite Nick’s. The band consisted of one man playing a concertina and the other playing a two-piece drum set. A local came over to our table and borrowed Esther for a dance.
I couldn’t leave without buying some Irish music. Back in Dubai, I had time to listen to it and was impressed. I liked especially the joining of traditional fare with the newer styles and techniques of some of the younger groups.
Lunasa is the most consistently good of the traditional music instrumental groups. By now, I have what? eight? nine? albums by them. No vocals. Pipes and flute, guitar and bass backing, fiddle lead, a fifth player who doubles on pipes, whistles and the uillean pipes, which is a smaller variant of the bagpipes. (You tuck the bag under your arm and pump it up and down to keep the wind coming.)
Kila is more uneven but when it’s on, it’s by far the most exciting and intense of there groups. The Luna Park album is amazing. Tunes like “Glanfaid me” have the driving, building energy of the Mahavishnu Orchestra, and “Bully Park” reminds me of a cut from an Oregon album, “Pepe Linque.” Planxty (Christie Moore sang with them for a while), the Chieftains (the most traditional), Flook, Danu (Muireann Nic Amhlaoibh, vocalist) –are good. The Peatbog Faeries bend traditional genres almost to the breaking point. Scotland’s Wicked Tinkers use bagpipes, kettle drums and hunting horn to do a music that sometimes is traditional –reels and jigs- but other times is what rock music might sound like if it had developed with bagpipes and didgeridoo in the mix. For storytelling, there are no one better balladeers than Mary Black and Christie Moore. I like Muireann Nic Amhlaoibh too.
I don’t know where to fit the accordionist-violinist Sharon Shannon. Her Live in Galway set is marvelous but The Diamond Mountains, with various guest artists (listen to the tune at the head of this blog with aging Dessie O’Halloran), comes closest to my feeling about the music we heard played live while we were in Ireland.
It seemed a landscape where people sang easily and many stories were ripe to be told.
(Listen to Con O Driscoll’s comic “The Spoons Murder” below if it’s storytelling you want!)
ADDITIONAL LISTENING
Lunasa: “Goodbye, Miss Goodavich / Rosie’s Reel,” from Otherworlds
Kila: “Glanfaid me,” from Luna Park
Muireann Nic Amhlaoibh, “The Parting Glass”
Peatbog Faeries, “Dancing Feet” (2011)
Wicked Tinkers: “Weird Jigs and B52”
Con O Drisceoll: “The Spoons Murder”
MUSIC & ME 