Irish Music

Sunpapers: 3/15/92

Author: J.D.Considine

Mother Machree! So many varieties of Irish music - and it's still evolving.

As anybody in the business can tell you, St.Patrick's Day is to Irish music what Christmas is to carols. This is when the kiss-me-I'm-Irish crowd gets in the mood for hearing of the green, and the record industry is more than happy to olbige, pumping out Irish music as eagerly as bars serve green beer.

But What, precisely is Irish music?

Is it the pipes-and-fiddles purism of the Chieftains? The rowdy jokes and folk songs merriment of the Clancy Brothers? The rock-oriented eclecticism of Luka Bloom? Or the Tin Pan Alley sentiment of "My Wild Irish Rose" and "When Irish Eyes Are Smiling"? Clearly, each has a claim on the term "Irish music," as do the sonatas of John Field or the rock recordings of U2 and Sinead O'Connor. It's just that some songs or performers seem more Irish than others to the average American, and it's worth taking a look at why.


Let's start with the seasonally marketed "St.Patrick's Day Celebration" (Legacy 48694), an album clearly intended to catch the eye of the shamrocks and leprechauns contingent. In it, we find all manner of music, from the Dubliners singing "Croppy Boy" to the Chieftains ripping through "March from Oscar and Malvina," to Kate Smith's version of "Molly Malone." It's Irish music, all right, as sure as the album is green - but such a confusing catch-all that it's unlikely to completely please any listener. Take, for example, the selections by Morton Downey and Kate Smith. Although Downey is today known mostly for having sired obnoxious talk-show host Morton Downey Jr., the elder Downey was one of the most popular Irish tenors of his time, with a wonderful, lyric tone and an easy, mellifluous delivery. Lovely as his voice was, however, his taste in material ranged from the maudlin to the cartoonish. This album includes examples of both, starting with "It's The Same Old Shillelagh," a head-bashing tribute to filial loyalty that was one of Downey's trademarks, and an overwrought reading of "When Irish Eyes Are smiling." Still, as sickeningly sentimental as Downey's performance is, Kate Smith's lachrymose rendition of "Mother Machree" is even worse, a paean to motherhood that would make even greetin card writers blush. This, though, was for years the sort of music most Americans thought of when St. Patricks Day rolled around. Most of that was simply a matter of lyrical references, for there was little intrinsically Irish about the music itself. Indeed, Mitch miller's recently re-issued "Favorite Irish Sing-A- Longs" (Legacy 48674) packs "Mother Machree" and "When Irish Eyes Are Smiling" alongside such obviously non-Hibernian compositions as "My Bonnie Lies Over The Ocean" and "School Days" with no discernable stylistic stain. (Then again, Miller-ized material was nothing if not homogenous: this, remember, is a man who made "Give Peace A Chance" sound like "The Yellow Rose Of Texas.")


Still, the American notion of what Irish music sounded like didn't really begin to change until the late 50's, when the Clancy Brothers with Tommy Makem began making their mark. Although there was no disputing the genuineness of the group's material, which mixed traditional folk songs with rousing rebel songs (up-the-English tunes left over from the Irish Rebellion) and witty novelty numbers, the group's sound was anything but purely Irish. In truth, it was solidly American, owing much to banjo-and-guitar groups like the Weavers or the Kingston Trio, but that hardly hurt the group with the Irish market. The Clancys and Makem were wildly popular together, and if their three songs on the "St.Patrick's Day Celebration" collection aren't enough, there's plenty more on the newly digitized "Luck of the Irish" (Legacy 47900). A concert recording, it offers a fair sampling of the group's stylistic range, from light-hearted comic stuff like "The Old Orange Flute" and "Mr. Moses Ri- Tooral-I-Ay" to powerfully political songs along the lines of "Gallant Forty Two" and "Four Green Fields." If only Sony Music, Legacy's parent company, had seen fit to issue a more comprehensive collection than this 33-minute trifle - that'd really be something to celebrate.


Another aspect of Irish music included on the "St.Pat's" album is instrumental dance music, represented here by the Gallowglass Cieli Band and the Chieftains, two different sides of the same coin. Ireland has a rich tradition of instrumental music, from the court harpers of the royal age to the flute and fiddle virtuosos of today, but perhaps the most enduring instrumental tradition of all is the ceile (pronounced hay-lee) band. These are mixed instrument combos which play jigs, reels, marches and slides for step-dancers, and though the Gallowglass Ceile band, with its accordion and tenor sax front line, isn't terribly traditional, its strictly functional rendering of tunes like "Haste to the Wedding" and "St.Anne's Reel" is typical of the way such music is played at dances even today.

That isn't the only way Irish instrumental music is played, though, and for that we have the Chieftains to thank. Celebrated (and deservedly so) as the foremost exponents of Irish traditional music, the group has adapted the virtuosity of Irish solo instrumentalists to the ensemble approach of ceili bands - and in so doing, reinvented the idea of Irish folk music. Given the group's astonishing productivity - 21 albums in 28 years, not counting film scores and solo projects - the two tunes included on the "St.Pat's" album seem barely worth mentioning. Perhaps that's why the label has also issued the 12-song compilation, "The Best of the Chieftains" (Legacy 48693). Granted, the title overstates things more than a little, inasmuch as this best-of draws from only three of the group's albums (the ones which just happen to be in the Sony catalog), but the music is enjoyable enough, presenting an impressive sampling of the sort of rigorous classicism that made the Chieftains leaders in the Irish folk revival. Even so, all it takes is a single listen to the latest Chieftains album, "An Irish Evening" (RCA Victor 09026-60916) to realize just how old- fashioned the music on that best-of is. Here, after all, the Chieftains are hob-nobbing and harmonizing with rock stars - Nanci Griffith and Roger Daltry, to be specific - and offering versions of everything from the "Chattering Magpie" reel to the Who's "Behing Blue Eyes." Amazingly, all the music sounds of a piece - there may be rock stars, but there's no pandering to the rock crowd here - in part because the Chieftains' sound is so specific and immutable, but mostly because the Irish folk scene puts greater emphasis on keeping the music alive than in preserving it as a dead tradition. That was the case in the late '60s and '70s, when Irish bands like Planxty, DeDanann and Clannad adapted the lessons of the Chieftains to the rock and roll experiments of Fairport Convention, Steeleye Span and the Band for a sound that was wholly Irish and utterly new.

And it continues to evolve.

Just listen to what the Irish group Altan squeezes into its latest album, "Harvest Storm" (Green Linnet 1117). Some tunes, like the medley of reels that open the album, are given an enthusiasticallly old-fashioned treatment; others far more exotic, like the Gaelic song "Si Do Mhaimeo I" which with its didgeridoo and throbbing percussion takes its cues as much from progressive rockers like Kate Bush as from traditional folkies. Then again, folk music ought to reflect the sound and sensibility of the folk. Why else would Luka Bloom's "The Acoustic Motorbike" (Reprise 26670) sound the way it does? Bloom's lineage is impeccable (his brother is Christy Moore, a founding member of Plaxty who is widely regarded as the Irish Bob Dylan) but his approach is anything but traditional - "The Acoustic Motorbike" tries everything from standard-issue Irish folk-rock like "You" and the title tune, to a version of L.L.Cool J's "I Need Love" - yet its audacity and unerrring musicality are perhaps its greatest strengths. Does that make it any less Irish? Certainly not. And if that kind of tradition stretching doesn't go down well with the green-beer crowd - well...most of them are only Irish one day a year, anyway.